My great aunt Manci Klein of Püspökladány and Debrecen survived the Shoah? With the help of two volunteer translators I found via the Hungarian SIG on JewishGen, I was able to read a 1949 letter to my grandmother in Israel from her first cousin in Budapest. The first cousins pain and insecurity was difficult to read about, but she also mentioned a sister of my grandmother who had apparently survived the Shoah, at least to that point in time. My mother had heard a few years earlier from her uncle who visited Debrecen - where most of the family lived - in 1945 shortly after his US Army service ended that no one survived, and that became THE story. So my lesson from this was that this uncle may have visited too soon to make a determination about who perished -- besides the people I mention a few others popped up over the next ten years. BUT really the amazing story is if my great aunt, born Manci (probably Margit or Magda) Klein, most likely around 1916-1917, actually did survive. All her siblings, before and after, were born in Püspökladány, and the whole family later - parents were Erno and Hermina Kunsztler - moved a bit east to Debrecen in approx. the early 1930s. While I have found the birth records on Family Search for all her siblings, I have not found one for Manci and my theory is that she was born in or around Hanusovce nad Toplou or Perechyn after the Russians pulled out of the War and while it looked like things would turn bad in eastern Hungary in relation to an ascending Romania. Her great-aunt and cousins lived in Hanusovce and her grandparents in Perechyn. (My grandmother learnt Slovak as a little girl, which is how I found out that the family moved to what is now the Presov region or Subcarpathia temporarily.) For some reason there might have been communication problems related, in part, to the political changes in both Hungary and Israel in the late 40s and early 50s, and my grandmother moved from Israel to the USA in 1956, and somehow with a possible name change of Manci due to marriage and the Klein-is-like-Smith problem people fell out of touch. There were some others in North America my grandmother knew about but did not have contact with... I think she did this to protect herself from too much grief by thinking about good times and the closer family she lost (parents, at least one sister, great aunt, etc., many friends). So here a few photos of Manci/Margit from the late 1930s (including one with her parents/my great-grandparents). Perhaps someone recognizes her?
Posted on: Tue, 04 Nov 2014 21:32:18 +0000
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