My grandfather, Frank Weinman, grew up in Vienna, Austria: an educated, assimilated Jew whose father owned paint factories.
His fulfilled, happy, upper-class life collapsed when he was in his early 20s and the Nazis invaded Austria. After the so-called “Kristallnacht” – German for “The Night of Broken Glass” in 1938, when the Nazis destroyed Jewish shops and houses – they knew they had to go. Grandpa Frank’s parents already got visas for America in Chicago with the help of the family. But Frank was in love with a Hungarian he met in Bratislava, my grandma Teri. They stayed with her in Europe, initially hiding in Prague, where they secretly married while fleeing.
Frank eventually made it to Teri’s hometown of Košice, Hungary, where he was hiding with her family. This was 1940 and 1941 and Hungary was still safe for Jews.
Meanwhile, my grandfather’s brother, Uncle Charles, was in Chicago trying to get my grandparents a visa to come to America, which wasn’t easy. To get in, even those trying to escape death in the camps, Jews had to have an American sponsor willing to sign an affidavit and raise a lot of money. Charles’ boss in Chicago agreed, and miraculously my grandparents left Europe in the fall of 1941, arriving two months before Pearl Harbor.
Once in the US, they tried to get Teri’s parents, my great-grandparents Rudolf and Matilda Vidor, to come to America. But they were proud Hungarians. They thought they would be fine. And they were until 1944, when Hitler invaded Hungary.
My great-grandparents were deported to Auschwitz and murdered. Her daughter, my great-aunt, was there too, but was then taken on a death march and ended up dying in another camp called Stutthof, a fact we only recently learned thanks to the help of Nadia Ficara of the United States Holocaust Museum.
For years, without knowing what happened to her parents, my grandmother prayed Kaddish, the Jewish prayer in honor of the dead, on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It was an event that had nothing to do with my family, everything to do with the courage and steadfastness of the Jews. Jews Hitler tried but failed to annihilate completely.