See also
| Husband: | Joseph MARFELD (c. 1894-1942) | |
| Wife: | Lea MADER (c. 1894- ) | |
| Children: | Simon MARFELD (1930-1942) | |
| Martin MARFELD (1924-1942) | ||
| Friedrich MARFELD (1921-1943) | ||
| Name: | Joseph MARFELD | |
| Sex: | Male | |
| Father: | - | |
| Mother: | - | |
| Birth | c. 1894 | |
| Occupation | Mathematics Professor; Kraków, Lodzkie, Poland | |
| Death | 1942 (age 47-48) | Belzec, Lubelskie, Poland |
Lea MADER
Lea MADER
| Name: | Lea MADER1 | |
| Sex: | Female | |
| Father: | Isaac Groder MADER (c. 1870-c. 1947) | |
| Mother: | Anna MEHR (c. 1870-c. 1948) | |
| Birth | c. 1894 | Belz, L'viv, Ukraine1 |
| Name: | Simon MARFELD | |
| Sex: | Male | |
| Birth | 1930 | |
| Death | 1942 (age 11-12) | Belzec, Lubelskie, Poland |
| Name: | Martin MARFELD | |
| Sex: | Male | |
| Birth | 1924 | |
| Death | 1942 (age 17-18) | Belzec, Lubelskie, Poland |
| Name: | Friedrich MARFELD | |
| Sex: | Male | |
| Birth | 1921 | |
| Death | 1943 (age 21-22) | Belzec, Lubelskie, Poland |
Story of Josef Marfeld by his wife's niece Katherine Mader.
EMail: nkulla AT aol.com
The name, Joseph Marfeldt, was given to me, Katherine Mader, by my aunt Jenny, when I inquired about the family name of the man who married my aunt Leah, who disappeared with her family during the Holocaust. I do not know whether Aunt Jenny, who was in her 80's at the time she gave me this name, was being accurate, or just wanted to stop my questioning. I have enquired through numerous Jewish registers and lists of persons who died in the Holocaust, and have never been able to find anyone with the last name of Marfeldt. Unfortunately there is no one alive anymore who can contribute any more information. However, archives in the former Eastern bloc are opening up each year for researchers, and it is possible that during the next century it would be more possible to find out the fate of this part of our family.
In 2000 I located a treasure trove of letters which were written during the late 1930's back and forth between my father, Paul Mader, and his sisters Jenny and Lilly in Vienna. The letters are all written in German, and I am taking them to my cousin Anita Testa-Mader in Lugano, Switzerland, and leaving them with her. She speaks German, and I am hopeful that after reading the letters she will learn more about Josef Marfeldt and his family.
Story of Lea Mader by her niece Katherine Mader.
EMail: nkulla AT aol.com
Lea was the oldest child of Isaac and Anna Mader. She was born in Belz, Poland, and moved at an early age to Vienna, Austria. She married Joseph Marfeld (see his notes), and had three sons. When her sons were teenagers the Nazis came to Vienna, and Leah, as well as her husband and family, moved to the small town of Tarnow, Poland. Lea's husband taught Hebrew at the local high school in Tarnow. Her parents, Isaac and Anna, looked for evidence of what happened to Lea and her family up until the time of their deaths in the late 1940's. The only items that remain to prove the existence of these persons are the two family photographs which are included in this scrapbook. I have always kept a photograph of Leah and her baby boy in my home. I hope this photo honors their lives, and to reminds us not to squander the opportunities and prosperity we are so lucky to have.
The following story I wrote in 2001 following a trip to Israel:
SEARCHING FOR LEA
As a little girl I was prohibited from wearing black boots: They reminded Dad of the Nazis and gave him nightmares about Lea. He never spoke of his older sister or what became of her, and I learned not to ask him about the aunt whom I had never met, to accept the mystery that we had "family who disappeared in the war."
With every year that passed my curiosity grew. Dad died in 1980 without telling much about Lea. I often visited or spoke with his last living sister, Jenny, who returned to Vienna after surviving the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Aunt Jenny was always thrilled to hear from me -- but reluctant to speak of Lea. The only evidence that Lea actually existed was a photo of a young woman whom Jenny identified as her oldest sister, posed with an infant. For years I stared at the picture on my living room wall, haunted by the same dark eyes that I shared with my father. Who was the infant? What was its name? What happened to them?
Over the years Aunt Jenny dribbled out a few more details: Lea was married and had three teenage sons. Her husband's family name was Marfeldt.
My father escaped from Vienna to Switzerland 1939 with his brother Ello. Ello married a Swiss; his only child, Anita, is my lone first cousin. Although she lives in Switzerland, we are as close as the siblings neither of us had; together we shared the shock and pain of learning that we had lost three cousins, the boys who vanished with our aunt. Jenny died in 1996 without adding to our slender list of facts about Lea.
In seems impossible in our information age that all record of a family could disappear. I searched the Internet and other electronic databases. I leafed through Red Cross documents, lists from Holocaust libraries and synagogues, concentration camp records, Jewish newspapers. I found no Marfeldts. I learned this was not unusual: Where the Nazis failed to incinerate an entire family, they often succeeded in wiping out many of its branches. I was determined, however, to learn at least the names and fates of Lea and her boys, to add them to the family tree passed to my own three children. I wanted to record for future generations that these people had lived, that they mattered to our family. When my search proved fruitless, I hired a Jerusalem private investigator to search Israeli records. He fared no better than I.
In December 2000 I visited Anita in Switzerland. She had uncovered a small clue. Her father, who died in 1961, left voluminous personal papers. In them Anita found a 1942 postcard from Lea, postmarked Tarnow, Poland. We had always assumed that she lived in Vienna! Lea wrote that she appreciated the package from her family, and needed warm shoes for her son, Fritz, with whom she hoped to remain.
So we had a cousin named Fritz who had lived in Tarnow during the war. And his last name, his family name, was not Marfeldt but Marfeld.
Further digging in Ello's papers yielded more postcards from 1943. Fritz wrote that he had heard nothing from his family in six months and thought of them constantly.
I spent the 2000 winter holidays in Egypt and Jordan with my husband and children. Our return flight was from Tel Aviv; at the last minute we decided to spend the final two days in Israel. While my family toured the Negev, I visited the library at Yad Vashem, a huge Holocaust memorial site near Jerusalem. My last shot, I thought. One last day to find Lea. There I found a database called Pages of Testimony with the names of millions of Holocaust victims. Everyone with personal knowledge of Holocaust deaths is urged to contribute; each must swear that their testimony is correct. Eventually this database will be accessible via the Internet, but then it was not.
With little hope, I typed in "Marfeld." A name appeared on the screen: Lea Marfeld. A miracle! Her page said that she was from Tarnow and died in a concentration camp. There were pages for Fritz, dead at age 20, for Martin, dead at 18, and Simon, died age 12. All lived in Tarnow. All died in concentration camps. I was even more stunned to learn that each of my relatives had been entered into the Pages of Testimony on May 24, 1999, by Jacov Zedon.
I had never heard of this man. What prompted him to enter the Marfelds? And why not until so long after their deaths?
Zedon's number was on each page; I used the library phone to call. A woman answered. I do not speak Hebrew; in the fractured German of my youth, I explained what I wanted. After a long silence she said, "I am so sorry. I wish so much that I could help you. But my husband Jacov died last week! I never heard him speak of the Marfeld family. I had no idea that he entered their names at Yad Vashem." All she could offer was the number of Jacov's cousin.
I took it, sure that my search was over, that Jacov Zedon had taken Lea's story to his grave. I tried to be philosophical: At least my cousins now had names and ages. A man appeared at my elbow. "I overheard you on the phone," he said. "My German is as bad as yours. Did you learn it from your parents also?" This was Tommy, a professional researcher searching for Nazi war criminals on behalf of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. When I said that my long search was over, he urged me to keep going. "Just when you think that you've reached the end of the road, another road invariably opens up," he opined.
Tommy speaks Hebrew; he offered to call Jacov's cousin. The cousin said that he had never heard of the Marfelds. Jacov grew up in Tarnow, he added, then referred us to a doctor who kept track of former Tarnow residents in Israel. The doctor could give us only a phone number for Luera Melloch, a recent immigrant, who speaks Polish and Yiddish. I speak neither.
Tommy made the call. "I am in the library of Yad Vashem with an American woman searching for relatives from Tarnow," he began in Yiddish. "Have you heard of the Marfeld family?"
His face lit up. I listened in amazement as he translated her reply: "Was the mother Lea, and the children Fritz, Martin, and Simon?"
"Yes, yes!"
"My father owned a house in Tarnow during the war," she said. "We rented rooms to the Marfeld family!" Since Luera also spoke broken German, I got on the phone. Luera was the same age as Fritz and they became good friends when the Marfelds moved into her father's house. Luera said that Lea's husband, whose first name she does not recall, taught Hebrew in the high school. Lea was very tall, a kindly woman. Her sons were smart and well-mannered. When war came, the boys had to leave school and try to survive when there was almost no food or clothing. In 1942, probably just after Lea sent her last postcard, all but Fritz were taken by the Nazis. He was taken in 1943, shortly after penning a final card to Uncle Ello.
Luera believes that they all went to nearby Belzec, the most deadly Nazi extermination camp. If Belzec is not as well known as Auschwitz, I learned from a book at Yad Vashem, it is because of approximately one million Jews sent there, precisely two emerged alive.
At Yad Vashem I also learned that German troops occupied Tarnow on September 8, 1939, just seven days after the Nazi attack on Poland that began World War II. Jews were seized for forced labor, robbed, beaten. German troops torched most of Tarnow's synagogues. In the following months Jews lost their jobs and were stripped of money and property. Many were forced to leave their homes. On June 11, 1942, hundreds were murdered in the streets; 3500 went to Belzec. By June 18 another 10,000 Jews had vanished into Belzec; many more were slaughtered in the cemetery or in huge pits outside Tarnow. A Jewish ghetto was established on June 19, and in November another train with 2500 went to Belzec.
Luera last saw Fritz in 1943, after his parents and brothers had been taken.
His last postcard is postmarked March 9, 1943. According to the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, killing continued in Tarnow until the end of 1943, when the city was declared judenrein ("cleansed of Jews"). Those not murdered in Tarnow or Belzec were sent to Auschwitz or Plaszow, a forced labor camp liquidated in 1944; its few survivors went to Auschwitz. Fritz Marfeld is not among those listed in any camp -- but the Nazis kept no list of Belzec's dead. I have no doubt that Lea, her husband and three sons were murdered, if not in Tarnow then surely in Belzec.
Belzec is an almost forgotten place, millions of unburied human bone fragments shrouded by an overgrown and unkempt forest. I am saddened and disgusted to imagine the Marfelds last thoughts, their unmourned bones scattered in such a forgotten place. Small wonder that my father and aunt wished to spare their children such horror.
I asked Luera, now 77, if she knew why Jacov had posted the names at Yad Vashem. "Jacov and I went to school together in Tarnow, and were great friends," she replied. "When I came to Israel, I wanted to make sure that the Marfelds and what happened to them were memorialized. Jacov lived closer to Yad Vashem, so I asked him to go there and enter the names of your family. "
So Mrs. Zedon never knew the Marfelds -- because her husband hadn't known them; he had merely done Luera a favor. But why bother at all? "I always imagined that one day Lea's family would find her through Yad Vashem," Luera replied.
Two strangers half a world away took the time and effort to venerate a family that had been dead for 56 years -- and fate conspired to place these all-but-forgotten names before one of only two people in the world who cared about Marfelds. The names went into the database in 1999; I came to Yad Vashem a year later. Had I visited before they were entered, I would have missed them. Probably, I would have stopped looking. Had I visited another day, would I have found a multi-lingual researcher to translate? A year later, would Jacov's widow still be alive? Luera?
I used to fantasize that my relatives had somehow escaped, that they were safe in Australia or perhaps South America. Now I know that they are with the six million. I find peace in this awful truth, and in knowing that they were never entirely forgotten. And I know that one day my daughter Julia, sweet and kind and towering over her tall father, will look through dark eyes like Lea's at her own children, and tell them of her tall Great Aunt and of Fritz, Martin, and Simon, her first cousins once but forever removed.
| 1 | Ancestry.com, "Galicia, Ukraine, Births, Marriages, and Deaths, 1789-1905" (Name: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc.; Location: Provo, UT, USA; Date: 2012;). |
| Ancestry.com. |