Childhood
Joseph
Hold was born in Laibach Yugoslavia (currently
Slovenia) July 31, 1937. His family was originally
from Austria and if you asked him he’d say he
was Austrian. He lived in Gotshee, a German
speaking community in Slovenia. During the war,
this area of Yugoslavia sided with the Germans.
When
the war was over they faced tough times at the
hands of the Yugoslavs. Starvation was rampant as
was homelessness. My father and his mother were
forcibly detained in camps where they were
separated. This chapter is best told with a letter
excerpt from my father’s cousin Ridy Hoegler
Skyrme:
Oct.
20, 2000
“My
own family’s flight from Untersteiermark may
have taken long days and nights, been very
uncomfortable and dangerous, but we made it to
Graz and safety. Many Gottscheers were not as
lucky. Many died; some were murdered;
some starved to death; some died simply from
exhaustion on their endlessly long journey; and
many endured hardships which in retrospect seem
impossible to survive.
Among
this latter group was my Tante Ottilie (Ottilie
Hoegler Hold) and her 7-year-old son, Joseph.
By the time it was their turn to be
evacuated from Gurkfeld in Untersteiermark, it was
too late.
They ended up in the city of Gottschee,
where they were imprisoned.
From there they were taken to Sternthal,
the worst of Tito’s concentration camps.
Ottilie had been briefly married to a chap
in Sarajevo; I don’t know if he was Serbian,
Slovenian or Croatian.
She divorced him when Joe was barely two
years old.
Divorces among Gottscheers at that time
were unheard of, and they were only granted in the
rest of the country for the most serious reason.
In her case the divorce was instantly
granted. This perceived blot on her record made
her persona non grata among the Gottscheers, and a
traitor among the Yugoslavs.
The divorce also left a paper trail.
In Sternthal she was ignored by the other
Gottscheer prisoners and repeatedly beaten and
abused by the Yugoslav captors.
At the beginning, Joe had to watch his
mother’s abuse.
Eventually he was sent off to a
children’s camp, which supposedly was run by the
Red Cross. Conditions
in the children’s camp were little better than
at Sternthal. The children were malnourished,
filthy, and sick.
Only a handful survived.
Among the survivors was Joe.
When they were returned to Sternthal, Tante
Ottilie did not recognize Joe until he came to her
and called her “Mama.”
He was covered in lice and fleas and was
reduced to skin and bones.
After
Joe returned she devised a plan to escape.
Various farmers in the area delivered
produce to the camp, and she persuaded one of
these to hide them on his wagon, and take them to
the Austrian border.
It wasn’t quite that simple, but
eventually the man agreed to smuggle them out of
the camp. What happened next is unclear.
Some days later, Tante Ottilie woke up in a
hospital and Joe was sitting by her bedside.
He was bruised, but otherwise fine, and he
had been washed and combed and fed.
The story she was told was that while they
were hiding on that wagon, there was an accident,
and they were thrown clear of it.
They were found some time later; Joe had
been guarding her unconscious body.
Some good Samaritans had taken them both to
the hospital.
It was on the Austrian side of the border.
They were alive and safe.
The
struggle after that was to keep the two of them
alive.
After
days of wandering, they found a farmer who allowed
them to sleep in the chickencoop and gave them
food in exchange for Tante Ottilie’s labor in
the fields. Joe even ended up in a school
while they lived at this farm.
He did not have any pleasant memories of
their time there, either of the school or of the
way they were treated by the farmer.
When they left there, almost a year later,
they were still malnourished.
Tante
Ottilie decided to make her way to Vorarlberg, to
the home her mother had left almost seventy years
earlier.
She knew that if any of the family members
were still alive, they would take them in.
Eventually she had managed to save enough
money from the meager wages the farmer paid her,
and they made their way to Altach in Vorarlberg.
There she was given a place to stay; she
got a job in a garment shop; and she also found
the cases of goods that her sister, my Tante
Paula, (Paula had a fatal heart attack in 1944)
had sent ahead for safekeeping.
She was able to sell those items to augment
her small income and she and Joe finally had
enough to eat again.
She was grateful to be able to join her
brothers and their families in the USA and on
March 1, 1950, they arrived in New York on the
same boat as Arnold Rom and his mother.
...
The fact that she survived at all, and managed to
keep Joe alive, is truly astonishing to me. How
she could keep even the tiniest flicker of hope
alive when she was abandoned by her own
countrymen, and abused by her captors, is
incomprehensible.
She lived for her child, and the rest of
her life was always for her child.
She was beautiful and vulnerable, and truly
made of steel.
Joe
had buried all the memories of that time.
After his mother’s death, forty-five
years later, they started to surface in
nightmares...Eventually he decided he simply had
to try to keep those memories buried; it was still
too painful and too soon to deal with them. Now he
will never have to.
Both my Tante Ottilie and the cousin whom I
regarded as my little brother have found peace at
last.”
Indeed,
my Grandmother found the post-war economy to be
tough and was lured by the promise of America.
Dad
and his Mom moved to Queens, NYC from Europe,
where they eventually settled in College Point. My
Grandmother took various jobs including making
cafeteria lunches and many years working in a
rubber goods factory. Dad first went to public
school where he wasn’t popular due to
anti-German sentiment around that time. Grandma,
like many American immigrants, highly valued
educating her child and eventually got the money
to send him to private high school. Dad attended
high school at LaSalle academy where one year, at
least, he was ranked first in his class.
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