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comment by rjw
rjw  ·  2790 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: August 3, 2016

My mother and sister have invited me to go with them to Hořice in the Czech Republic (aka Czechia - which is used by Czech politicians but not that many other people - personally I prefer it because it's one word not two), to rediscover the Jewish side of my family's heritage (my grandmother fled Austria for Britain, just after the Anschluss). One problem: there are at least six places with the name Hořice, we might need to do some more research. One thing I do know that my great grandfather inherited a textile factory there which he ran into the ground (being more interested in law and intellectual matters than business) before it was stolen by the Nazis. We have a collection of translated letters that he sent to my grandmother just before the Holocaust so we should be able to figure it all out. One member of my family tried to appeal to the Czech government to get the factory and house back but they have put their foot down and will not take any more claims. I guess you have to draw a line under everything at some point.

My feelings of Jewishness are conflicted - I was raised with absolutely none of the religious or cultural traditions. My parents are both agnostic and my grandmother (mother's mother) was raised secular and converted to Christianity before leaving Austria (totally unrelated to politics - in fact she became a Lutheran when Austria was ruled by a Catholic clerico-fascist government). The one time I do feel it is when people use mentioning the Holocaust as a cheap political tool (people from every political position regarding Jewish people / Israel have been caught doing this).





Vozka  ·  2788 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Czech here, I'd start here, textile was traditionally produced there and there were several active factories at the beginning of the 20th century. Feel free to message me if you need help with something, I don't log in every day, but I'll try to help.

rjw  ·  2788 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Thanks for the information. Yeah we reckon it's that one! We knew the town was in north Bohemia and this is the only Horice I found that is located around there. Also it looks like it was a shtetl. Where did you hear that textiles were traditionally produced there? Maybe if I find some historical resources on the subject I can get a bit more information. We have a lot of letters from family before the Holocaust so there are probably some more clues I haven't checked out.

Vozka  ·  2787 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Unfortunately my sources are pretty bad - Mileta, the only textile company still running (afaik) has this info on its website. It was easy to confirm that it's true (by that I mean the fact that there were several running factories at some point) by googling and finding some mentions here and there, but nothing more. According to a historical postcard, one of the factories was called "EM. FEUERSLEIN A SPOL", but again, no more information to be found. Towns around here often have tons of historical records in their archives or in local libraries that would surely contain useful information, but it's almost never digitalized (=takes a long time to search through it, it would also obviously be in czech or german) and may not be easy to get to.

rjw  ·  2787 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Ohh that's it! That's a bad transcription, it should be Feuerstein. Thanks for the link.