The Family Brichta

Part One – Backgrounds and Life in Berlin  

Hermann Brichta

My father, early days

My Father was very similar in upbringing and outlook to that of my mother. Born on a farm in 1897 among and surrounded by Czechs that is not all that surprising. There were other Jewish farmers in Moravia and Slovakia, ownership of land and equal, or more equal, opportunities, even in the army, were much more and more widely available within the Habsburg empire than in Russian Poland, the latter did not become an independent state until 1919. He was fully aware of his Jewish origins but as a nationality, not as a religion.

Instead the boys were called up, Ernst was killed and by 1915 Oswald and Hermann were Prisoners of War thousands of miles away. It is reasonable to assume that farm labourers too had been called up. With farming then  being very labour intensive, horses having been requisitioned and shortage, or absence ,of  fertiliser and lack of manure made it impossible to carry on. It seems that grandmother just left the farm unable to cope and moved to Vienna in 1915.

That also meant that when her two sons finally returned from Vladivostok on Russia's Pacific coast and at the terminal of the Trans-Siberian railway, in 1920 and 1921 respectively, they did not return to Vlkoš in Moravia, their birth place, but to Vienna and to their mother. Therese Brichta survived her husband by 18 years. She died of the same sickness, cancer of the stomach.

As I shall explain later, on the two forms he completed in 1919 in Vladivostok, one an application to become a Czechoslovak citizen and the other to join the Czechoslovak army in Russia he, and his brother Oswald in Irkutsk thousand miles and many time-zones away, both put "Jewish" after "nationality" when they could just as easily have put "Czech".

 In Germany my father had both German and Jewish friends, boxed at the Maccabi, worked for a Jewish private bank, yet never set foot in a synagogue. He married an equally Jewish woman but at a registry office.

Toni Brichta

My mother Toni and her twin brother Fritz

My mother Toni and her brother Fritz Wasservogel were born on 22.06.1892 in the Kreutzberg district of Berlin. Possibly because they were twins both were very small. They were about ten years old when their father died in 1902 at the age of 52.

Because he had had no life insurance and probably very few savings the children were sent to orphanages although they kept in very close contact with their mother to whom they were devoted. They were also very close to one another.

Fritz went to a Jewish orphanage; I believe it was called the Auerbach, where he received a classical education and where he became fluent in Latin and Greek. I was told that he could translate fluently from one into the other. He was also very good at sports and chess.

Toni, my mother, was sent to a Protestant orphanage where she received a liberal education, became fluent in English and French to interpreter standard and also learned shorthand and typing at a time when girls only gradually entered office work.

This entry into commerce was helped by WW1 when men, who as clerks had carried out such work, had been called up. I have a photo of her with her female colleagues  but cannot tell whether that was taken at the offices of the Berlin branch of the Allianz or at the Victoria of Berlin Life offices, she worked for both. I would just like to add that at her Protestant orphanage she was indoctrinated with anti-Catholicism which made a change from anti-Semitism.

Read all five chapters here:
http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/survivor/brichta1.html

The Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team

www.HolocaustResearchProject.org


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