{geni:about_me}
Letter from Hanna Hirsch (née Hartl), cousin of Melanie O’Callaghan (née Fuchs)

Vienna, 3 August 1993

This gives a potted history of Valerie's parents and brothers, outlines her husband's career post WWI and the fate of her brother and sister- in-law, Dr Richard Fuchs and Ebba Fuchs and their children.

Dear Ellie,

As your trip to Prague approaches it’s time to mobilise my memories.
Around 30 years ago, on the occasion of my first stay on cure in Piestany in Slovakia, I met Dr Julia Polakova, a Jewish eye-specialist from Prague who had survived Theresienstadt. In her I found an excellent guide for the city of Prague. Our long friendship came to an end 4 years ago when she died. She also gave me a variety of books and brochures, on of which (To the Roots) I’m sending you.
Our great-grandparents Carl (Salomon) Eckstein and Regine (née Jontof-Hutter) lived near the Powder Tower (Pulverturm) which is part of every city tour. The house in Elisabethstrasse* (no. 13) was gone by the end of the war. Great-grandmother Regine, her nickname was ‘Röschen Sokrates’ (Little Rose-Socrates) could speak Latin and Greek and went 3 times a week to the theatre and the opera. Their apartment was big and thus allowed both of them to live inpeace with a reasonable distance between them. You’d never have guessed that their marriage wasn’t the best. The great-grandparents were quite wealthy, they had a mother of pearl button factory with the usual ups and downs. Theymust have been liberal Jews, as people called them, as my mother, who often visited her grand-parents, only realised that they weren’t Catholics when she read Carl’s (Salomon) death notice in the newspaper. Anyway, the whole family scraped together the money so that our grandmother Valerie could marry the dashing Lieutenant Maximilian Fuchs. The money was the ‘deposit’ (security) from which, befitting his rank, with the interest on the sum paying into the officer’s budget. The younger the officer, the higher the deposit.

Our grandmother Valerie had 2 brothers; Oscar and Camillo*. They had intended on giving their children names whose letters that spelled out the name Oscar, but when the second born ‘Selma’ died in childhood, the pattern was brokenand our Valerie couldn’t have a name that began with A or R. After World War I Camillo, after being in Russia, ended up in China where until the early 1920s he became tutor to a very powerful family. He published a Czech-Chinesedictionary. After coming home (with very little money) he got involved in the distribution of a dye product, getting our grandfather Maximilian very involved too, after he had been released from the Austrian Army in 1918. Working as a sales representative was hard for our grandfather, but as he worked very hard, competently and with dedication, he was able to buy the farm in Wald (Styria), the house in Klosterneuburg and the site in Hietzing. Both Oscar and Camillo reluctantly got married very late, were both childless and were killed in a concentration camp. All their property- minerals, pictures, writings, etc, have of course disappeared. So it is that there are no living relatives of the Eckstein family in Prague today.
Grandfather Maximilian originally came from northern Bohemia (born Benesova, Ger. Bensen), his father Josef Fuchs married his second wife Amalia (she was a home economics teacher) and had 2 sons- Richard and Maximilian. There were 3 daughters from the first marriage; Therese, Elisabeth and Flora. Either Therese or Flora was the grandmother of our only relative in Prague; Zdenek Susicky, Cernokostesecka 45, 10000 Praha 10, Strasnice. (tomorrow, Zdenek’s daughter Jana is coming to stay with Wolfgang in Klosterneuburg for 10 days).
Our grandfather’s brother Richard, was a university professor in Erlangen (Bavaria, Germany; http://www.uni-erlangen.org/) and stayed by his mother’s side till her death. She was buried in the Erlangen protestant cemetery, presumably having converted to help his career (she supposedly read her Talmud on a regular basis when she got old). After that Richard was professor in Breslau (then Prussia/Silesia, now Wroclow in Poland; http://www.wroclaw-life.com/wroclaw/breslau) and married one of his students- Ebba, a Danish girl who became a children’s doctor/schools doctor. They had 2 children; Knut and Helga. My mother went to visit them on holiday once while she was in secondary school. She told me that they were very formal and strict and that her cousin Helga was a real brat. When Hitler infected Germany Ebba managed to get a work permit and residence permit for herself and whole family from the King of Denmark, thanks to the fact that her father had once done him some great service. My mother didn’t know what became of Knut and Helga, apparently they got into communism. I forgot to mention that our Fuchs grandparents lost all their savings when their banker disappeared off to America, leaving their children with nothing.

End

* Elisabethstrasse is now called Revoluciu Ařida

* + Oskar 4 May 1941, Prague
+ Camillo 13 February 1942 Prague

Just before deportation to Theresienstadt