The Ninth Person On This Trip

We decided to bring three generations together for a Czech family pilgrimage, in this one unique window of opportunity: while Denny and I were visiting Europe from Shanghai; while Dad and Ann were still young enough to travel; while memories of our family history were still fresh in our minds; and before my teenage nephews Benjamin and Jacob flew the coop to university. On top of that, having been unable to spend any time together as a family during COVID times, it was also the perfect way to force us all to be in each other’s company for a week. The last time I saw my nephews, they were children. Now they are mountain-sized adults, whose cheeky personalities I feel like I’m getting to know for the first time.

Along with my brother Daniel and his wife Helen, the 9th person accompanying us on this trip is the spirit of my Grandmother (Babička). We started the trip in Prague, where she had ended up after the war, and where my father and uncle Jirka were subsequently born. And we’re making our way down to her birthplace of Vienna. But yesterday we made a special visit to the sleepy town of Milevsko in Southern Bohemia. That’s where Babička’s parents in Vienna (the Neumanns) had desperately sent her and her sister to live with their grandparents (the Aschermanns) after the annexation of Austria into the German Reich in 1938. She was 17, her sister was 15, and their little brother had been too young to travel, so had stayed in Vienna with his parents.

Babička was the only member of the Neumann and Aschermann families to survive the holocaust. The building where she lived in Milevsko has since been knocked down and rebuilt into a hardware store. And the local synagogue has since been reconsecrated into a church.

At the entrance to the church, there was a very nice memorial to the old synagogue, and to the victims of the holocaust from the town. Despite all this loss, the fact that the Aschermanns’ great great great grandchildren could pose for a photo in front of this memorial was enough to feel like we were breathing fresh life into the memory of my family, and all the other Jewish families of Milevsko.

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