Introduction

Early in 2019, my son Izy joined ancestry.com, setting in motion a sequence of events that would lead our family on a trip into the past. We already knew much about our forebears, because my elder brother Jerry had fortunately videotaped interviews with our father before he passed on. Armed with this information and other recollections, Izy had constructed a family tree that he entered on Ancestry. But we were about to come face-to-face with someone who was able to add greatly to our knowledge of where we came from.

Shortly thereafter, Izy received an email from a person who said that he too had constructed a family tree and that we were on it -- we were third cousins. This man said his name was Peter Hora and that he was from a town in Slovakia named Vrbove. 

Naturally, Izy was intrigued, but also a bit doubtful. He responded to Peter that there were no people named Hora in our family and that while our ancestors did in fact come from Slovakia, we had never heard of a town called Vrbove.

Peter explained that his grandfather’s last name was Herzog, but that after the Second World War, the Communists took over Slovakia, and made it difficult for a Jew to find a job. So his father, Tibor Herzog, changed his name to Hora to conceal the fact that he was Jewish from prospective employers. Peter had found the link between his family and ours when he saw that Alajos was the brother of my great-grandfather (Izy’s great-great-grandfather) Dr. Jacob Herzog.

We were to learn from Peter that Dr. Herzog was in fact born in Vrbove, but at the time we did not know that. We knew him only as being from a town called Hlohovec, which was where he moved after earning his medical degree in Budapest.

Our family had already been planning a trip to Europe that summer, but now we added to our itinerary a visit to Vrbove to meet Peter. We aimed to do thirty cities in thirty days, but Slovakia turned out to be the highlight of the trip -- and later we wished we had allowed ourselves to schedule more time there. 

On June 24, 2019, I embarked with my wife Joyce and my sons Izy and Avi. We flew to Prague, capital of the Czech Republic, where we rented a car and drove to Piestany, which was right across the border in Slovakia. We had wanted to stay there overnight because the town is famous for its mud baths, and our grandparents had visited them. 

My older brother’s wife Sharon had worked as a senior archivist for the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington. They have one of the largest collections of Jewish family stories. Sharon took my grandmother Magda’s photos of the Muller family and catalogued them in the Museum archive. If you Google Magda Muller, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, you will see all these photos of my family, from as far back as the 1920s and ‘30s. During that era my grandparents visited the spas in Piestany, and the collection has photographs of them. 

Interestingly enough, the two of them never went together to these spas. Many Jewish families have a tradition that the only person you can trust is your spouse. You should never leave your family business and take your spouse along. Therefore, you can go separately, but not together.

In any case, the most famous of the spas in Piestany is called Thermia Palace, and we have a few photos of my grandparents standing in front of it. We took our boys into the mud baths. It was a luxury spa in the 1930s and nothing has changed there whatsoever. It is like taking a step back three generations. It’s not luxury as we would use the word today, but as it was used almost ninety years ago. I could almost close my eyes and imagine myself joining my grandparents.

After a good night’s sleep, we drove to Vrbove, which is only a short distance away. We found Peter Hora waiting for us at the town’s central square.. This was Tuesday morning, and we had booked a flight out of Vienna on Wednesday, so there wasn’t much time—too little time, really. After we compared some documents about our families, Peter drove us to the outskirts of Vrbove, which is a small town of about six thousand people. The road had some twists and turns, but he finally stopped at a farmhouse, where we all got out. A woman who obviously knew Peter well answered the door. She welcomed us, walked us through the house, out the back, and then to the end of her property, where we came upon a long, unmarked red brick wall. Toward one end was a low doorway with an old metal door. She unlocked it and we all had to bend down to pass through.

We emerged to find ourselves in a large Jewish cemetery -- another vision of the past. There had to be about four hundred graves, with tombstones placed haphazardly, all displaying Hebrew lettering. Many of the stones were in some degree of disrepair, but some had obviously been freshened up. The name on many of the graves was Herzog. These were our family members.

Peter has traced the family back to the eighteenth-century Rabbi Menachem Emanuel Herzog, who was a winemaker, and whose grave we now saw. I had not known his name and as I read it on the stone I had a profound sense of connection with all the generations before me. My father’s mother’s father was Dr. Jacob Herzog, whose father was Simon Herzog, whose father was Israel Herzog, who father was Yosef Yutzpe Herzog, whose father was that same Rabbi Menachem Emanuel Herzog. Seven generations! Eight, if you count my sons. I was glad they had come along.

Before the war, one-third of the people in Vrbove were Jewish, and the Herzogs were among the most prominent families. Many, if not most, of them were deported to Auschwitz in 1944. However, some escaped and made their way to the United States, Australia, and other countries. Peter Hora has been successful in contacting many of these branches of the family. Today, some of these descendants (not our branch, unfortunately) have continued the family’s wine-making tradition and own Herzog Wineries, which also includes Royal Wines, Kedem Wines, and recently acquired Manischewitz as well. Through their contact with Peter, these Herzogs have provided funds for the care of this Jewish cemetery in Vrbove. They have paid for graves to be restored where possible, and for the general upkeep of the cemetery, which is done by the family that lives in the adjacent home.

They have also organized an extended family reunion in Vrbove every two years. Seventy cousins attended the last one, and now, we have already reserved our spots on the upcoming trip.

After finishing our visit to Vrbove, we drove to the nearby town of Sered. Sered, I knew, is the town where Nandor Muller, my father’s father, was born. We did not have the contact information for the caretaker of the Sered Jewish cemetery. We stopped at the Sered Holocaust Museum, which is on the site of the Sered Concentration Camp. Originally the camp was under the control of the Hlinka Guard, which was the Slovakian equivalent of the Nazi SS. Later it was turned over to local police because the Hlinka Guard were needed for war activities. Dr. Jacob Herzog practiced medicine there, under the control of the Hlinka Guard because many of the inmates were used for forced labor, and he had to keep them as healthy as possible.

Fortunately the guide at the museum had the phone number of the woman who had the key to the Sered Jewish Cemetery. Peter called and spoke with the woman, who said she would leave the key with someone who lived across the street from the cemetery and we could pick it up there.

We did, and we easily found the location. There is a white stone wall and an entranceway about twenty feet high with a Star of David inscribed on it. However, we were dismayed by what we found behind the wall. The grass and weeds were so high that we could barely see any of the graves. Many of the tombstones lay flat on the ground, where they had fallen or been knocked down. After enduring dozens of mosquito bites, we finally found the grave of my grandfather’s mother Sophie Muller, who died of natural causes in 1942. On her grave is also a memorial stone for her husband Ignatz and their daughter and son-in-law Rozsi and Alec Schwitzer, all of whom were deported to Auschwitz in 1944 and perished there.

We surmised that when one gives advance notice to the caretaker that someone will be visiting at a given time, she then arranges for the grass to be cut around specific graves. Otherwise, no caretaking is done whatsoever.

Leaving Sered, we went on to Hlohovec, about twenty minutes away by car. There we had arranged to meet Ladislav Vykopal, who lives right on the central town square in the same home where my grandparents lived before the war with my father and his sister. Their store was right downstairs. We had a little trouble finding it, because Ladislav is retired and the sign over the store now reads Orange Cellular.. I wondered what my grandfather would make of that.

Our family goes way back with Ladislav’s. In November, 1938, Ladislav’s grandfather, Aliz Vykopal, was nineteen years old and worked for my grandfather. One night the Hlinka Guard called my grandfather outside and beat him up. Ladislav’s grandfather, however, protected my grandmother and her children—my father and aunt—from harm. When I told this story to Ladislav, he nodded and said he knew that story. In fact, his grandfather had protected another Jewish family as well.

Ladislav took us upstairs where my grandparents had lived. He especially enjoyed pointing out to us the items that had been there in the days before the war. The stairs, the doors, and the flooring had all been built by my grandfather.

He showed us the sturdy wooden bed that had belonged to my grandparents. He told us there had been a second bed, but he didn’t know what became of it. I said, “I know where it is. Before my grandparents left in 1939, they packed a lift, one of those twenty by forty-foot shipping containers, and sent it to Canada. Inside that lift was the second bed, which you will find today if you go to their home in Ontario. My parents slept on that bed for fifty plus years. My father passed away, but my mother still sleeps in it.”

I smiled when I saw a safe built into the wall. When I was growing up, in my grandparents’ house there was a painting on the wall. Behind that painting was a safe similar to this one. Many Jewish families who fled the Holocaust have the thought in their minds that they never know when the next Holocaust might be. So they keep some little gold ingots in a safe such as this one, because gold is an easy way to transport wealth. When I pointed to the safe, Ladislav said right away, “Your grandfather put that safe in the wall. We don’t use it.” And of course I knew that my grandfather did do that, because that was the sort of thing he would do. It was one of the reasons he had been able to escape, and therefore one of the reasons why I was alive. In another chapter, I will tell you a story of how he obtained visas to leave Europe.

From there we went to the Hlohovec Jewish Cemetery. The man who takes care of the cemetery was there because Peter had notified him ahead of time. He had freshly cut the grass and removed the weeds, especially in the places he knew where we were going to visit. The other places were not so well cut.

We saw a stone with Peter’s grandfather’s name on it -- Alajos Herzog. Peter put that stone there to memorialize him. Our ancestors whose graves we saw there are my father’s mother’s grandparents, Jeanette and Simon Rosenfeld, and Jeanette’s parents Ignatz Prezelmayer and his wife Amalia (Kohn). Interesting, her stone does not say her first name; rather, it says “Wife of Ignatz Prezelmayer.” I guess that was the custom at the time.

In that cemetery we came across a little hut, eight by eight feet by eight or ten feet high. When I asked the caretaker to open it, he was very hesitant. I gave him fifty Euros and he unlocked it. I could tell immediately that my sons and I were the first to be inside that room for a very long time. What was inside were things that had been saved when the synagogue was destroyed in 1944, I believe. Elsewhere in the cemetery was the stone turret, which was too large to fit inside this small hut. 

But here, inside a cabinet, were some prayer books, maps of the cemetery, and other papers. No silver objects. The prayer books were riddled with holes and they stank of mold. But I was thinking of bringing them back to North America, cleaning or “unmolding” them, and putting them into a museum. I got in touch with Sharon Mintz, who is head librarian of the Jewish Theological Seminary and also works at Sotheby’s in their Jewish books department. I asked her what the process would be to clean the books. She told me, “David, I’m very sorry to tell you that not only is it impossible to ‘unmold’ them, as you say, but they are dangerous even to handle. The mold can cause respiratory problems. Furthermore, if you put only one book into your own library, the mold will spread to other books. So you have two choices: one is to leave them there and the other is to follow a Jewish law called shaimos, which says that since a Jewish prayer book has the name of G-d in it, if it is damaged so much that it cannot be used, it must be buried in a Jewish cemetery. You should make arrangements to have someone bury them.”

So we left the prayer books where they were, at least for the time being. They are in a safe place, and I think no one else is likely to handle them.

We had to cut our visit short in order to have time to drive to Vienna and catch the plane for the next leg of our vacation trip. However, we will be back. The idea for writing this book about my family had already occurred to me.

My intention was strengthened later in the year when my wife and I went to London for a wedding. The groom was the son of a very close friend of mine, Michael Gross. Michael’s father was born in Hlohovec, and the obstetrician who presided at his birth was my great-grandfather, Dr.. Jacob Herzog. So our families have a tie that goes back more than a century. When I met Michael, I told him I was writing this book and I wanted to know everything about his father and his father’s childhood, everything Michael could remember.

Michael told me, “David, my father has died, my mother has died, and I am sorry to say that I never asked them to record their stories.” I was dismayed, because now those stories are forever lost.

Only four Jewish families from Hlohovec survived the war, and that is why so few people visit the graves. And the descendants of those who did survive are people who don’t go there, because, like Michael, either they don’t know which ones are their relatives, or they just don’t bother to go. I am hoping this book will inspire people who might find it a catalyst for them to do their own research or might want to be part of a group to endow the upkeep of the cemeteries with us.

My grandfather is not alive to speak to me now, but if he could, I think he would say, “Listen, David, I left you some money. Take a tiny bit of it and make sure that my parents’ graves are cared for.” We made a pact with his memory that we will make arrangements to endow the perpetual care of the Sered Jewish Cemetery and the Hlohovec Jewish Cemetery. It is the least we can do to perpetuate the dignity of our ancestors who are buried there. We are also sponsoring the translation into English of the definitive work of Hlohovec Jewry entitled Zidovksa Komunita v Dejinach Mesta Hlohovec by Professor Nina Paulovicova and Jozef Urminsky. Their work is monumental and I encourage the interested reader to get hold of it.