Hugo Marom - February 8, 2008
Germans Take Catholic Brother
When the Germans moved in...I can't tell you whether it was two weeks, three weeks or a month after March 1939...the Gestapo, one day arrived. I was not at home. My brother Rudy was at home, my parents were at home. It must have been a Sunday. I was either playing soccer or something. Apparently...according to han...stories handed over because I wasn't there so it's hearsay...a couple of Germans arrived...a man and a woman dressed in leather coats practically to the ground...Gestapo. They told my mother there's no place for a non-Jewish child to be with a Jewish family, to pack all his things, all his toys and everything that he had when he came and what he'd received since he'd been with us for three years or four years nearly and they took him away. And after the war I looked for him. He's in the list...he was in the list to go to England. Peter Meisl you'll find him there. And uh, the orphanage...although he was by that time seventeen, or eight...seventeen years old after the war, I didn't find him after the war. The name Meisl obviously...children orphanage don't have surnames, they only have their Christian names. So, he was either killed during the war or served in the army or died or passed away. Although during the bombing of this orphanage, which is completely destroyed by the Russians during the attack on Brno they claimed there were no children...there was nobody there at the time...that they were in shelters and nobody was killed there. But I never found him. I never found any records until...the search went on for many years until about four years ago...I always checked telephone books for the name Meisls and of course there are a lot of Meisls and I used to phone them up and one day I rang up a uh, a Meisl family near Brno and they answered the phone...a lady answered the phone and I said, "Would there be anybody...an older person about the age of seventy to eighty by the name of Peter Meisl?" So, she said, "My uh, my father's...my husband's father was Peter Meisl." I said, "Where was he born?" and she said, "We don't know. We believe he came from an orphanage." I've corresponded with this family who is a very famous musical family...they're all musicians. In fact, one of the sons...he's no longer alive so there's no way and there are no documents...no way to prove anything...we've been corresponding every year for Christmas and so forth...the son was world champion in Russian organ...writing music and playing these big organs uh, what're they called?
Accordions.
Accordions, I'm sorry, accordions, accordions, yes. They're Russian and small ones and so forth so Russians. And I've got recordings at home of classical music on accordion and so forth. So, we haven't met yet. We're planning to do it next time we go although there's absolutely no way...they've tried uh, okay.
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