Dad used to tell me that he periodically went up to Brno (Brünn) to visit his aunt and uncle. I never knew which aunt and uncle he was talking about, and I guess I wasn’t interested enough at the time to ask. Honestly, I think half the time he told me this story just because he really liked to say “Brrrrrrno.” He always did it with such an enthusiastic, exaggerated front tongue roll. I think he may also have been proud of his independence as a kid. I seem to recall that he took the train from Vienna to Brno all by himself.

Anyway, looking through the tree and through records he deposited at Yad Vashem, I’m pretty sure that he must have been visiting his great uncle and great aunt, Sigmund Bauer (1876-1944) and Auguste Eugenie (Kohn) Bauer (1881-1944) and their two sons, Heinrich Wolfgang Bauer (1912-1952) and Franz Josef Wilhelm Bauer (1915-1942—a patriotic name for a boy born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1915!). Auguste, or as Dad called her, Eugenia, was the youngest of his grandmother Zdenka’s six sisters. In his Yad Vashem testimonies, he writes that Franz and Heinrich were shot by Nazis in front of their own house, but other records say that one or both of sons were sent to Terezin. Both parents were also murdered in concentration camps. I think I have records that the sons were journalists, so maybe I can find some of their work online.