Lightweight brown suitcase carried by a Jewish Austrian refugee child

Alfred Josef Kurz was born on July 29, 1937, to Meilach (Emil) and Klara Bieberstein Kurz in Vienna, Austria. They were an observant Jewish family. He had an older sister, Doriane, born on March 22, 1936, also in Vienna. His mother was born on March 25, 1908, in Husiatyn, Poland (Ukraine), and she had one brother, Eliot, and one sister, Mary. His father was born on December 19, 1897, in Tarnow, Poland, and was known by his mother’s maiden name, Weiss, until adulthood. He had three brothers, Benjamin, Charles, and Michael, and one sister, Lola. Emil’s family owned a multinational optical frames business and Emil was fluent in several languages. He managed the Vienna branch and his siblings managed branches in Austria, Italy, Serbia, and Egypt. On March 13, 1938, Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany. The Germans quickly introduced anti-Jewish legislation, and Jewish businesses and property were confiscated. His uncle Benjamin left Vienna on July 1938 with his wife, Lillian, and their two year daughter, Diana; they would eventually get to the United States. In 1939, Emil decided to move his family to Maastricht, Netherlands, where the Dutch branch of the business was located. Klara’s sister and most of Emil’s siblings emigrated to the United States; Klara’s brother and mother had emigrated earlier to Palestine. In 1940, the family moved to Amsterdam as another optical frames branch had been established. In May, Germany occupied Holland. More and more restrictions were forced upon the Jews. But until August 1941, when Jewish children were barred from school, Alfred and his sister continued to take Hebrew lessons with a rabbi and attended first grade at a Dutch elementary school. In 1942, the Amsterdam branch was confiscated. Emil used some of his remaining assets to purchase a diamond. He initially hid the diamond, but decided to sell it and invest the money. He had the diamond appraised by a Jewish acquaintance in the jewelry business. Jews were not permitted to have jewelry and valuables, and the man turned Emil in to the Germans to keep his own family from deportation. Emil and Klara were arrested, and released after Emil agreed to give the diamond to the Germans. In July 1942, the Germans began to deport the Jewish population to concentration and extermination camps in Poland. On August 6, 1942, Emil was arrested and sent to Vught transit camp. In late October, he was sent to Amersfoort concentration camp for special punishment, and then to Westerbork transit camp on November 7, 1942. During this time, Emil was able to correspond with his family. Klara contacted officials at the Jewish Committee in Amsterdam to try to keep him from being transported to a death camp. On November 10, 1942, Meilach sent his family a letter during deportation to Auschwitz; they never heard from him after that. In 1943, the Germans increased the roundups and deportations of Jews in Amsterdam. The family’s non-Jewish neighbors who were active in the Dutch underground often hid Klara and the children. Through the underground, Doriane and Alfred were placed with a non-Jewish Dutch woman in Amsterdam in September 1943, and then for several weeks with two farmers in the countryside. On October 19, 1943, Klara was deported to Westerbork. During this time, Klara’s brother, Eliot, arranged for certificates permitting their entry into Palestine. With assistance from the Jewish Committee, Doriane and Alfred joined Klara in Westerbork in December 1943, in preparation for the journey to Palestine. But on February 15, 1944, partly because of the certificates, they were sent to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany, and not to Auschwitz. Klara worked in the infirmary. Many people died each night and Alfred and Doriane began each day by watching inmates drag open wagons into which they tossed corpses until they formed tall heaps. The siblings talked constantly about food. Rations consisted of watery soup and a sliver of bread; they were hungry all the time and began to fall ill due to malnutrition and disease. Alfred developed a kidney infection, and in March 1944, Doriane contracted typhus. British forces began to bomb the camps, and on April 10, 1945, the family and about 2500 other prisoners were forced onto a train. They were on the train for over two weeks with no food or drink. Klara became ill with spot typhus. On April 23, they were liberated by the Soviet Army near Troebitz, Germany. The family recuperated in Germany for seven weeks with Red Cross assistance. They were then transferred to Leipzig and, in June 1945, to a displaced persons camp in Maastricht, Netherlands, where there had been a branch of the Kurz Brothers’ Optical Frame business. Klara was able to reconnect with many friends and to begin the process for receiving reparations. She notified their family in the United States and Palestine of their survival and by September, they had supplied the affidavits of support needed to apply for US visas. Klara remained seriously ill and was often hospitalized. Freddy also had to be hospitalized again. When he recovered, he attended the local school with Doriane. Because of Klara’s illness, the children lived much of the time with family friends, the Roos’s. Klara sought information about her husband, but the family presumed that he had been killed at Auschwitz. Emil’s brother, Michael, his wife, Dord, and their daughter, Zora, from Belgrade, also were assumed to have perished. Klara and the children returned to Amsterdam and to their old apartment. Their uncle Charles came from the US to arrange Klara’s care as well as the family’s immigration. Klara died in March 1946, due to complications from typhus. Their uncles, Benjamin and Charles were not able to get US visas within the Netherlands, so Charles took Alfred and Doriane to Stockholm, Sweden. He arranged for them to stay at a boarding school and have private English lessons. When US President Truman ordered that preference be given to orphans in US immigration quotas, the children were able to leave in July 1946. They sailed to New York from Goteborg, Sweden, aboard the SS Gripsholm. The children were adopted by their uncle Benjamin and his wife, Lillian, in New York. Doriane attended Barnard and became an elementary school teacher and a small business owner. Freddy attended Columbia University and became an engineer. He married and has three children. Doriane passed away, age 69, on October 29, 2005.

The suitcase was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2011 by Alfred Kurz.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Alfred Kurz

Funding Note: The cataloging of this artifact has been supported by a grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.