Notes for: Leopold Meisel
From http://www.zchor.org/valasske.htm#meisel:
In 1999 Michael Honey enquired on this website:
Many families sent some of their members away in order to avoid the German occupation only to be caught elsewhere and those were deported and killed just the same.
One such family were registered with the police as having left Valasske Mezirici for Eindhoven, Holland in June 1938, they were:
Meisel Dr. Leopold, b. ??, his wife Gertrud Meisel (née Heller), b.17th Jan. 1891 in Valasske Mezirici, elder sister of Dr. Karel Heller, their son Gerhard Meisel, b. Vienna 9th Sep., 1915, their daughter Tereza Meisel, b.Vienna 22nd Sep., 1919.
I have checked the Terezin cards, deportees from France and from Holland and this family does not appear to have fallen into the clutches of the Germans. This means that they may have survived the Shoah by leaving the Netherlands. I am looking for this family as I need to make sure that their names should not be included on the above list of victims who were killed.
I wrote the above in 1999 when the website was first listed. I had no people contact me with information. But I kept looking. In July 2001 there was an international conference of Jewish Genealogy in London. I then lived in London and gave one of the conference lectures. During the intervals between sessions of the conference there was an area for rest and coffee. I sat down at a table with a Rene Van Wijngaarde from Holland, I did not know him. He was visiting the conference from Holland. As we chatted I told him the above story because it concerned Eindhoven in Holland and I complained how nobody came forward to solve the riddle of the whereabouts of this Family Meisel.
I asked him if police registrations of people arriving in a town and of leaving exist in Holland as they still do in the Czech Republic. He answered in the affirmative and said that all I needed to do was to write to the town archive in Eindhoven. I asked him if he would be so kind and find for me the E-mail No and or the address of the archive and could I telephone him after the conference. A few days after the conference I had the number and I append the following correspondence with the archive:
According to the registration in Eindhoven, the fam. Meisel came to this city on 14 Feb. 1939. Leopold was born on 17th Jan. 1880 in Zlin (Czechoslovakia).
The family departed on the 2nd May 1939 for Cambridge (England).
This is the first confirmation which I had that this family were victims of the Shoah, but that they managed to escape deportation by the Germans. All over Europe there are police registrations of movements of people, but not in England and not in the US either. Now how to look for them after 61 years? I decided on the telephone book. I started to look up past records of numbers in Cambridge to no avail. Refugees arriving in England in 1939 were not likely to have a telephone registered in their name. But during fiddling about with the phonebooks the helpline said to search for the name in a bigger region than just the town of Cambridge. So just for the heck of it I put in Cambridgeshire. Lo and behold I got a number in Bedford for a family Meisel.
I rang the number and a little girl answered, I asked her if I could speak to her daddy. She said no, he is away playing golf and will not be home till tomorrow. So I asked her if I could speak to her mummy. She said that mummy is cooking in the kitchen and that she will call her. Mrs. Meisel came to the phone and I first apologised for talking to her little daughter. At the time there were all kinds of stories circulating in the papers about paedophiles telephoning like this. I explained the above circumstance and asked if her husband was Gerhard Meisel. And to my utter surprise she said no, but Gerhard is my father-in-law, he is my husband's father. I timidly asked if she would have Gerhard's telephone number and address. She answered in the affirmative and the utter wonder is that Gerhard actually lived a few miles from me in Edgware, in north London.
I spoke to Gerhard and from him got the details of the family Meisels relationship to the Hellers in Valasske Mezirici. . . .
Gerhard filled in for me the information on the Heller family . . . The Meizels family were from Zlin in Moravia, Gerhard's grandfather on his father's side lent Bata money after the Ist World War when Bata started to produce sneekers. The business became very successful and the firm Bata became a world wide concern. Bata kept up friendly contact with the Meisel family as the business grew. Leopold Meisel became Finance Director at Bata and the firm also employed his brother Siegfried. The office for the Finance Dept. of Bata was in Vienna. At the time of the Anschluss of Austria in 1938 Leopold fled to Zlin and his family came to Valasske Mezirici. The reason they left for Eindhoven was that Bata was relocating his busines to Holland feeling that Czechoslovakia was endangered by Hitler. When in May 1939 Bata saw that Holland was also not safe he transferred his business to Canada. But Bata kept faith with his employees and obtained visas for Leopold and his family to the UK and for Siegfried to South Africa