Ruby Family History Project Blog

Also in the previous post was the question of the identity of Fanny Ringel Twiasschor, who is listed as the resident of a Ringel apartment in 1920. I looked up name derivations for Fanny and found that among Jews it was often a variant of Feiga. The directory listing was published in the year before the death of Feigla Kaufler Ringel.

So it must have been Feigla, Hermann's mother, who was living in the apartment and is listed in the directory as Fanny Ringel Twiasschor. She died in November 1921. It seems Helga got her middle name in 1924 in honor of her deceased grandmother. 

I just went and looked at Feigla's death certificate, which was one of the original documents Elly carried with her to America. I had previously misread the year of her death of 1925 when the date is really Novemeber 28, 1921. She was 67. Her address was Lothringerstraße 4a. Bingo!

I also reviewed the chronology of directory listings for Ringel family members at the address at Lothringerstraße 4. 

Table to come.

Until now, we didn't have much information about Hermann Ringel's sister Betty. We knew about Rosa Ringel Shatner, the mother of Zeev, who died with her daughter Margot after a roundup in Belgrade. We knew Betty had two daughters, Edith and Gena, who later lived in London. 

Today I was searching in the Yad Vashem database in order to mention it in my article, Searching on Ringel and Rzeszow, the eleven matching records included one name, Zierel Apfelbaum, that was familiar to me, and another, Betty Twiasschlor, that just seemed weird. I checked up on Zierel and saw she was a daughter of Schija Ringel's brother Judah, thus Hermann's first cousin. She also came to Berlin and married Josef Apfelbaum. She was deported from Berlin 9/27/1942 and perished at Auschwitz.

At first I paid no attention to Betty with the funny last name, but when I idly clicked through the detailed information I saw that her maiden name was Ringel and she was born in Rzeszow in 1880. There are actually two records about her in the YV database with slightly different information about her date and place of death. I will copy both records in full below. 

So then I started looking in Ancestry and JewishGen to see what I could find out about a Betty Twiasschor in Berlin. Well, there was another Twiasschor family in Berlin (the name goes back to several towns in east Galicia/Ukraine), so that made the search slightly difficult. This other Twiasschor was in business and had phone and address listings in many directories. He and his wife were also deported and their family sponsored a Stolpersteine for them, so most of the Google hits are about that. 

However, several of the directories had an address for another Twiasschor resident, possibly a widow, at an address on Lothringerstrasse that looked familiar. I checked and confirmed that it was indeed the same building as one of Hermann Ringel's old addresses. Several other directory listings had tantalizing bits. One listing was for the Geschwister Twiasschor, meaning siblings. Another listed Fanny Twiasschor, geboren Ringel, as the occupant. (I don't know if Fanny was another name for Betty or if that is someone else, but the name sure rings a bell.)

I didn't see anything about an Edith or Gina at first, but then this 1945 item in Die Aufbau showed up. The Aufbau was the German language Jewish paper that published lists of victims and survivors after the war. It also covered happier news, such as this paid announcement of the engagement of Edith Twiasshor and Rudi Krausz in London. I am not sure what "fly" means, but it seems to suggest the bride came originally from Berlin and the groom from Vienna. 

I am pretty sure this must be Helga's cousin Edith. I don't know if she was still married to Herr Krausz when we visited Edith and her sister for tea in 1961. I had the impression they were both unmarried but what did I know? 

Other than the Aufbau item, there wasn't any other information I could find about Edith or Gena. But now we have their birth surname and have learned of their mother's fate. Both of Hermann's sisters were killed in extermination camps. 

See the detailed info about Betty below. 

I came across this book excerpt that gives a flavor for the life of the Wasserreich family in Montevideo in the 1940s. The author Eva Ross was born in Austria as Eva Stoessl. The uncle David she describes below had the surname Stossl, which is the married name of Erich Wasserreich's daughter. 

Making a Rose After the Diaspora: An Autobiography

by Eva E. Ross

pp 54-55

https://books.google.com/books/about/Making_a_Rose_After_the_Diaspora.html?id=tLWvPQAACAAJ&source=kp_book_description

On weekends in the summer we would go to the beach; if my uncles picked us up in their car we would go to Carrasco, a nicer and more exclusive beach. We could also take the bus, but they were always terribly crowded and we had to stand the whole way for 30 minutes. Coming back in the evening it was even worse; people would hang like grapes from the bus. Nevertheless, Montevideo was a city where one could live quite well without a lot of money or a car. The transit system was very good, going from east to west and south to north, but often overloaded. One could stay on the beach all day without paying a penny, and food was not expensive.

My uncle David, who had divorced his first wife with whom he had a son, Ernesto, was dating a very pretty young German refugee by the name of Eva Wasserreich, who had come with her parents from Berlin where her father had been a prosperous businessman. New her father was selling butter from door to door! My uncle’s hobby was horseback riding, and with his factory taking off, he was able to afford a car and to join the equestrian club. He taught Eva to ride also and they went riding every weekend in winter, but in summer they loved to go to the beach. As the club was near Carrasco and the best beach happened to be there as well, we sometimes had the opportunity to get a ride in their car to Carrasco.

David and Eva eventually got married and moved into an apartment near her parents. We often had meals together, especially for the Jewish holy days. My uncle would often say to me, a twelve-year-old, “Children should be seen but not heard.” Or, “You keep quiet, you are too young to participate in this discussion.” Such comments did not encourage me to be outgoing.