Lying about paternity to protect offspring in 1930s #austria-czech

Jan Hellmann <jan@...>

Mr. Bakos wrote yesterday about mother lying about her child's origin and
asked whether there are more of such stories.
The answer is definitively yes. The books on shoa are full of such stories.
I have seen f.e. for example copy of a false birth certificate of one of my
relatives claiming baptisms and later adoption by Jewish couple. The person
is living - therefore no more details.

Jan O. Hellmann/DK

Tom Venetianer <tom.vene@...>

Peter and all,

You wouldn't believe the things Jews did to protect themselves and
their families. Besides non-forced conversions, which for a certain
time offered a given degree of immunity against deportations, people
did extraordinary things, such as "plastic surgeries" to reconstruct boys'
foreskins. I don't know how successful these surgeries were but I am
certain that they were done. Why? Because the first thing the
Nazi/Gestapo bastards did on a razia was to take down the men's pants
and examine their genitals.

An episode in question, that happened to me and my family: my parents and
I were escaping >from the Nazi forces and travelled by train, which was
always a very risky thing to do. On one station, a Gestapo razia was in
progress. Fearing for my life, my parents tried to hide me somehow.
In one of the waiting rooms was a coal stove, not functioning. Although it
was a very narrow space to hide a 7 years old boy, my parents stick me in
and I stayed there for over two hours, compressed as a sardine inside a can.

You ask if trying to save offsprings worked? Sometimes it did, sometimes
it didn't. It depended on many circumstances - the old saying of
"being in the right place at the right time" or vice-versa applies.

So yes, I would definitively believe the story you were told. What seems
a bit strange is that the young man was accepted in the German air force.
As far as I know, half Jews (one parent Jew) and even a quarter Jew
(one of the grandparents being a Jew) were all classified by the Nazis as
"mischlingen" (mixed breed) and all Jewish laws, of course including
deportation, applied to them.


Subject: Lying about paternity to protect offspring in 1930s
From: "peter bakos" <pgbakos@...>
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2005 19:07:44 +0000

I would rather not name names here.

Somebody showed me a letter sent by an ancestor to the appropriate officials
in Vienna in 1938 declaring that her son was the result of a liaison with
another man, not her husband. Her husband was Jewish the other man Aryan.

The person writing the letter was Jewish. The son indeed "passed" and was
in the German airforce during the war. His letters home indicate he was
given distateful duties because of his "half" status. He was killed during
bombardment on the Russian front.

Did people do this to try to"save" their offspirng? Did it work?

Tom Venetianer <mailto:tom.vene@...>
Sao Paulo - Brazil