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Josef is dead and buried near the High Tatras.
I don’t know what he died of, and I didn’t know what he was doing in that part of the world. I didn’t know anything about the High Tatras.
Come to think of it, two years ago now, I didn’t know much about anything when it came to Slovakia, where this mountain range is located.
Slovakia was as unreal as Never-Never Land, as unfamiliar as Albania.
Was it somewhere near Germany, Russia, and north of Hungary? Although work in journalism and business had brought me to many places in the world, the centre of Europe was a blur. So, too, were its politics, its history, its past: where was Slovakia when, say, Napoleon, the Medici, Elizabeth I, or George Washington, were doing their thing? Or the ancient Greeks and Romans? How does it fit into the scheme of things?
To be sure, my brother, a US city planner, had mentioned Slovakia to me: he even found an historical family connection during a World Bank trips
to local towns that seek guidance in attracting private investment. He told us one of our great great grandfathers was buried in the Eastern part of the country, in a cemetery located
outside a small hamlet, a lonely forgotten place on a hill, like the cemeteries in US cowboy movies.
And then suddenly accessible roundtrip flights from London to Bratislava became available, and it was cheaper to fly there than to Biarritz,
France, or Verona, Italy. And maybe more novel, and challenging. An adventure! Something different! And thus Slovakia slid onto the radar screen.
I decided to make this forgotten family member the focus for my first-ever visit. I’d check out the country, and write something about this man
and his part of Slovakia. I’d detail the fun of the hunt for him, and the sights and experiences garnered along the way. I ‘d compare Slovakia then and now, my life versus that of a villager, and suss
out the differences between me and the progeny of the noblemen who lived in the big castles down the street from my great great great grandfather.
I thought it would be interesting and fun. It turned out to be frustrating, but intriguing.
As a point of information: the man, Josef Schreiber (B. 1860, d. 1916) lies buried in Brezovica nad Torysou, a tiny hamlet in Eastern Slovakia,
near the High Tatras and the Carpathian Mountains.
Nobody in my family knew what he was doing there, or why he died. He was married to a lady called Hani Appel (b. 1861). Maybe she’s dead and buried near him, who knows. Most of their children came to New York, USA, round about the turn of the century.
Why did some leave and some stay? What was life like back then? What’s life like now in this little townlet? Is it lively? Did my ancestor miss a
trick by staying behind and not hotfooting it to New York?
What would my life be like if my ancestors hadn’t uprooted? And maybe, just maybe, might I want to live there myself—to “come home”, after a life spent in planes and hotels around the globe?
A juicy agenda, and it was a hard one to kickstart. There are no formal press or cultural officers at London’s Slovak Embassy, so a hard pressed
but willing diplomat had to field these questions: how far from, say, Bratislava to Presov, how to get around if you don’t drive, what languages are spoken in the Eastern part of the country? How to find
local translators?
The language issue was a problem even before I set foot outside my office. It was tough to find English- speaking contacts on the telephone at
the State Museum in Bratislava. It was also tough to figure out where information is located: my relevant State Archives are spread between Bratislava, Presov and Brezovica nad Torysou. They’re written,
I was advised, variously in Latin, German, Slovak, Hungarian. That’s not promising if you only speak English, French, Spanish and some Italian.
I was after civic records: commercial and property records, property deeds, tax records, rent rolls, mid to late 1800s licenses
for Bresovica and surrounds. A late 19th century map of the town’s buildings and shops. The census books for 1848,1857 and 1869.
I wanted to interview someone knowledgeable about the history of the noble families, the towns of Saros/Saris County, and the history of its Jews.
I wrote email after email: “ I would like to touch base with your colleagues at the Archives. I'm interested in what these hold in general,
how far back they go, the number of visitors you get, any developments in the works, oral histories being undertaken. I want to see the records kept in Presov/ Bratislava/Kosice. I hope
to tease out what I can about this Josef Schreiber family, to flesh out the members of this family back through time, name them, clothe them, find out how many kids they had, where they lived,
what they did professionally... And also, find out who lived in the big castle in Brezovica, and about the other local noble families in the 1800s, where are their progeny today and
eventually, what they are doing. “
I linked into www.kvc.sk, which emailed me „we are really glad that you choose for your journey our
railway company“. I found Bratislava information at http://www.bratislava.sk/en/ .
One of the most exciting responses was from Miloslava Bodnárová, director of the Štátny archív v Prešove. He told me there are a
bunch of archives to go through at his place. There are hundreds of records for the Berzeviczy family (1567 – 1943), which owned most of the estates in the Brezovica n. Torysou area, records for
the country of Saris, old census records, and the record books of the Brezovica rabbis.
But he warned me that I was going to have a rough time. The archive indexes are often not very detailed, meaning it could take weeks and maybe
months to search and locate what I was after. For example, some documents I was after might be in the economic section of the Berzeviczy family archives, which are colossal. He said the maps and plans in
the family’s archives mainly detail countries and, counties, not regional areas or plans of specific sites.
He said some material had not even been indexed, making it well nigh impossible to know where to start a search.
Worst, he pointed out, all the documents are written in various languages: Latin (up to the second half of the 19th century) Hungarian (chiefly from the 19th century), some in German, and occasionally in Slovak. If that wasn’t enough, most documents up to the turn of the 19th/20th century are handwritten.
He provided me with leads and contact details for history and cultural specialists but warned me that my letters had to be written in Slovak
or Hungarian.
The most important was Prof. PhDr. Peter Kónya, PhD, and deputy of the dean of the Faculty of Arts, Prešov University, who works in its Institute of History and has published several articles concerning the history of the Jews of Šariš region as well as the noble families.
I got my sister to come with me: she can’t speak Slovak or Hungarian but at least she can drive. We flew into Bratislava, arriving late one rainy
evening in the small and confusing airport of one of Europe’s smallest capitals, with a population of 500,000.
Next day, we found the legacy of communism still visible, but the pedestrianised old town’s charm preserved and crammed with architecturally
beautiful palaces from the reign of Maria Theresa lining the streets. The Main Square with the Old Town Hall, parts dating from the 13th century, gives testimony to the town’s historical roots. But it’s clear that Slovakia has moved from communist backwater to regional economic powerhouse. Foreign developers have created luxury apartment towers. The Danube shoreline facing Bratislava is a modern skyline. There is evidence everywhere of foreign investment, especially in the car industry.
Although the country styles itself as the “Tatra Tiger”, its different cultural groups are not homogeneously on offer. The huge Slovak National
Museum on the Danube houses just the national history collection, with and the Slovak National Gallery displays permanent exhibitions of Slovak art, and the Bratislava’s history is in the Town Museum,
and the Hungarians, Romanies, and Jews each have their own individual dedicated museum.
Professor Pavol Mestan, who presides over the Museum of Jewish Culture from his overflowing office at the National Museum, told us that the
Jewish Culture is a big crowd puller: over 50,000 people visited in 2005, a large percentage of all Museum visitors. They come to see socio cultural artifacts mainly from the 18th and 19th century, and references that date back to the 2nd century, when a Roman legion was sent from Jerusalem to the Middle Danube.
It’s very hard to piece together the history of Bratislava and Slovakia from what’s on offer in the capital.
You get a glimpse here, an insight there. But you still don’t grasp how the great swath of land including Germany, Poland, Austria, Bohemia, Hungary, Moravia, Galicia and some Russia have fit together. Or not. The towns on the maps are still unpronounceable, hard to write down. Levoca? Spis? Kosice, Banska Bystrica, the High Tatras…. A myriad of dark images fill your mind-castles, bears, forests and wolves -from childhood fairy tales that you’d forgot till now.
Outside the capital, the countryside is pretty banal for long stretches–fields of sunflowers. Then it suddenly becomes bucolic. Long green
valleys stretch under immense blue skies punctuated by chubby white clouds. It is sedate, settled, and free of advertising posters and boards. It feels like a throwback to the 1950s. It feels like parts
of the USA Midwest – Idaho, Iowa, or Montana.
Here, though, almost every village seems to have a kastiel, and many of are derelict and apparently for sale. There was one on the
outskirts of Bratislava covering 4,966 sq m, Slovakia’s largest chateau, complete with 8.15 acres of land and outbuildings. Another close to Zilina, northeast of Bratislava, was a ruined castle dating
back to the 13th – 14th century.
Foreigners have already reportedly snapped up properties. Some like Ian Brodie, a Scottish journalist, hotelier and property consultant,
are purchasing small cottages to the north of Bratislava for a song.
Others have paid about SK 1.6m for a 250 year old 400 sq meter house near Banska Stiavnica, the UNESCO world heritage site in central Slovakia, which they plan to restore as closely to the original look as possible.
Rumour has it that a chateau in the Tatras with 30 rooms, a basement and 9.6 acres of land, much of it forested, can go for Ł332,000.
Could this be our cup of tea?
The train moves on toward Presov, through deeply wooded mountains and more wide gentle valleys, with little communities nestling here and there.
You see what must be all the tones of green that exist in this world, and you see enormous never-ending blue skies. Occasionally, a few people till a field near haystacks.
Presov is a calm jewel, a long main street framed with wonderful ochre palaces and buildings that date back to the 16th century. Among its many churches is the Orthodox Synagogue, completed in 1898, considered among the most beautiful constructions in Slovakia and one of the world’s most fabulous synagogues. It’s said that a US group offered to buy the Synagogue and move it stone by stone to the West Coast, an offer Presov refused.
It’s a remarkable building with elaborate wall paintings done in an oriental style.
Its exhibits include an old menorah or religious candelabra carved out of wood over a century ago obviously by an amateur craftsman for his family’s use, and a barrel dated 1811 that served to wash the body.
The State Archives are located just out of town, and that’s where we went early one morning. It was time to suss out who lived where, with
whom and who was born when.
We started with the Saris county archives, which contained many documents concerning early Jewish settlement in the Šariš area. It’s a very
large group of documents and only part of it is sorted out. The period up to 1789 can be accessed, but the index is not very detailed. That didn’t bother us, because we had no knowledge of anything
before 1860, when Josef was born. The documents from 1790–1859 haven’t been sorted out yet, and weren’t available, but that was all right too.
We turned to the census documents,
especially the 1848 Jewish census from the Horná Torysa district, which includes Brezovica n. Torysou. No mention of Josef Schreiber’s family. On to the town’s 1857 census records-what’s preserved are just summaries which list house numbers, not the house-owners.
My sister laughed when she saw these century-old census records. She worked as a census taker in Berkeley California one summer during a
university break. She talked about how boring it was to go from door to door asking the same questions. She never imagined the information she got could be so exciting.
We struck lucky with the 1869 census. We found a family called “Appel” living at one house. Hani Appel.
Josef’s wife. These are Josef’s in-laws! Suddenly, this woman and her family popped into sight. Her father Aron , a teacher, born in 1824. Her mum Teresa or Rezi, five years younger than her husband, born in 1829. Their six kids, including Hani, who lived with then in that house, all born within 12 years of each other. What a lot of noise!
There was no mention of Josef in this census, or anybody who sounded like part of his family. This guy was beginning to frustrate us. He
was so elusive. Where is he?
They had come from Novi Sacz, over the border, north, from whence came a lot of Brez people, and a rabbi. We can trace her father back to 1840,
when he was born, according to the 1869 census. The whole Appel family lived in Brez them - about six kids, whose names we've got.
On to the Brezovica rabbis register books. These are like parish records in English churches – public and religious registries of births,
marriages and deaths kept over the years by Rabbis, maps for your journey into history. These 19th century records consist of printed columns with records written in pen.
Regrettably, they are incomplete. Many pages have been cut out and removed from these books.
There were records for 1850–1895, and these were missing many sections. There were some birth registers for 1850-1895, marriage records for 1882-1895, and death records for 1858-1895.
We tried to find some old maps of Brezovica and surrounds, looking in the Berzeviczy family archives and the Krajský súd v Prešove. Urbárske
mapy, archive, where the maps from 19th century are held. Unfortunately, no maps from Brezovica have been preserved.
The road to Brezovica nad Torysou winds through countryside, near the towns of Lipany and Sabinov. Our interpreter Livia
Kortvelyessy translated the sparse paragraphs we have about this village, copied from a Socialist document and a history book.
The village, which means birch tree, was first mentioned as far back as 1317 when it formed part of Torysu and a family estate, perhaps
connected to a nobleman called Rikolf from Lomnica in Spis. In the early 1300s, a nobleman called Michael built a big fortified castle right next to the village, lived there and started the
Brezovica branch of the Lomicas, They owned all the nearby villages. But in the 15th century, captain Jan Jiskra took over the castle and it became very damaged.
From the 13th – 19th century, the village was famous for its markets, which got a special dispensation from the Kaiser. The villagers produced wheels, carvings and wood. A paper factor was founded here at the beginning of the 18th century. And the village grew: in 1787, it had 1331 inhabitants and 191 houses. In 1829, there were 1745 inhabitants and 194 houses.
Things seemed to change a bit after World War I, when the work was agricultural and forestry. There was a big strike of agricultural
workers in the 1920s, and in 1925 a big fire destroyed half the village. A JRD farm was founded in 1951, taking all property for the state.
From 1580, this little town boasted a Latin secondary school and it a gothic church from the 1300s which was rebuilt in the renaissance, with an
altar stone from Dubrovnik. One of its rabbis, Rabbi Gansfield from Uz, who presided over the Jewish community from 1830 – 1849, authored one of the most popular books of his times, a book which was
printed 14 times and amazingly sold over a half million copies.
Be that as it may, this is today an isolated hiccup of a town, a townlet, a hamlet. It’s a big leap from its wooded enclave to the world’s
big buzzy cities? How could anybody back then know about New York and the USA? How did a youngster travel across the land mass and across the sea to a far-off place, leaving your ma and pa behind? And
how do people today leave the comfort of places like this town for cities like London? These are some things I thought about as we drove through the countryside. .
I thought about how weird to emerge from the shadow of High Tatras to New York’s crowded streets, huge buildings, newspapers, books, alcohol,
blacks, early jazz, silk blouses and elegant top hats.
I also thought about what I expected life in this townlet to have been like. I imagined peasants tilling the fields, like in the tapestries in
Paris’s Musee de Cluny, but with more mysterious looking noblemen than the French. Big fur hats. Jews living in hovels, in ghetto areas of the little village, with a few chickens and a horse,
huddled and bent by the cold.
And the village, I expected, would be today a slim stretch of houses and a cupola topped church, in a green valley with a small river running
through it. There would be the romantic ruins of a castle.
We turned into the town, on a straight main road. Small streets go from left and right.
There are two story houses in rows, huddled together. There’s the office of Mayor Milan Bujnak, a purpose-built building on the main street, near the church, creating a square with some trees.
The Brezovica mayor has always worked at local council, even when the small private fields were agglomerated into bigger allotments, and he’s
been mayor for four years now. Under his aegis, new houses are being built, young families moving in, attempts are made to attract tourism and historical/cultural interest in the manor house, 13th century church and ruins of the town’s castles.
He is also spearheading a project to formalize the town’s history on paper, which is no small feat. He gathered the town histories written
by various inhabitants, he oversees the archives that date back to the late 1800s, and he even has had some of Brezovica’s history translated into English.
Mayor Bujnak, a solid fellow, sat stony-faced when we began our interview.
We were seated on both sides of his desk because he said there was nowhere else for us to go. . Various big leather-bound handwritten history books were brought for us to study, which we had to do facing him as he continued to work. He rummaged through papers and put them in orderly piles. He peeked over at us. He started to listen. He couldn’t avoid it: we were shrieking. We were narrowing in on our prey. He joined in.
Mayor Bujnak leapt from his chair to see the column listing the signature of Josef Schreiber. Found at last!
It took a long while to wade through the material, I don’t know why.
We were fingers and thumbs. We were confused by details, thrown off course by a missing page, distracted by listings for the birth of Hani Appel’s niece, or a nephew. Some many different languages, handwritings, and strange customs. All these names, all these people! A whole shadowy community was rising up. Cousins were appearing all over the place. Brothers and sisters were marrying intra-families. People were dying. Kids were being born. Rabbis were overseeing ceremonies.
The town’s history books are the chronicles of a local man, who based them on oral histories, archives and documents.
They’re written by hand in big leather bound books, on thick cream pages each framed with a neat red border. They describe daily life in the town, the habits of the townsfolk, the food eaten by the Jews (Shalot or thick soup, baked roast of beans, lentils, meat, pasta, onions & veg) how Orthodox Jews prayed 3 times a day. They talk about how the Jews had their own maids (Christians) to help them on Saturday, as that was a religious day. They list the town’s 10 shops, which included two pubs, and cite the names and nicknames of shopkeepers, which are in Polish, Slovak, or German dialects.
There are entries about the weather, about the humdrum activities of daily life. As the years unfold, there are entries about the arrival of the
Nazis. These note that the Jews were deported in lorries to Lipany, a nearby town, where no one was allowed to come to the lorries and offer them water.
The writer is very despondent about this. The chronicle goes on to note that some Jews were hidden, some escaped and survived. It names some of these townsfolk and where they went to hide in the wooded mountains.
The Mayor offered to take us to see the Jewish cemetery in his car, and we started with a tour of the village.
It has a wide main street – no shops but freestanding houses separated by little lots, an onion-cupola church at one end and further away the undistinguished remnants of one of Brezovica’s two castles. The village stretched out enough to have side roads and there were roads perpendicular to the main road. As we drove along, the Mayor pointed to one house or another and tells us that it had been a Jewish house, or the site of the old synagogue. He pointed us to the oldest house in the village, diagonally opposite his office, and that could have been Josef’s house, he said.
We went up to the cemetery, which dates from about 200 years ago. It is up a warm green hill, near the Catholic cemetery, and it is a long
stretch of trees and bushes. They sway in the wind. They are very beautiful. There is no indication that this is a cemetery or anything other than a lovely little copse.
According to the Chronicles, there is a ditch in the middle. And it was surrounded by a stone wall. There are rows of graves, women and men
separated. Gravestones are the same size, made of granite and marble, with the Hebrew inscription facing east, as they are meant to.
The Mayor stopped in the field above the cemetery.
He told us that the cemetery was tended until about five years ago, and it was a peaceful place. Then the undergrowth began to grow. The wall crumbled. Kids came up here and stole stones, and so did people from the neighbouring town of Popolo who used the headstones in their buildings.
My sister strode down the hill and peered through an opening in the copse. “It’s dark but I’m going in,” she said. She disappeared.
The Mayor told me about how a Brezovica Baroness had rented the two castles to two men, the Klein brothers, until she was murdered. They
ran two spirit factories, one making spirits from potatoes and one from plums. The Mayor talked about cavorting on the castle ruins during his youth, playing hooky from school.
Then he told us about Josef. The Chronicles said he was an egg merchant, and he would’ve had a horse and carriage as well as his shop. He’d
go to the nearby town of Lipany to sell eggs – not happily because Lipany had its own manor house egg production.
He’d also go to Sabinov. Three times a year, perhaps, he’d go to Presov. It was far – less far than Stratford to London, say – but it was a ways to go. Josef was allowed in the town for just a few days each of these visits because the guild people, in spite of various edicts, restricted Jews to this timetable.
My sister came back and said there were a few headstones in the copse.
They looked in an awful state. There were places where kids played, and there was a tramp in there. He used to have one of the fields, the mayor said, but he lost it under communism and he never got his life together again after that.
The Mayor invited us to meet Potato Face, the oldest living inhabitant of Brezovica. She is a very wrinkled round lady with grey hair in a bun,
who shares a small house with her wiry smiling husband. Chicken run in their yard, and a dog barks. She speaks an old Slovak dialect, our interpreter Livia says, one you hardly hear anymore. Potato Face
tells us she recognises the people in the photo we show her. Hani Appel is featured in this photo and she is no dreamboat. I ask Potato Face if Hani Appel was as unattractive in life as she looks
in the photo. “She’s prettier than you,” she tells me.
It was time to leave Brezovica.
We got back to London and we sifted through, facts, photos, booklets, and notes.
We have now pinned down Josef Schreiber – somewhat. We figured out – somehow – that he comes from the town of Rdziostow (many alternate spellings), sometimes said to be in Germany. His father was called Maurice. He and his family could have been living anywhere you can think of in 1869, but this anywhere certainly wasn’t Brezovica.
But Josef eventually did turn up in this tiny town at some point. I like to think he was the dashing outsider who won the heart of Ms Hani
Appel.
After all, there weren’t many suitable suitors to choose from, according to the records. And everybody seemed to know everybody. Many of Brezovica’s other inhabitants, including the Appels, came from up north, over the border, from Novi Sacz, So Josef could easily have been the mysterious stranger that a young spinster dreams of.
As things turned out, Josef rose to become one of Brezovica’s 10 businessmen. In fact, he went into business with Hani’s brother, Samuel
Appel. That’s not much to know about this man, but it’s something. It will be nice to know more about him.
And about Hani and her grandfather, who was born in 1804, the year Napoleon crowned himself Emperor.
It’s easier to find out about Mayor Bujnak’s two sons, both of whom like Josef’s children left Brezovica to pursue opportunities outside the
town. One son divides his time between Prague, where he works, and Brezovica, where he is building a house. The other, Milan, lives near me in London. But that’s a whole new story.
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