Czechs Seek to Put a Face on Holocaust Victims

For half a century, all that remained of Zikmund Winterstein was his name and two dates: the day he was born, and the day he was considered to have died.

Winterstein and most of the 80,000 other Czech victims of the Holocaust, whose names were painted decades ago on the inside walls of Prague’s Pinkas Synagogue, have languished in obscurity since the end of World War II.

Now a campaign is underway to put faces to the names of those who perished in Nazi concentration camps.

Over the past several months, major Czech newspapers have been publishing ads calling on Czechs who may have documents or pictures of Jews who never came back to make them available to the Jewish Museum in Prague.

The museum’s director, Leo Pavlat, says the “Lost Neighbors” project is an attempt to gather as much information on Czech Jews as possible before those who still remember are gone.

“About most of the victims, we know absolutely nothing. It’s a pity this was not done right after the war,” Pavlat says.

He hopes, however, that people may have long-forgotten papers or pictures at home as well as documents that Jewish friends or neighbors left with them before being sent away. Perhaps most important, he hopes for “the memories those Jews left among their non-Jewish fellow citizens.”

“We get some really nice letters,” he says. “For example, one from a woman who since the war has not been able to go to a street in which she had several Jewish friends when she was a child” because she would be overcome by emotion.

Nearly 120,000 Jews lived in Czech territory before the war; 80,000 did not survive.

Many Holocaust survivors tried to suppress their memories after the war and refused to talk about their experience.

After the communists came to power in Czechoslovakia in 1948, at least 18,000 Jews fled, and those who stayed were too afraid to openly acknowledge their identity. Today, there are only about 3,500 Jews in the Czech Republic, according to Jewish community registers.

Czech efforts to shed light on the country’s Holocaust victims have lagged behind those of other nations. Even the Pinkas Synagogue memorial has been neglected. It deteriorated so badly that it had to be closed in 1968 and wasn’t reopened until 1996, after the demise of the communist regime.

Czech Jews hope “Lost Neighbors” will reawaken the nation to a forgotten past.

“It’s a very good project,” says Peter Weiss, 47, a Jewish psychologist whose mother survived the Auschwitz concentration camp.

“It may cause many people to search not only for the history of Jews, but also for the history of the place they live in. And it can also make them think about how Czechs were behaving during the Holocaust.”

Although the drive to learn more about the victims is purely domestic--the plea hasn’t gone out to Czechs living abroad--it has already succeeded in filling in some of the blanks about victims like Zikmund Winterstein.

Until recently, all that was known was that he was born on Aug. 8, 1873, and left Prague in October 1941 in one of the first transports to the ghetto in Lodz, Poland, from which many Jews were taken to death camps. Because nothing else was known about Winterstein, his departure from Prague was registered as the day he died.

But documents and letters brought to the museum by a man whose grandfather received them from a Jewish friend of Winterstein add a few brush strokes to his life.

A certificate of apprenticeship shows Winterstein was a tinsmith. His correspondence to a travel agency reveals his last address was in Prague. A receipt for 50 German marks sent to him by a relative suggests he may still have been alive on May 6, 1942.

Jana Splichalova, who heads the Jewish Museum’s Holocaust department, says cables from the travel agency to Winterstein and his wife, Anna, show they apparently were making plans to emigrate to Cuba before they were shipped to Lodz.

The cables, dated Nov. 11, 1941, said Cuban visas were waiting for the Wintersteins at the Cuban diplomatic mission in Berlin.

They arrived too late. The Wintersteins had been put on a transport bound for Lodz on Oct. 31.