Family History Page 4

War Babies. Top Left: Jolán and Josef Paktorovics, ca 1917. Top Right: Melán Paktorovics with newborn Edith, ca 1920 ("Edith has arrived!" was the annotation for this photo in my mother's scrapbook). Below Left: Alexander, Jolán, and Josef, ca 1919-1920. Below Right: Edith, Alexander, and Jolán, ca 1921. Josef, Jolán, and Alexander were all born during World War I; Edith was born just three months before my Grandfather left for the US.

Austria-Hungary formally declared war on Serbia on 28 July, and on 30 July ordered general mobilization of its armed forces, with Russia following suit the same day. On 1 August, Germany declared war on Russia, and 3 days later invaded Belgium, precipitating declarations of war by France and Britain. On the home front, my Uncle Joe, conceived in peacetime, was born a month later, on 3 September 1914. My mother and Uncle Alex were both born before the war was over.

What else happened during this time? For my grandfather, the year 1918 was marked by more than the end of World War I. His mother, Hana Moskovics, and two of his sisters, Bella and Salie, all died in the same year. The cause of their deaths, so close together, isn't clear, but in the case of the two sisters, a distinct possibility is that they were claimed by the "Spanish" flu pandemic of 1918-1919, which is estimated to have killed 50 million-100 million people worldwide within a single year, possibly as many as 25 million in the first 25 weeks. The fatalities were predominantly young and/or otherwise healthy adults. The Spanish flu could have been responsible, directly or indirectly, for all three deaths in my grandfather's immediate family in 1918 (my information is from the Wikipedia entry on the Spanish Flu).

This may have been the apartment building in Ungvár/Užhorod in which my Grandmother lived with her first four children prior to their emigration to the US in 1924. The photograph from my mother's album is undated; because the Grünbergers may have owned several properties, it isn't clear whether this is the one at 21 Radvanská Street, entered as my grandmother's last residence on the steamship ticket for their trip to the US.

Two family documents from the 1920s. The index card-sized document above, dated 25 August 1923, appears to be a confirmation of the birth of "Alexandr Paktorovits" (my Uncle Alex) on 12 September (září ) 1917 in Užhorod. Like many others issued in the region at the time, it is bilingual, although the second language (and sometimes even the first) is not always the same; in this case one version was printed in Cyrillic (Ukrainian or Ruthenian), the other in Slovak (I am guessing based on its apparent resemblance to Czech combined with my failure to get very far with a Czech-English Dictionary). The card lists his parents as "Salamoůn" [Paktorovits] and "Melánia Klein". This spelling of my Grandfather's first name is a variant I haven't found in any other documents. My reading is that it is either a registration for school or was obtained as a requirement for this purpose (note that it was signed by a matrikár, which translates as registrar).

The document at the left, printed in Czech and Hungarian) is apparently an attestation of my Grandmother's birth into the Jewish congregation of Užhorod, issued 13 August (srpna) 1924. This date is precisely one week before her appearance with her children at a US immigration facility in Southern Moravia for physical examination and immunization. On 21 August 1924 she purchased a steamship ticket from the White Star Line in Prague to bring them all from Cherbourg to New York City (see Family History Page 8). The document clearly shows the names of her natural parents, Zsigmond Klein and Yetti Moskovits, her date of birth as 17 September (září ) 1891, and her city of birth as Užhorod.