and schools throughout Europe before the Second World War Her work shaped many of our ideas of what early humans looked like I discovered Erna while researching my mother’s Hungarian family Erna’s husband was named Róbert; he and his brother fought for the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the First World War Neither one would survive beyond the next conflict Hungary after the war only to die years later in Mauthausen who became Erna’s stepdaughter; Rose’s children But my mother never knew any of her Hungarian cousins That’s because my mother’s French Catholic mother never told her about his family in Hungary I lived and worked in Pécs for five months researching the Engel-Jánosis Studying archival materials from Yad Vashem and other museums and going over my mother’s wartime passport I learned a lot about the people they were and the passions that drove them I also came to understand something of the quiet years-long suffering my mother and other family members endured as a result of the agonizing antisemitic propaganda that accompanied Hitler’s rise to and consolidation of power Most of them were murdered in the Holocaust Those who did managed to do so by reconstructing themselves—remaking their identities to minimize their exposure to a system that wanted to destroy them But sometimes those reconstructions exposed them to other The Nuremberg Race Laws codified Hitler’s twisted ideas about racial purity (and contagion) and invested them with the authority of the state that jealous protector of a monopoly on violence The road to extermination was becoming clear It was in response to these laws and the Nazi hatred they embodied that Erna and my mother began to reconstruct themselves But they also carried part of it forward with them Some members of my mother’s family changed their surname wiping out the Engel to distance themselves from their Jewish roots it became illegal to write the prefix von or de so Engel de Jánosi or Engel von Jánosi became Engel-Jánosi the name would risk making an agent of the state pause because of that “Engel.” So some family members simply became Jánosi Reconstructing a life takes time. I dig through layers of stories I’ve heard or read, those earlier reconstructions, to find what might lie underneath. And sometimes I dig where I have no stories to go by at all. My mother never lied about who she was—she just didn’t talk about her past. I read old letters, comb through old passports and travel documents, and search online archives for more information. Why? Maybe because I’m trying to figure out a pattern, a key that unlocks the evolution of a life and a family. How do people survive the violence and insanity of a time such as theirs? What choices do they make while somehow maintaining their dignity, character, and sanity? Mostly, I focus on the facts, even when the facts are troublesome—even when they don’t fit my assumptions. IN A 1938 PRESS PICTURE taken at her home in Pécs, Erna leans against a fireplace mantel, sure of herself in a wood-paneled room, surrounded by her plaster busts of Neanderthal Man, Homo aurignaciensis, and Homo ultimus, the Conquering Hungarian. She and the busts of the men she recreated are at the height of their fame. I now understand the woman in that photo was putting on a brave face amid worsening hardship and danger. (Photo courtesy of Anna Stein.)Known for her pioneering work in anthropological facial reconstruction she wears the white lab coat of a scientist She also brought the interests and questions of anthropology to her work Through her facial reconstructions of early hominids Erna wanted to educate humans about humans through art Born Erna Baiersdorf de Erdősi on September 24 She also developed an interest in new scientific understandings of our species and its origins Erna also paid attention to how humans needed to recreate themselves to survive A bronze cast of one of the Neanderthal reconstructions Erna created CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0> via Wikimedia Commons)These reconstructions were widely distributed throughout Europe Other scientists and artists visited the museum to study Erna’s methods Her work changed how her colleagues across the continent reconstructed mammals She also helped to reshape how people saw early humans Share MY GRANDFATHER, FRIEDRICH, KNEW ERNA as the wife of his cousin Róbert. A historian and a devout monarchist with conservative beliefs, Friedrich lived in Vienna and traveled by train at least once a year to Pécs to attend gatherings at the family estate near a coal-mining village called Komló The family operated the mine and a successful lumber business with factories in Hungary and Austria Wood was harvested and loaded on trains in Pécs where it was processed into slats for parquet floors My mother remembered jumping up and down on the boards as workers unloaded them at the factory in Vienna; her cousin Anna remembered jumping up and down on the boards as workers loaded the trains in Pécs My mother didn’t know Anna or Erna back then because her father Friedrich didn’t take her to Hungary with him on trips to see their extended family They baptized their only daughter—my mother I don’t know if Friedrich really did belong to this far-right-wing paramilitary group it didn’t help him: The Reich banned the book’s distribution anyway Still, my grandfather continued teaching at the university while his mother and his wife saw to the details of the family’s parquet-floor business. Friedrich didn’t like working in the factory. He preferred researching at the Austrian State Archives and traveling to Rome to study the doctrines and history of his chosen faith Friedrich’s academic specialty was modern European history but he refused to believe what was happening in Austria and in Europe He chose to live in a beautiful bubble within a larger the SS chief appointed to “liquidate European Jewry,” declared his intention to free Austria of Jews The Nazi Party proclaimed that only racially pure Germans could be German citizens, and the Reich Citizenship Law codified this idea when it defined a citizen as a person who is “of German or related blood.” Because Jews were defined as a separate race and could not be German citizens And any person with at least three Jewish grandparents was consigned to this racial category The Nuremberg Laws put both Friedrich and his wife and daughter—my mother—in danger a blond-haired boy in a Hitler Youth uniform wouldn’t allow her on an ice-skating rink My grandmother told my mother not to go to the ice-skating rink anymore Erna was fired from her job at the Kunsthistorisches Museum because she was a Jew She was not allowed to sell or display her statues at other museums or galleries Erna’s colleagues removed her work and any references to her work from their books and articles She couldn’t find work in Austria or in Hungary the faceless 29,500-year-old statuette that was dug up in 1908 Margit tried to talk her sister into emigrating to Vancouver that Erna’s family began to reconstruct themselves in earnest and his small family lived with his mother She did not follow him into the Catholic Church and the division created some enmity between them the ministry of education rescinded his venia docendi (teaching license) The University of Vienna summarily fired him my mother’s teacher asked the class every morning if any visitors had been to their homes the previous evening She had them write lists of all their parents’ friends This teacher was a relative of Hermann Göring and she also kept lists of her students’ height and the color of their eyes and skin Citizens who wanted to travel were required to apply for Reissepasses My grandmother Carlette’s marriage to Friedrich had become illegal Her brother and mother were living in Switzerland and France at the time urging her and the rest of the family to leave Austria my grandmother spent days standing in long lines at the consulate’s office for her new Reissepasse My mother said that every day before she left the house She would wear her best coat and hat—the one with the netting—plus gloves Nazi law required my mother and Friedrich to appear on their own behalf before the police department for temporary Reissepasses which they had to carry at all times and get stamped once a month at the police department but both must have felt lucky that neither of their passes was marked with a J for Jude I found it among her things after she died Already they were training her to think of herself as a number The SS muscled their way into my mother’s home in Vienna one night to search the place—for what Friedrich made sure to leave papers bearing the Vatican’s letterhead on his desk The SS made a list of everything in the house They left that night without making any arrests but the threat to my mother’s family had become real in a new way my grandparents spent all their money on bribes and tickets and a sympathetic dean who gave Friedrich an offer to teach at King’s College My mother left with her mother by taxi on a cold spring night in late April 1939 My mother wore a dark blue coat several sizes too big She told me that even though she did not cry and a hat with a black net covering her face She told my mother not to look back—to never look back Support our independent coverage of politics and the arts by signing up for a free or paid subscription When the train reached the first border crossing My grandmother said it through the cabin doors The guards hesitated but kept their distance They asked that the women slide the papers under the door holding the documents at the corners and quickly stamping them without checking for suspicious words like Engel After Friedrich reunited with his wife and daughter in Switzerland they traveled to England and split up again My grandparents sent my mother to stay with a family in Whitchurch to keep her safe from German bombing This put my mother and her parents in England at the same time Erna was there my mother and her parents boarded a ship called the Scythia The parents and daughter were each asked if they were polygamists (no) or anarchists (no) their reason for coming to the United States was “to teach at Johns Hopkins University,” which was listed as their sponsor Another academic job offer that helped save their lives Under the heading “race or people,” the manifest lists my grandmother as “French.” My mother and grandfather received another label: “Hebrew.” that one word might as well have said: shame My family did not escape the range of all of the Nazis’ weapons and their poisoned ways of thinking could reach all the way around the world my mother imagined men in the telltale gray and black uniforms standing around her bed I keep my mother’s Kinderausweis in my top desk drawer Sometimes I examine the stamps and signatures with a magnifying glass ERNA DID NOT LEAVE ENGLAND with her sister Margit in 1939 Erna went back to Hungary to be with her husband By this point, the country was rapidly moving to the far right. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Hungary passed similar anti-Jewish laws to those that had spread elsewhere in Europe These prohibited marriage and sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews and banned Jews from owning or purchasing land The Engel-Jánosis could no longer own their homes or businesses outright Erna and Róbert must have talked about leaving Róbert and his brother Richárd were decorated veterans of the Great War Although she couldn’t find paid employment Erna was free to work on her sculptures at home She was teaching her 9-year-old stepgranddaughter she gave Anna plaster to shape her first statues the couple and the larger family had adapted in other ways Róbert and Erna converted to Catholicism along with Róbert’s daughter He stopped talking to his brother in the wake of their religious divergence amid the new anxiety and uncertainty of this period leaving Richárd running what was left of the family business Germany occupied Hungary last, and in 1944, Eichmann took on the task of murdering the country’s remaining Jews. According to Hannah Arendt, Eichmann found the Hungarian Gendarmerie and Hungarian Arrow Cross “more than eager to do all that was necessary” to help him achieve his aims They arrested and loaded Hungarian Jews into cattle cars bound for the camps Eichmann said that everything “went like a dream.” In the spring of 1944, the Hungarian Gendarmerie ordered Hungarian Jewish citizens to report to the authorities Hungarian officers working with the Nazi SS arrested Richárd in front of his house in Pécs on March 19 and the targeting of a prominent and respected local businessman served as a warning to the rest of the family and their larger community: None of them was safe she quickly arranged to hide her children Anna and Gábor with Catholic nuns in the countryside She and her husband would then try to escape to Budapest Richárd was locked in an internment camp in Pécs for over a month In 2011, when I was in Pécs, the director of Tímár House (the Pécs historical museum) said the internment camp never existed. But Yad Vashem has evidence and eyewitness accounts of the camp. It was torn down right after the war. The internment camp was the first stop in a larger grim itinerary. The Hungarian Gendarmerie loaded Richárd into a cattle car along with thousands of other Hungarian Jewish citizens from Pécs for a half-week journey to Austria. They received no food or water during their transport. The entrance to Mauthausen concentration camp public domain)At the “Wailing Wall” inside the gates at Mauthausen Then they remade him according to the precepts of their genocidal system Jude.” “Ung” was short for Ungarischer (Hungarian) behind which other members of the family had hidden their ethnic identities Mauthausen records show that someone drew a black line through his name Richárd never attempted to reconstruct himself I discovered Richárd at the Yad Vashem archives in 2008 when I typed my mother’s maiden name into their database “You’re the first to ask about him,” the archivist said “You are responsible now,” the archivist told me and every other lost family member requires reconstructing them—putting aside false narratives forced on them from without resisting false narratives they internalized The Hungarian Gendarmerie marched Erna and approximately 6,000 Jewish citizens of Pécs to the railroad station then shoved into cattle cars headed for Auschwitz The air was thick with smoke that smelled like burning hair, according to accounts from other prisoners admitted the day Erna walked under the iron gates that bore the terrible inscription of a false promise: Arbeit Macht Frei Erna stood in line on the ramp where Josef Mengele surveyed newcomers People he sent to the left went to the gas chambers Nicknamed the “angel of death,” Mengele conducted experiments based on Nazi racial theory on Jews and Roma Maybe Erna knew something when she saw Mengele she said her birth date was 1906 instead of 1889 attempting to pass as a 38-year-old woman even though she was 55 but he declared Erna “fit to work” and sent her to the right Erna was tattooed with the prisoner number 25086 she worked as a “Pflegerin” (medical attendant) who had used whatever was available to create art She had lived and worked in a world of men but she also knew about art and prehistoric survival Word got around about the artist from Pécs Other officers ordered Erna to sketch them She must have struggled drawing flattering portraits of men who wanted to murder her A month before the Russian Army liberated Auschwitz SS officers transported Erna and approximately 530 other Hungarian Jewish women to Lippstadt at a slave-labor camp in the Buchenwald complex Erna made hand grenades and aircraft parts with other female prisoners they decorated a tree and exchanged gifts they cobbled together from waste metal smuggled out of the factory under threat of death Nazi guards abandoned Erna and the other women close to the village of Kaunitz Rose and her husband, Marcel Stein, had previously returned to Pécs with their children, Anna and Gábor. They had survived the 1945 siege of Budapest Anna remembered seeing friends and relatives shot in the Danube When they moved back into their home in Pécs Anna remembered Erna returning to Pécs to live with them Erna was the only camp survivor to return with a full head of hair Anna watched as Erna began making sculptural reconstructions again in their home The Hungarian government had already nationalized the family factory They also required the Steins to pay compensation to 150 workers Erna bought the family home from the Steins The Steins used the money to pay the workers Erna’s sister Margit searched to find Erna work so that she could emigrate The Vancouver City Museum invited Erna to take a position there Erna hosted a final exhibition of her work in the family home she proposed that the city use the space as a natural history museum—opening it up to the very people who had betrayed her and sent her to her death Erna was not seeking revenge or retribution the Engel-Jánosi family home became a youth club She survived the worst genocide of the twentieth century But I would learn that the Nazis’ campaign of cultural genocide across Europe was not the only reason She also looked for ways to help in her new country She became curator of the Anthropological and Paleontological Department at the Vancouver City Museum most museums do not show what’s left of Erna’s work When I visited the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna in 2011 Two separate museum officials said the statues and busts did not exist there there was no record of Erna having worked at the museum museum officials removed Erna’s statues from their shelves because she was Jewish What I did not yet know was that years later officials at museums that held her work removed it again—this time because it was culturally insensitive she joined her creative and mechanical talent to Eickstedt’s theories of ethnology Eickstedt dissected human corpses to study racial types Eickstedt had access to fourteen preserved heads of “Melanesian” individuals from the German Pacific colonies He took it upon himself to dissect the noses taking measurements to investigate their relevance for racial anatomy These measurements informed the thicknesses of the soft tissue layers that Erna applied Rassenkunde und Rassengeschichte der Menschheit (Racial Sciences and Racial History of Mankind) in which he attempted to classify racial groups using terms such as subspecies and subvarieties Eickstedt had the more robust scientific training of the two and in the course of her collaboration with him Erna embraced his theories as an intellectual basis for her work in scientific reconstruction But for all she suffered and lost during the Holocaust which was sometimes justified by its perpetrators using the high-minded language of theories such as Eickstedt’s Erna did not rid herself of her former colleague’s ideas after the war Some of Eickstedt’s theories remained popular for decades after the Nazis lost the war Erna’s belief in them would not have put her completely out of step with most other anthropologists during her life As with Boule’s tendentious reconstructions of the Neanderthal as subhuman Erna’s reconstructions of early hominids have been found to rely on false premises They do not allow us to see everything that was true about their subjects Erna was also free again to ply her talents in other areas Something must have clicked one day in 1953 when she read in the newspaper that Vancouver police had found the skeletal remains of two young children in the woods She called the police station and asked if she could help knowing how important it was to try to tell the stories of two murdered children Using her artistic and scientific skills in forensics Erna had been living in Canada for four years when she wrote an essay titled “The Method of Reconstructing Human and Animal Remains in Sculpture and in Paintings” for a periodical called Museum and Art Notes. The cover of the issue was illustrated with a photograph of one of her dinosaur reconstructions and her essay opens with an evocation of the joys of her line of work: the work of resuscitating a world which has completely disappeared in the infinity of centuries or millennia is so beautiful a task not alone from a scientific standpoint that it awakens the artist’s fullest enthusiasm For him there can be no aim more glorious than to conjure up a true picture of that life which roamed the face of the earth millions of years ago Those are the words this Holocaust survivor uses to describe her work or painted what she witnessed or experienced during the war She lives on through her granddaughter, Anna Stein, also an artist. Anna’s anthropomorphic figures in her paintings and stained glass are influenced by history, poetry, myth, and by the members of her illustrious family. Like me, Anna reconstructs her own dead. (Photo provided by the author.)The Afterlives of the Engel-JánosisERNA RECONSTRUCTED HERSELF My grandparents moved back to Vienna around 1959 though the family home had been bombed twice by the Allies Friedrich didn’t get the red-carpet treatment he’d hoped for and he had to work out the messy details of becoming an Austrian citizen again He didn’t get the full pension or salary of a full professor so he continued teaching at the University of Vienna past when he would have liked to have retired My grandmother Carlette died soon after they moved my grandfather remarried to a woman not much older than my mother My mother told him he’d taken a vow before God hid from Nazis in a farmhouse in Czechoslovakia a Nazi soldier stopped her and demanded to see her papers The Nazi soldier looked at my Jewish great-grandmother and concluded she couldn’t possibly be Jewish Marie walked miles through snow to a Red Cross tent Marie dragged Friedrich’s Christmas tree out to the curb When Marie celebrated her hundredth birthday in Washington she let me read the congratulatory letter from Richard Nixon She only returned to Vienna to be buried in the family cemetery Six different border guards stamped my mother’s Kinderausweis with swastikas before she eventually crossed into Switzerland and But for every swastika stamp and Nazi signature kicking my mother out of Austria or American official who also stamped or signed her pass Share this essay with a member of your family I discovered Erna while researching my mother\u2019s Hungarian family Erna\u2019s husband was named R\u00F3bert; he and his brother who became Erna\u2019s stepdaughter; Rose\u2019s children That\u2019s because my mother\u2019s French Catholic mother I lived and worked in P\u00E9cs for five months researching the Engel-J\u00E1nosis Studying archival materials from Yad Vashem and other museums and going over my mother\u2019s wartime passport years-long suffering my mother and other family members endured as a result of the agonizing antisemitic propaganda that accompanied Hitler\u2019s rise to and consolidation of power Those who did managed to do so by reconstructing themselves\u2014remaking their identities to minimize their exposure to a system that wanted to destroy them The Nuremberg Race Laws codified Hitler\u2019s twisted ideas about racial purity (and contagion) and invested them with the authority of the state Some members of my mother\u2019s family changed their surname so Engel de J\u00E1nosi or Engel von J\u00E1nosi became Engel-J\u00E1nosi the name would risk making an agent of the state pause because of that \u201CEngel.\u201D So some family members simply became J\u00E1nosi Reconstructing a life takes time. I dig through layers of stories I\u2019ve heard or read, those earlier reconstructions, to find what might lie underneath. And sometimes I dig where I have no stories to go by at all. My mother never lied about who she was\u2014she just didn\u2019t talk about her past. I read old letters, comb through old passports and travel documents, and search online archives for more information. Why? Maybe because I\u2019m trying to figure out a pattern, a key that unlocks the evolution of a life and a family. How do people survive the violence and insanity of a time such as theirs? What choices do they make while somehow maintaining their dignity, character, and sanity? Mostly, I focus on the facts, even when the facts are troublesome\u2014even when they don\u2019t fit my assumptions. IN A 1938 PRESS PICTURE taken at her home in P\u00E9cs, Erna leans against a fireplace mantel, sure of herself in a wood-paneled room, surrounded by her plaster busts of Neanderthal Man, Homo aurignaciensis, and Homo ultimus, the Conquering Hungarian. She and the busts of the men she recreated are at the height of their fame. I now understand the woman in that photo was putting on a brave face amid worsening hardship and danger. Born Erna Baiersdorf de Erd\u0151si on September 24 CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0> Other scientists and artists visited the museum to study Erna\u2019s methods Share MY GRANDFATHER, FRIEDRICH, KNEW ERNA as the wife of his cousin R\u00F3bert. A historian and a devout monarchist with conservative beliefs, Friedrich lived in Vienna and traveled by train at least once a year to P\u00E9cs to attend gatherings at the family estate near a coal-mining village called Koml\u00F3 Wood was harvested and loaded on trains in P\u00E9cs My mother remembered jumping up and down on the boards as workers unloaded them at the factory in Vienna; her cousin Anna remembered jumping up and down on the boards as workers loaded the trains in P\u00E9cs My mother didn\u2019t know Anna or Erna back then because her father Friedrich didn\u2019t take her to Hungary with him on trips to see their extended family They baptized their only daughter\u2014my mother Friedrich\u2019s publisher told them: Look I don\u2019t know if Friedrich really did belong to this far-right-wing paramilitary group it didn\u2019t help him: The Reich banned the book\u2019s distribution anyway Still, my grandfather continued teaching at the university while his mother and his wife saw to the details of the family\u2019s parquet-floor business. Friedrich didn\u2019t like working in the factory. He preferred researching at the Austrian State Archives Friedrich\u2019s academic specialty was modern European history the SS chief appointed to \u201Cliquidate European Jewry,\u201D declared his intention to free Austria of Jews The Nazi Party proclaimed that only racially pure Germans could be German citizens, and the Reich Citizenship Law codified this idea when it defined a citizen as a person who is \u201Cof German or related blood.\u201D Because Jews were defined as a separate race and could not be German citizens Friedrich\u2019s parents were practicing Jews The Nuremberg Laws put both Friedrich and his wife and daughter\u2014my mother\u2014in danger a blond-haired boy in a Hitler Youth uniform wouldn\u2019t allow her on an ice-skating rink Erna\u2019s colleagues removed her work and any references to her work from their books and articles She couldn\u2019t find work in Austria or in Hungary Erna\u2019s sister Margit and Margit\u2019s husband that Erna\u2019s family began to reconstruct themselves in earnest my mother\u2019s teacher asked the class every morning if any visitors had been to their homes the previous evening She had them write lists of all their parents\u2019 friends This teacher was a relative of Hermann G\u00F6ring and she also kept lists of her students\u2019 height and the color of their eyes and skin My grandmother Carlette\u2019s marriage to Friedrich had become illegal my grandmother spent days standing in long lines at the consulate\u2019s office for her new Reissepasse She would wear her best coat and hat\u2014the one with the netting\u2014plus gloves The SS muscled their way into my mother\u2019s home in Vienna one night to search the place\u2014for what Friedrich made sure to leave papers bearing the Vatican\u2019s letterhead on his desk but the threat to my mother\u2019s family had become real in a new way and a sympathetic dean who gave Friedrich an offer to teach at King\u2019s College She told my mother not to look back\u2014to never look back \u201CSehr ansteckend!\u201D Very contagious their reason for coming to the United States was \u201Cto teach at Johns Hopkins University,\u201D which was listed as their sponsor Under the heading \u201Crace or people,\u201D the manifest lists my grandmother as \u201CFrench.\u201D My mother and grandfather received another label: \u201CHebrew.\u201D My family did not escape the range of all of the Nazis\u2019 weapons I keep my mother\u2019s Kinderausweis in my top desk drawer By this point, the country was rapidly moving to the far right. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Hungary passed similar anti-Jewish laws to those that had spread elsewhere in Europe The Engel-J\u00E1nosis could no longer own their homes or businesses outright Erna and R\u00F3bert must have talked about leaving they still didn\u2019t believe their neighbors R\u00F3bert and his brother Rich\u00E1rd were decorated veterans of the Great War Although she couldn\u2019t find paid employment R\u00F3bert and Erna converted to Catholicism along with R\u00F3bert\u2019s daughter leaving Rich\u00E1rd running what was left of the family business Germany occupied Hungary last, and in 1944, Eichmann took on the task of murdering the country\u2019s remaining Jews. According to Hannah Arendt, Eichmann found the Hungarian Gendarmerie and Hungarian Arrow Cross \u201Cmore than eager to do all that was necessary\u201D to help him achieve his aims Eichmann said that everything \u201Cwent like a dream.\u201D In the spring of 1944, the Hungarian Gendarmerie ordered Hungarian Jewish citizens to report to the authorities Hungarian officers working with the Nazi SS arrested Rich\u00E1rd in front of his house in P\u00E9cs on March 19 she quickly arranged to hide her children Anna and G\u00E1bor with Catholic nuns in the countryside Rich\u00E1rd was locked in an internment camp in P\u00E9cs for over a month In 2011, when I was in P\u00E9cs, the director of T\u00EDm\u00E1r House (the P\u00E9cs historical museum) said the internment camp never existed. But Yad Vashem has evidence and eyewitness accounts of the camp. It was torn down right after the war. The internment camp was the first stop in a larger grim itinerary. The Hungarian Gendarmerie loaded Rich\u00E1rd into a cattle car along with thousands of other Hungarian Jewish citizens from P\u00E9cs for a half-week journey to Austria. They received no food or water during their transport. public domain)At the \u201CWailing Wall\u201D inside the gates at Mauthausen Jude.\u201D \u201CUng\u201D was short for Ungarischer (Hungarian) Rich\u00E1rd never attempted to reconstruct himself I discovered Rich\u00E1rd at the Yad Vashem archives in 2008 when I typed my mother\u2019s maiden name into their database \u201CYou\u2019re the first to ask about him,\u201D the archivist said \u201CNo one has ever asked about this man \u201CYou are responsible now,\u201D the archivist told me That\u2019s what I\u2019ve been doing ever since and every other lost family member requires reconstructing them\u2014putting aside false narratives forced on them from without The Hungarian Gendarmerie marched Erna and approximately 6,000 Jewish citizens of P\u00E9cs to the railroad station The air was thick with smoke that smelled like burning hair, according to accounts from other prisoners admitted the day Erna walked under the iron gates that bore the terrible inscription of a false promise: Arbeit Macht Frei Erna stood in line on the ramp where Josef Mengele surveyed newcomers Nicknamed the \u201Cangel of death,\u201D Mengele conducted experiments based on Nazi racial theory on Jews and Roma but he declared Erna \u201Cfit to work\u201D and sent her to the right she worked as a \u201CPflegerin\u201D (medical attendant) Word got around about the artist from P\u00E9cs Rose and her husband, Marcel Stein, had previously returned to P\u00E9cs with their children, Anna and G\u00E1bor. They had survived the 1945 siege of Budapest When they moved back into their home in P\u00E9cs Anna remembered Erna returning to P\u00E9cs to live with them though I don\u2019t know how she got the money Erna\u2019s sister Margit searched to find Erna work so that she could emigrate she proposed that the city use the space as a natural history museum\u2014opening it up to the very people who had betrayed her and sent her to her death Join now the Engel-J\u00E1nosi family home became a youth club But I would learn that the Nazis\u2019 campaign of cultural genocide across Europe was not the only reason most museums do not show what\u2019s left of Erna\u2019s work When I visited the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna in 2011 museum officials removed Erna\u2019s statues from their shelves because she was Jewish officials at museums that held her work removed it again\u2014this time because it was culturally insensitive she joined her creative and mechanical talent to Eickstedt\u2019s theories of ethnology Eickstedt had access to fourteen preserved heads of \u201CMelanesian\u201D individuals from the German Pacific colonies which was sometimes justified by its perpetrators using the high-minded language of theories such as Eickstedt\u2019s Erna did not rid herself of her former colleague\u2019s ideas after the war Some of Eickstedt\u2019s theories remained popular for decades after the Nazis lost the war Erna\u2019s belief in them would not have put her completely out of step with most other anthropologists during her life As with Boule\u2019s tendentious reconstructions of the Neanderthal as subhuman Erna\u2019s reconstructions of early hominids have been found to rely on false premises Erna had been living in Canada for four years when she wrote an essay titled \u201CThe Method of Reconstructing Human and Animal Remains in Sculpture and in Paintings\u201D for a periodical called Museum and Art Notes. The cover of the issue was illustrated with a photograph of one of her dinosaur reconstructions that it awakens the artist\u2019s fullest enthusiasm She lives on through her granddaughter, Anna Stein, also an artist. Anna\u2019s anthropomorphic figures in her paintings and stained glass are influenced by history, poetry, myth, and by the members of her illustrious family. Like me, Anna reconstructs her own dead. (Photo provided by the author.)The Afterlives of the Engel-J\u00E1nosisERNA RECONSTRUCTED HERSELF Friedrich didn\u2019t get the red-carpet treatment he\u2019d hoped for He didn\u2019t get the full pension or salary of a full professor My mother told him he\u2019d taken a vow before God She said she\u2019d left them at her house The Nazi soldier looked at my Jewish great-grandmother and concluded she couldn\u2019t possibly be Jewish Marie dragged Friedrich\u2019s Christmas tree out to the curb Six different border guards stamped my mother\u2019s Kinderausweis with swastikas before she eventually crossed into Switzerland and Sign up for our daily Newsletter and stay up to date with all the latest news You are receiving this pop-up because this is the first time you are visiting our site You are using software which is blocking our advertisements (adblocker) we are relying on revenues from our banners So please disable your adblocker and reload the page to continue using this site.Thanks The raw material situation in the horseradish sector is extremely difficult at the moment "We source our raw materials mainly from three growing areas Due to considerable yield losses and the generally difficult conditions raw material prices have in some cases risen by over 60 per cent compared to the previous year," says Andreas Schöppl co-managing director of the long-established company based in Baiersdorf (Bavaria) the corresponding price increase has been implemented for the horseradish products Despite the sometimes sharp decline in yields "A poor harvest is often mistakenly confused with poor quality the raw material so far has been particularly convincing with mostly average root weights." Despite ongoing inflation sales of horseradish products have remained largely stable thanks in part to Schamel's strong brand portfolio Matthias Schamel and Andreas Schöppl jointly manage the activities of the long-established company About two-thirds of the total raw material is harvested from the end of October until the end of the year The rest spends the winter in the ground and is harvested only after the fields are accessible again Schöppl: "This varies greatly depending on the growing area: in Bavaria and Styria harvesting usually does not resume until spring while Eastern Hungary starts again in just a few weeks." New product line 'SUPERROOT'In addition to the production and marketing of the well-tried table horseradish Schamel continues to develop new products to enrich the range of products a new variant of this vegan mousse with ginger flavor will follow Both products are part of the new product line SUPERROOT which we may expand in the future to include other new products." Left: insights into the horseradish cultivation Right: horseradish mousse of the new product line called 'Superroot' Future of the product segmentThe "Meerrettich-Kompetenz-Team" (en.: Horseradish Competence Team) was set up a few years ago to preserve Bavarian horseradish cultivation it is difficult to secure the required quantities the number of farmers in Bavaria and Styria continues to decline and it is not possible to replace them one-to-one," says Schöppl the company is confident about the near future horseradish is still very popular in the DACH region and once we have fully implemented the necessary price increase we are confident about the rest of the year."Photo credit: Schamel Meerrettich GmbH & Co KG For more information:Andreas Schöppl Schamel Meerrettich GmbH & Co. KGJohann-Jakob-Schamel-Platz 1D-91083 Baiersdorf / Bavaria Tel: +49 (0) 9133 / 7760 - 0[email protected]www.schamel.de FreshPublishers © 2005-2025 FreshPlaza.com Join the conversation You can save this article by registering for free here. Or sign-in if you have an account The identity of the two children in the Babes in the Woods murder mystery has finally been determined Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience author Eve Lazarus identified the victims on Monday as brothers David and Derek Bousquet The remains were found by workers in Stanley Park on Jan They had probably been killed years earlier But police were never able to find out who they were Start your day with a roundup of B.C.-focused news and opinion By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc The next issue of Sunrise will soon be in your inbox Interested in more newsletters? Browse here. Ally Brady discovered a family photo of her grandmother Diane with two brothers she had had no idea existed She was told they had been taken away from her great-grandmother by social services Brady decided to do a genealogy search through the database 23AndMe Brady then uploaded her DNA to various genealogy sites Coroners Service and Massachusetts-based Redgrave Research Forensic Services to try to help solve the Babes in the Woods mystery The remains of the Babes in the Woods were displayed for many years at the Vancouver Police Museum but after an earlier DNA test determined they were both boys Redgrave was able to get a DNA sample from a small bone fragment that hadn’t been buried who has written several acclaimed crime books Full Screen is not supported on this browser version You may use a different browser or device to view this in full screen Brady’s mother was approached by a Vancouver police detective who told her that her uncles — David and Derek Bousquet — were the two skeletons that had been found in the park she had never heard of the Babes in the Woods,” said Lazarus Brady did an internet search and came across a Lazarus podcast on the Babes in the Woods and then she told me the story,” said Lazarus Police always believed that the mother of the two boys had killed her two sons and covered them up with her coat They speculated the mother went off and killed herself Whether she killed her sons is still a mystery Granny was a lovely old woman who loved animals and babysat kids all the time.” Vancouver police said they would not comment until a news conference planned for Tuesday jmackie@postmedia.com kfraser@postmedia.com transmission or republication strictly prohibited This website uses cookies to personalize your content (including ads), and allows us to analyze our traffic. Read more about cookies here. By continuing to use our site, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy You can manage saved articles in your account Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker Extreme weather conditions and waterlogging have significantly impacted this year's horseradish harvest in Bavaria "After the traditional harvest start in October which meant that some farmers couldn't even access their fields the horseradish harvest progressed very slowly leading to a generally scarce raw material situation and supply gaps there have been mixed yields of mixed quality as well as increased rejections in further processing And the raw material situation is still very tense," describes Matthias Schamel Managing Director of Schamel Meerrettich & Co. Baiersdorf and its surroundings have a long tradition in horseradish cultivation a portion of the crop still needs to be harvested a portion of the crop is left outside for the second half of the season but not to the extent as in this year's season It is estimated that about a third of the total yield is still in the ground." Schamel is less concerned about the quality of the unharvested horseradish "Horseradish is winter-hardy and retains its quality and nutritional values even in persistent sub-zero temperatures there are no storage costs if the goods are left out in the field." Horseradish can usually be harvested until Easter The two-headed management of the Bavarian traditional company: Matthias Schamel (l) and Wolfgang Schöppl Range expansion and brand relaunchDespite the difficult harvest conditions was launched on the market shortly before Christmas "It is a vegan horseradish puree with a somewhat milder taste which was very well received by our retail customers we are already working on the further development of the product line and variety," explains Schamel the traditional brand underwent a relaunch in the third quarter of last year "We have redesigned the design of our labels We are convinced that the brand now stands out better on the shelf and becomes more visible." New and well-established: vegan product line Super Root (l) and the already established spicy table horseradish.Future of horseradish productionSecuring the raw material will also remain challenging in the coming years "The labor cost share in demanding horseradish cultivation is very high many farmers cultivate the product as a secondary occupation A structural change is currently taking place as the older generation is retiring handing over their farms to the next generation we have set ourselves the goal of also inspiring the new generation for horseradish cultivation One of our main tasks is to make the value chain more efficient and to reduce the workload of the producers which can also wash and process imperfect roots we are overall positive for the year 2024," Schamel concludes Pictures: Schamel Meerrettich GmbH & Co Sie haben erfolgreich Ihre Einwilligung in die Nutzung von Transfermarkt mit Tracking und Cookies widerrufen Sie können sich jetzt zwischen dem Contentpass-Abo und der Nutzung mit personalisierter Werbung