Mother of Mike Frankl
1911 – 1956
Mike’s mother, Marta was born on the 30th March 1911 to Julius and Maria Haurowitz. Julius ran a store in the town square of Mlada Boleslav that sold fabrics, a variety of materials and some clothing, along with bags and sacks. The Haurowitz family had lived in this town, which included one of the largest and oldest Jewish communities in Bohemia, for more than 150 years. As was common at the time, the family lived above the store.
Somewhat unusually for the early twentieth Century, Marta was an only child. Her birth had been difficult and traumatic for Maria, Julius’s wife, who may have been advised that to have further children could be a significant risk to her life. The store that Julius and Maria ran in Mlada Boleslav prospered and they had Czech servants and shop assistants and during her childhood Marta was looked after by their nanny, Ruzena. The family were quite assimilated and only went to synagogue on the high holy days and occasionally on other festivals.
Mlada Boleslav was and is still the home of Skoda, the fast growing and successful car industry. Marta had a lovely, enjoyable and slightly spoilt upbringing. She went to the local Czech school, where she was also taught to speak German. She had many friends and with her wider family had long and fun-filled holidays: skiing weekends in the nearby mountains during the winter months, summer vacations with family at summer country homes. They made trips to Prague to the theatre, concerts and operas. Marta learnt to play the piano and became a skilful embroiderer. She did not learn many domestic skills as they had servants who looked after all their needs – an idyllic life.
At around the age of seventeen, Marta was sent to Teplice to a ‘Ladies” finishing school for a few months. Little did she know that her future husband’s uncle and a number of cousins lived in that town.
As she reached her older teenage years, the family went twice a year in the spring and autumn to Marianske Lazne, the famous and fashionable spa town. Marta enjoyed meeting up with cousins and friends, visiting the dress stores and seeing the latest fashion designs as they arrived from Paris. She started attending the tea dances where the wealthier middle-class families took their eligible daughters in the search for potential partners. She loved the music, dancing and gaiety of those days.
She was attracted to Franta when they were first introduced. He was a handsome bachelor in his thirties, a man of the world. A man who very unusually in those days owned a car. A man with a bit of a reputation as a ladies’ man. She was enthralled, fascinated and fell in love. Julius had to check out this young man to ensure he was a suitable potential husband for his precious daughter. Franta was living and working in Prague at the time for one of his Porges cousins (nephews of his mother). They ran a successful fur trading business, in which Franta had been trained. The Porges’ family were an extremely well established Czech Jewish family with many high-level connections, even to the extent of being linked into the Ephrussi family, the very wealthy bankers in Vienna.
Julius was impressed enough and received positive assurances about Franta’s character, reliability and business ability. Fortunately, both families were quite well assimilated and traditional orthodox Jewish life was not dominant at all. They lived a free life in Czech Society and although they viewed their Jewish ethnic and cultural heritage as extremely important, in their day to day lives they did not concern themselves with much in the way of Jewish ritual. Both the Frankl and Haurowitz families had lived in small towns in rural Bohemia for generations. In early days, they spoke judendeutsch or yiddish or zargon amongst themselves and Czech with the surrounding community. They were also taught German in school. A significant number of Prague Jews only spoke German, and looked down on those who spoke Czech, which they regarded as a ‘peasant’ language. They viewed German Society as the highest level of civilisation, paid attention to the latest trends emerging from Berlin and at least to start with, turned a blind eye to the growth of Fascism.
They married on 22nd March 1931 in Prague. The wedding was a grand affair at the Hotel Bristol. It brought members of the Frankl and Haurowitz families together, along with Franta’s mother’s family the Porges clan and Maria’s family the Tapfers. The bridesmaids and page boy were Franta’s nieces and nephews: Hana and Milena Stern (daughters of his sister Rosa), and Paul and Eva Vrba (children of Zdenka).
Wedding photos
Marta’s dress was a Paris fashion replica and her dowry full of hand embroidered beautiful linen, crockery and cutlery, some of which I still have. The couple were able to enjoy a wonderful leisurely honeymoon over six weeks including a long stay on the French Riviera and then toured the beautiful sights and sounds of Italy.
Julius was very generous and the financial part of the dowry helped Franta set up and establish his own fur trading business in Michalska (Street) in Prague. After Marta and Franta set up home in Prague, it did not take long for Marta to become pregnant and my sister Hana was born in March 1933, and brother George in October 1935.
Insert photo with Maria, Marta and Hana
Julius and Maria frequently visited by taking the train from Mlada Boleslav to Prague. Hana remembered being taken by Julius to the local park in Prague where he treated her to ice cream, and in winter he took her skating on the island in the middle of the river. Life in Prague was good. Their lifestyle was very comfortable, with servants to cook and clean, excellent opera, concerts and theatre nearby, lovely restaurants and coffee houses all over Prague and many family members all around them.
The invasion of Sudetenland by the Nazis changed all of that very quickly.
Meanwhile Marta, Hana and George had moved in with her parents, Julius and Maria Haurowitz, to their home in Mlada Boleslav, a town some forty kilometres north east of Prague, situated on the Jizera River. Mlada Boleslav was a prosperous town with a well-established Jewish community dating back to the fifteenth century.
Although the months after Franta left Prague were fraught with tension and fear, she treasured the memories of that time with her parents. They had always been close, and there was the additional bonus of seeing her parents enjoy spending time with their grandchildren. My parents had developed the habit of having a photograph taken of Hana and George by a top Prague fashion photographer, each summer. On the occasion of their respective birthdays, these photos were given to Julius and Maria and to my other grandmother Fanni, Franta’s mother who lived in Prague in a block of flats that was owned by Karel Stern, the husband of Franta’s sister Ruzena.
The 1939 photo of Hana, aged five and George nearly three dressed in traditional Czech ‘lederhosen’ was also placed in the fashion photographer’s window display in his shop on Wenceslas Square. Somewhat unusually for Jewish children, both Hana and George were blonde haired and blue eyed in their early years. There is an apocryphal family story that when the Nazis invaded Prague in March 1939, this photo was picked on by an officer and appeared in the next addition of a daily newspaper, with the headline that this was ‘What Typical Aryan Children Should Look Like’.
Add in photo
While Hana and George stayed with their grandparents, Marta travelled to Prague on the local train service and spent her days trying to get the permits and travel passes that would allow her and the children to leave Czechoslovakia. It was a huge struggle; the Nazis made life as difficult as possible and put obstacle after obstacle in her way. She had to learn how to stand up to their bullying tactics, to pass on the occasional bribe, and at other times bluff her way through their aggressive questioning. She was a very good-looking, wealthy young woman and that helped her to get to see the officers in charge, but it also posed a threat and she had to deal with innuendos and blunt, crude sexual suggestions.
To assist the chances of obtaining the correct visas, Marta found a local Christian clergyman who provided an official ‘baptism’ certificate for both George and Hana – and perhaps for herself as well. The priest was even willing to backdate the certificate to October 1935, very shortly after George was born.
During this time, Franta was desperately obtaining visas, tickets and travel permits to get Marta and the children out of Prague. At one point, he managed to get airplane tickets for Marta and Hana on the assumption that George didn’t need a ticket since he was less than four years old. Unfortunately, the authorities would not allow George on the plane, so that potential flight to safety had to be aborted.
The Jewish community in Prague was in turmoil. Rumours of new restrictions abounded and whispered tales of people who knew people who had gone out at night and never returned were rife. Friends were forced to sell their businesses. Jews had to wear yellow stars on their clothes, and Jewish children were prohibited from attending school.
Marta was upset and sad that her parents had decided that they were too old to travel to a new country and make new lives for themselves. But their view was that their families had lived in Bohemia for generations and had survived quite a few riots and attacks over the decades. They felt they could maintain a safely low profile away from the larger cities, in a town they knew well.
Two of Maria’s sisters, Rosa Bandler and Hermina Heller, had daughters Hana and Sonya and they were trying to arrange for them to escape from Prague on one of the trains organised by Nicholas Winton. This English stockbroker had come to Prague and was trying to help the Jewish community organise the evacuation of children by arranging visas and transport to temporary foster homes in England for them. In July 1939, Hana Bandler was given a place at the age of 15 on one of the trains and travelled to London. Sonya was due to come on the next train, but its departure was delayed until after the beginning of September – but war was declared and it was too late.
Franta’s nephew and niece, Paul and Eva Vrba, children of his sister Zdenka and her husband Ernst Vrba, were more fortunate as they were on one of the earlier trains. Franta and Marta eventually took responsibility for them and ensured they found a place at the Czech School in Shropshire that was set up early during the war years.
In the meantime, Franta was getting more and more concerned about Marta’s struggles to obtain the correct papers in Prague. As the threat of war came closer and closer, he became quite frantic. Finally, in late August 1939 she obtained three train tickets and left Prague. The separation from her parents was dreadful for Marta and had a lifelong impact on the two children. It was a terribly tearful farewell. The train journeyed through Berlin and on to Rotterdam and then they took a ferry to Harwich/Felixtowe, finally arriving in London on September 1st, the day Germany invaded Poland. War was declared two days later! Marta could not have imagined how terrible life in Czechoslovakia was to become for her parents and other family members as well as the whole Jewish population.
Insert photos of Marta and Julius and Maria from Hana B photo album
To prevent her jewellery being stolen by the soldiers on the journey to England Marta left it all behind in the care of her mother who eventually passed it onto Ruzena. Having looked after Marta when she was very young, Ruzena had become a loyal and loved part of the family. She also looked after Hana and George in their earliest years. Many years earlier, Julius had purchased a small house for Rujena in the town square of Mlada Boleslav. Ruzena kept geese in the backyard and these were fattened up to produce foie gras! She was immensely loyal to the family and hid all of the family jewellery behind a brick in her own little house.
Things stayed fairly quiet in Mlada Boleslav until early 1943, when the Jews of the town were rounded up and incarcerated in the castle at the southern end of the town square. Eventually they were transported to Terezin and then Auschwitz.
Marta, Hana and George were happily re-united with Franta and moved into the small flat he was renting in Hendon. From her comfortable, pampered life in Bohemia, Marta had to now take responsibility for running a home on a very tight budget, with rationed food and all in a language she did not speak. It was very hard for her and at time she must have been very lonely. Franta was away from the home for long hours as he worked incredibly hard to make a living for them. They moved home a number of times during the war years and stayed in Beaconsfield during the period of the Blitz.
After the war finished they returned to Mlada Boleslav in 1946 and 1947, basing themselves in a flat above the toy shop previously owned by Marta’s two uncles Rudolf Klein and Rudolf Haurowitz. The shop was now run by Artur Klein who had survived the war and who had sent food parcels into Terezin to Julius and Maria Haurowitz and to Franta’s mother Fanni. Hana and George stayed in Mlada Boleslav while Franta and Marta went to Pargue to see if it was possible for them to move back to Czecholsovakia. This prospect ended when the Russians invaded and the country came under the control of the Soviet Union.
In 1947, Franta was able to purchase a house in Finchley and late in the year Marta discovered she was pregnant. Mike was born at the end of July and they began to live a more settled life in London. They had many Czech friends. George was sent to Framlingham School as a boarder and Hana attended Henrietta Barnett School.
Each summer they started making trips to the mountains of Switzerland and they used to enjoy long weekends in Bournemouth. As Hana got older she became involved in the young adult group at West London Synagogue, where she met Joseph Ephraim (Jeoff) Samson. They became engaged and married in December 1955. Jeoff was an ambitious and very bright physicist. They moved to a small flat in Sheen in South West London.
In May 1956, Franta, Marta and Mike were returning from a long weekend in Bournemouth to join Hana and Jeoff, George and Hana Bandler in Sheen for lunch. Marta was driving, there was a car accident in which the car drove into a tree and she was killed. Franta and Mike were somewhat bruised from the crash, but did not have serious injuries.
