Ruby Family History Project Blog

This item ran in The London Gazette on January 17, 1947.

Scott, Ernest Arthur (formerly Ernst Schoenwald); Germany; Manager; 6, Aldridge Road Villas, London, W.n. 7 November, 1946

That would be Regina's husband. As foreshadowed by the crossouts in the registry record, Ernst Schoenwald officially changed his name to Ernest Arthur Scott.

So Gina's new name will be Regina Scott, which I am looking for in Google but everything is about the romance novelist who goes by that name. 

We know that Pinkas Twiasschor was one of the 1000 specially chosen refugees who came to the U.S., spent 18 months in an Army camp in Oswego, New York, and were finally admitted as legal immigrants in January 1946. I have begun reading the 1983 bestseller Haven, by Ruth Gruber, about her role in the operation and her experiences with the refugees. It is a gripping read. However, Pinkas Twiasshor is not specifically mentioned in the book. I'll come back and write about the book in a future installment.

As for our relative, after his January 1946 re-entry into the United States at Niagara Falls, there were no more records on Ancestry for Pinkas Twiasschor but there were some for a Paul Twiasschor. When I first saw these I discounted them, because I had previously encountered another Paul Twiasschor in the Berlin address books who was clearly a different person. But when I examined the records again, a 1951 Social Security appllication and a 1954 New York State death index listing, I realized they both had birth dates that matched Pinkas Twiasschor's birth. 

This shows that Pinkas Twiasschor became Paul Twiasschor in the United States, and that he died in New York at age 72. Helga's uncle, while evidently estranged from the family, was alive and living in New York at the same time that Helga lived there too. 

The other Berlin couple that married in London in January 1911, Dina Twiasschor and Israel Goldstein, prospered as a family and in business in Berlin in the 1910s and '20s. Their daughter Sally was born in 1912, and then two other children, Alfred and Ruth, followed a decade later. Israel ran a furniture and textile store on Brunnenstraße.

We know this and quite a bit more because of a comprehensive biography of Dina Goldstein that is posted at the Finding Stolpersteine site, where you find all the documentation about the three stones in the photo placed in the sidewalk at Zehdenicker Str. 25. You should follow the link and read the English translation yourself, but I will summarize. 

The family faced tough times during the persecutions of the 1930s. The store on Brunnenstraße was closed, and the family invested instead in a mattress store on Lothringer Straße, where Israel also worked. They investigated ways to leave Germany. Israel actually visited his two brothers in the United States to secure sponsorship documentation. However, the Goldsteins still were not able to get a U.S. visa. 

On October 28, 1938, along with thousands of other Polish citizens in Germany, Israel was forceably evicted from Germany in what is known as the Polen-aktion. However, Poland would not accept the evicted Jews to return to their native land, and thousands languished for months in a no-man's land around the town of Zbasyn. On the Stolpersteine page, we learn that Israel was able to make his way to his birth village of Kolomea in south Poland, and that after a time Dina and their son Alfred were able to join him there. The two daughters, 24 and 12 years old, stayed behind in Berlin. 

Germany invaded Poland in June 1941 and the town of Kolomea came under the law of German occupation. A Jewish ghetto was established and the Goldsteins survived there into the early months of 1942, when they fell victim to one of the periodic actions in the ghetto. They perished in the Nazi death camp at Belzec.

Sally and Ruth got out of Germany and made it to the United States. It is Ruth who sponsored the laying of the memorial stone in 2009. She has also donated a collection of Goldstein family photos and papers to the USHMM. When I page through the photos of the Goldstein family on resort at Bad Flinsberg and other locales, they look just like many of the Ringel-Wohlgemuth photos we have of happy German Jewish vacationers in their bathing costumes. 

Dina Twiasschor was the sister-in-law of Helga's Tante Betty. And that makes her and the rest of the Goldsteins a part of our own mishpocha. Welcome to the Ruby family, Dina. I will pay my respects at the Stolpersteine on Zehdenicker Straße the next time I come to Berlin.

I'm sure there are better sources on the German occupation of Serbia in 1941-44, but the Wikipedia article on The Holocaust in German-Occupied Serbia has all we need to know. I'll go through the key points. 

Yugoslav Foreign Secretary Anton Korošec, who was Roman Catholic priest and leader of Slovenian conservatives, stated in September 1938, that "Jewish issue did not exist in Yugoslavia…. Jewish refugees from the Nazi Germany are not welcome here." In December 1938 Rabbi Isaac Alkalai, the only Jewish member of government was dismissed from the government.

This would be the situation in the critical months before Kristallnacht when Berliners like our grandmother were scrambling to escape the country. Elly and Helga fled to Belgium and then France. Despite the unwelcome attitude of the Yugoslav government to Jewish refugess, Elly's sister-in-law, Rosa Ringel with her daughter Margot, fled to Belgrade to be with other members of the Shatner family. 

In April 1941, axis forces led by Nazi Germany invaded Yugoslavia and installed a puppet government, setting the stage for implemention of anti-Jewish measures. 

The destruction of Serbian Jews by the Nazi Germans was carried out in two distinct phases. The first, which lasted between July and November 1941, involved the murder of Jewish men, who were shot as part of retaliatory executions carried out by German forces in response to the rising anti-Nazi, partisan insurgency in Serbia.

Altogether some 30.000 people were executed by the Nazi's during the first 2 months of this policy, including nearly all Serbian Jewish males, as well as tens of thousands of Serbs.[10] Despite executing tens of thousands of Jewish men, the Wehrmacht in Belgrade refused to kill women and children because that would have been "dishonourable".[11]

Such niceties were not observed for long.

The second genocidal activity, between December 1941 and May 1942, involved the incarceration of the women and children at the Semlin concentration camp and former fairgrounds in Belgrade and their gassing in a mobile gas van called a Sauerwagen. The German concentration camp, the old fairgrounds or Stare Sajmište, near Zemun was established across the Sava river from Belgrade, on the territory of the Independent State of Croatia, to process and eliminate the captured Jews, Serbs, Roma, and others. 

This second period encompasses the April 1942 date given by Hendel for the killing of Roza and Margot Schattner. Referring to the Zemun camp, SS-commander Harald Turner, Chief of the German military administration in Serbia, described the operation in a letter that month to a Nazi colleague. 

Already some months ago, I shot dead all the Jews I could get my hands on in this area, concentrated all the Jewish women and children in a camp and with the help of the SD (i.e. Sicherheitsdienst – Nazi Security Services) got my hands on a "delousing van," that in about 14 days to 4 weeks will have brought about the definitive clearing out of the camp...

So that is how it went for the Shatner family in Belgrade. The men were killed first, primarily by roundup and gunshot, in the second half of 1941. The women and children came next, sent first to a local concentration camp and then killed a truckload at a time in mobile gas vans. 

Emanuel Schäfer, commander of the Security Police and Gestapo in Serbia... famously cabled Berlin after last Jews were killed in May 1942: Serbien ist judenfrei.[19]