>> Welcome. Today is Monday,
August 22nd, 2022.
My name is Adina Langer.
I'm the Curator of the Museum of History and
Holocaust Education at Kennesaw State University.
And I'm here with Mark Hubert,
who will be recording a legacy series interview
with us in memory of his father, Joseph Hoopert.
So can you start by stating your full name?
>> My full name is Mark Allan Hubert.
My grandfather, my mother's father's name was Morris.
>> So you're named after him.
>> I'm named after him.
>> And do you agree to this interview?
>> Of course, I do.
>> Excellent. Thank you so much.
>> I'm very honored.
>> So can you just start
by letting us know where and when you were born?
>> I was born at the Bronx Hospital
[LAUGHTER]
in Bronx, New York in May 20th,
1955, and we apparently
didn't realize all of this until
talking to my sister recently.
We lived in the Bronx for
a short time and then Ba moved down to
New Jersey and then
my father fell asleep on the way home
one day and we ended up moving to Queens.
So I grew up in Queens, New York.
>> Actually, my mother
grew up in Queens in the 1950s as well.
[OVERLAPPING]
Who knows could be in the same neighborhood.
>> They could have been neighbors.
>> So before we talk about your childhood and eventually,
your life here in Georgia a little bit,
we're going to go back in time
and focus on your father's story.
So can you please state your father's full name?
>> My father's full name was Joseph Hoopert.
His nickname in Poland was Yuzu.
He was born in
Zigeuner Wald which was actually in Austria at the time.
For years, we looked for his town in
Austria until somebody told me that it was in Poland.
So in 1915 when he was born on May 31,
his town was in Austria in 1918,
it became part of Poland. Sure.
>> And can you spell Zigeuner Wald?
>> Z-I-G-E-U-N-E-R-W-A-L-D.
>> Can you please tell me a little bit about
your father's family?
What was his family like?
>> His family was a little bit unusual.
My grandmother's name was
Anna Bloch and her husband was Yahatzba.
And together, they had three children.
My grandfather lived in Ostrava Czechoslovakia,
which was a short distance between where he
lived and Zigeuner Wald
was a driving distance, basically.
And he was married. He had 10 children.
And he met my grandmother and fell in love with her.
This is after obviously after my grandfather passed away.
Her husband had passed away.
And he left his wife and married my grandmother,
and my father was the only child
from that from that marriage.
So altogether, there were
14 brothers and child and sisters.
I believe that there were
11 children from my grandfather's side of the family.
And counting my father,
there would have been four,
three prior to the marriage and my father was the fourth.
So there were 14 brothers and
sisters in the family altogether.
>> And then how many grandchildren were there?
>> There were I believe
11 on my grandfather's side of the family that were
still in Ostrava and
Anna had five grandchildren altogether.
>> So your father then was the
youngest of these 14 children?
>> He was the youngest. Yes.
>> And he was the only one born
specifically then to your grandmother and grandfather?
>> And it was good at that time,
that it was pretty somewhat scandalous
because my my grandfather left his first wife,
and he met my grandmother and fell in love with her,
and it took some time
one of my father's cousins actually wrote a book,
so there are passages about this and it took some time
for the families to figure out that this is okay,
we like each other,
but they were relatively close.
My father's two sisters
were going to go back a little bit.
My father's half brother,
Arthur left Poland at
the age of only 17 or so before he had to
join the military and he moved to the United States.
So he was here and my father's other two sisters,
Pella and Clara were in Zigeuner Wald.
>> And what were your father's parents occupation?
What did they do?
>> My grandfather,
Abraham owned Delicatesons and
butcher shops in Ostrava in Czechoslovakia,
and it was doing very well, actually quite well.
And his children and his sons
took over businesses when he left.
So his children were grown at that time.
My grandmother and my grandfather and her husband before,
owned the restaurant block, which was, it
was a restaurant in a tavern and a small inn.
We used to joke about the inn
was in case you had too much to drink,
you could stay at the in overnight.
And it was very well liked and very famous.
There was the closest large town was Bielsko Biala.
And Bielsko Biala was a somewhat industrial town
and there was a trolley that ran from
Bielsko down to Zigeuner Wald and continued on.
So people would come down to vacation,
like going to Catchers from New York for the weekend.
And there were postcards and
the stories about them, it was quite a place.
>> And what was the neighborhood like,
where the restaurant was and where they lived?
>> Very rural. It was
a small town. We've never been there.
We've tried a couple of times but not wasn't a big city.
It was a little town.
My father was close
to pretty much everybody that lived there.
There's a story about
the police used to come in pretty much on
a daily basis and they would sit down at the bar
and ask for the the top
shelf scotch for a glass of scotch.
My father would give them scotch and
then they'd have another and
another and then they would go.
My father never ever charged them
anything but he did tell me that he would
keep a bottle of the same from
the same scotch underneath the bar with
the lower level scotch in that bottle and that would be
their second and third drinks would
be would be the less expensive scotch.
>> So in this neighborhood
in this city in the town, really,
were there people of different religions,
different ethnic backgrounds living together?
>> Yes. I think so.
There was no synagogue.
I know that because my father talked
about my grandfather having a room in the house
where he kept a Torah
and it was nobody was really allowed in
there but I don't know very much about
the town at all because my father
literally never spoke about Europe.
He never spoke about, every
once in a while we talk about skiing.
He and I and my sister, also,
we all love skiing and my father was an amazing skier.
So he would talk about how they would get up
and hike up the mountain and have lunch
and the ski down
but I don't know any of his friends names.
I've never heard him talk about friends.
I don't know what he did when he was a little boy.
He shut that off after
the war and just wouldn't
talk about it. Just never mentioned it.
>> So you mentioned that
he had found or he told you about
his father having a special room
in the house with a Torah.
Do you know what role Judaism played in their lives?
>> I think they weren't orthodox,
but I think they were very religious.
My father after the war was
not and a number of people that I've talked to
a number of the survivors I've talked
to have had the same feelings.
Part of it was that he was
afraid to tell people that he was Jewish.
And part of it was that he had lost faith,
after what he'd seen and gone through,
he had lost faith.
So when we were growing up,
my sister had her Bat Mitzvah we went to Temple.
Again, you weren't Orthodox,
but and then after my parents passed, we stopped.
That was it. So we really were not,
we didn't have a religious household.
We did do Passover.
>> You did do Passover, did you
celebrate any other holidays?
>> We did Hanukkah, but not in ways
that families that are religious will do it.
>> So did you know or were you able to figure out how
they would have learned about
what was going on in the world in their little town?
Got news, that thing.
>> Travelers mostly.
Clearly, there was no CNN.
So it would be people that came to visit and they had
regular clientele that would come down and talk to them.
And like I said, Bielsko was a fairly vibrant town.
So there was a lot of news that would come out of there.
But that was pretty much it as far as I know.
>> And you mentioned that his brother
moved to the United States.
>> Yes.
>> Did they have other family
living elsewhere that they kept in touch with?
>> Other than the Hoopert family in Ostrava, I don't know.
I don't think so. I'm sure they did, actually.
I shouldn't say, but nobody
that my father ever spoke of.
And for the past 40, 45 years or so,
we've been researching him.
So we find little bits and pieces here and there.
>> And you mentioned that your grandfather
at first and then your father,
that he was a successful delicatessen owner
and restaurantor,
did you get a sense for how
the Great Depression affected the family if at all?
>> No. There was
very little talk really about anything that went on.
We would hear stories
about parties at the restaurant every now and then.
And my father became involved.
When my grandfather passed away,
my father was 19 and he took over the restaurant.
And so he did everything from the kitchen
up to doing the books and working in the dining room.
And his brother-in-law also worked in the restaurant.
But there literally were no stories at all about it.
His brother-in-law's name was Gundy,
and Gundy was married to Clara,
who was my father's favorite sister,
and they were very close.
I didn't know about Gundy
until I think I was probably in the sixth grade.
And we had taken a trip.
My father loved model trains,
so we had a very large basement and he built
a train track that literally had to turn
sideways to get from one end to the other,
and we'd spend hours and hours
working on the trains and playing with them.
And he took us on a vacation to
the train museum in Pennsylvania.
And after we went to the museum,
we went to this gentleman's house
and it was Gundy Frankel.
Didn't know who he was.
My mother and my sister and my grandmother
went in the house with his family and he
and my father went out onto
the deck and sat down and I went with them.
And they spoke to each other for a fair amount of time,
but in Polish and a little bit in Yiddish here and there.
So I don't know what they were talking about.
The way I describe it is it was
not an angry conversation.
They weren't yelling at each other,
but it was not a happy-friendly conversation.
It was clearly serious.
And when that was done,
we got in the car and we drove back to New York.
I never heard from Gundy again or about Gundy again,
and had no idea who he was
until we started researching and I found out about Clara.
And the thing that
separated them other than obviously the war,
was that after the war,
Gundy did not spend enough time looking for Clara.
He remarried almost immediately after the war,
and my father was very upset about that.
So that was part of it.
And I'm sure there was more,
but that was the gist of that.
>> So you mentioned that your father
started working at the restaurant when he was 19.
Did you find out what
his education had been like [inaudible]
>> I think mostly home school.
There was never any talk of a school at all,
and we've never seen photographs
or anything pertaining to a school.
Actually in the town as well,
in old photographs that we've pulled up online,
and we've never really
found the [inaudible] of all day school.
So I think at that period in time,
probably home schooling was more of the norm.
And working in the family business,
working around the house.
It was when I was a kid. Let me just put it that way.
>> And you had mentioned to me though that
he spoke multiple languages.
What languages did he speak?
>> Oh, my gosh.
He spoke Polish obviously.
He spoke Yiddish, he spoke Hebrew,
he spoke French, he spoke Italian, German.
What else?
Did I say Spanish?
No. Spanish. He learned to speak Spanish so
that he could speak to the employees
that they had at the store,
and his feeling was
that it wasn't right to have somebody come and
be with you and expect them to learn what
your language was without doing the same for them.
So he learned to speak
Spanish and he could speak Spanish to them.
He had just a gift for picking up languages.
We would have passover meals and
my mother's family was huge and literally,
we'd have this 20-foot long table
that he built out of plywood.
And one of his favorite things
to do and I don't know if
it was everybody else's favorite,
but he would tell
a joke at some point in time after everything was done,
and he would start off in English.
And then he would go from
English and he'd switch to Polish.
And so a third of the table now knew what he was saying.
And then at the end, he would switch to
some other language that maybe two people spoke.
And they would laugh and nobody else
had any idea what was happening and
that was just one of his favorite things to do.
>> It's funny. I can just imagine him
starting to have some of
those skills with groups
of people at the restaurant and his [inaudible]
>> He was quite the entertainer.
And we had parties at our house a lot of the time.
It didn't have to be
somebody's birthday or any special occasion.
They would invite guests over and my family would
come and they would sit in the living room and of course,
back then, everybody smoked,
so there was a cloud of smoke three feet off the ground.
And they would just laugh and
joke and talk to each other.
And one of the things was
that growing up and I think my sister
probably felt the same way,
is that partly because of the size of the family
and partly because of how they took him in.
They they really loved him.
We always thought that this was my mother's cousin,
but this was my father's.
So we always thought it was both families.
And when I was older and
I found out that these are all my mother's family,
and so none of this was was my
father's except for my Uncle Arthur.
And his sister, Phella,
who changed name to Phyllis,
also came to the United States.
She came during the war,
but we rarely saw her.
>> So in Poland,
did the family have a sense that war was on the horizon?
>> I think everybody had a feeling
that they knew that things were going on.
I don't know that anybody could
imagine what Hitler would do and what Germany would do.
So they had to know that there were battles going on,
and there were conflicts.
We're relatively sure that it was the police that came to
the restaurant and told
my father to get the family together.
And they literally they took whatever they could carry.
They put jewelry into
mason jars with jelly and so they got
stopped and searched and they went
to Belsqo and got on the train from there to Labov.
And the Germans and the Soviets had had formed
an agreement that the Soviets would take
half of Poland and Germany would take the other half.
So my father's home was in the Nazi side of the Poland.
So they went to Labov and started a life there.
They thought that was going to
be where they were going to be.
>> And I guess at that time, did they have a sense of
the relative merits of the Soviets
versus the Germans or it was taking a chance?
>> No. The letters
that Arthur got were mostly written by my grandmother,
some of them from my father.
And my father could fix anything.
We always joke about you coul hand a computer tomorrow
and he'd fix it for you
and give it back to you the next day.
So he took a position with an automotive company.
It was CWS and I would try and say the actual name,
but I can't pronounce it for the life of me.
But he started out working as a mechanic
and then they promoted him and he became a test driver.
So he was doing very well in the company.
My grandmother would write and say
where you don't have to send us any money,
we're fine and I'm trying to find some piece of clothing.
If you find that, you could
send that to me, that would be great.
Clearly they started to think that
this is where they were going to be.
This was going to be home.
And I think that their thoughts were
if Hitler lost power or if
somebody if the war ended in
Poland that they could go home
and they would certainly go home at that point,
but I think that their feeling
was this is where we live now.
There's no more Scot.
And then Hitler violated the treaty and crossed the line.
We're almost 100% well,
we know that he would have been at work.
We're almost 100% sure that he escaped into the woods.
And knowing my father and
from talking to some of the relatives that we've found,
he more than likely
waited until dark to see if he could go
back in and get his family
and that wasn't going to happen.
So we think he fought with Partisan groups
and then joined a Soviet brigade.
>> So did you hear or piece together
any stories about his time with the partisans,
what were they doing or?
>> He didn't really talk about it.
The things that we put together,
one is that for the amount
of time that he spent going through the woods,
it just makes sense that
he would've met up with partisans.
But when he was captured,
he put on a Soviet officers uniform.
The officer had been killed
and he was captured as a Soviet officer.
And we're not sure because he did have a Soviet uniform,
we have photographs of a minute,
but we're not sure if he was
actually part of that unit at the time or
if it was his group was joining their group and fighting.
So we don't know for sure
that he fought with partisan groups,
but it just makes
sense for where he was and what was going on.
>> And so what happened after they were captured?
>> So he put on
an officer's uniform because in the Soviet army,
to be Jewish and to be an officer
was close to impossible
and it could happen, but not likely.
So nobody suspected that he was Jewish.
They were taken to a POW camp.
I don't know where the camp was,
and I don't know the name of it.
And this is a story that we he actually told us.
After some time in the camp,
they were told they needed to dig a trench
around the perimeter of the camp, and there's soldiers.
We're building a trench so that if the allies come,
they can jump down the trench and defend the camp.
And they thought that was what they were doing.
They were wrong.
The Nazis lined them up along the edge of
the trench and they shot them row by row.
And my father woke up
under a pile of bodies that had been executed after him.
He had a scar on his face where the bullet
hit him if it had been an inch over,
we wouldn't be sitting here.
And his legs were frozen,
it was wintertime and he crawled out of the space.
I personally believe this way,
but I think that he was being watched over,
I think that his family and
just whatever forces there were caring for him.
He crawled to a farmhouse
and the farmhouse and the odds of this are unbelievable,
but the farmhouse was owned by a German doctor and even
more unbelievable as the German doctor
said I'll take care of you.
And he wanted to amputate my father's legs.
My father said no, he wouldn't do that.
He fixed the wound on his face and he hung
the bed above a wood burning stove
and put my father on the bed.
And my father stayed on the bed and he worked on him
and kept him warm until my father could walk again.
And I would love to know who he was and clearly,
that's never going to happen, but
he saved not only my father's life.
And there's a saying in Talmud that if you
save one life, you save the world.
And he saved one knife and so much has come out of that.
So my father, once he could move around
again and he was okay and his strength was back,
he joined another Soviet Union unit and he served under
the command of a general
and I should have brought the pic I have in my computer.
There's a picture of my father sitting
on a white horse in uniform.
And horses liked my father and my father loved horses.
So if he walked
outside and there was a horse across the pasture,
it would come upver to say hello.
And the general shortly after he joined gave him
the responsibility of taking care of his horse and
really took my father under
his wing just they became close.
And he fought with that unit through the end of the war.
At the end of the war,
he was awarded the Soviet Red Star,
which it's the highest
honor that the Soviet Union had at the time.
And the general said to my father,
you'll come back to Moscow with me and
the Soviet Union will take care of you
and if you get married or whatever and you have a family,
they'll take care of your family.
It comes with the honor that you had been awarded.
And my dad said, no,
I have to go and look for my wife and
child and if I can find them,
I will bring them to Moscow, and I'll find you.
And if not, I'll come back to Moscow and I'll find
you to our knowledge.
My father was not married and and he had no children.
He went to the US side of Germany,
occupied side of Germany to an area called Fulda
and went to a displaced persons camp.
Wouldn't want to go to a POW camp.
He went to a displaced persons camp
called Bad Sal Schlerf which was actually a resort.
And I have postcards from the from the resort.
It was absolutely beautiful.
And the Americans took care of him and helped him.
I think he weighed something like
80 pounds when he came in.
We have his papers from when he entered the camp.
He told the officers that he was from Berlin.
He didn't want to tell them that he was from
Poland and the reason for it,
and if you look at photographs of Berlin after the war,
there was no way that they were going to request
paperwork on my father from Berlin.
There was no Berlin left and
he was afraid that if he said he was from
[inaudible] or [inaudible] that they would
send for information about him and he'd have to
wait and wouldn't be able to leave.
So on his papers coming into the states,
and we have the log from the ship he came in on,
it says Joseph Hoopert and then it says German next to it.
So he stayed there.
Actually, my sister and I went to
the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC.
We went on a semi private tour with a group and we
had a chance to sit down with an archivist
and I had mailed him
more than I think he expected to get from me.
One of the things that he found
and we can't find it and I can't remember the names,
but he found that two of
my father's cousins were in
the camp and that they had arrived the day before.
And I think that they were part of the Hellinger family,
which were cousins, but
I couldn't find the paperwork that he has sent us.
It's been a number of years.
So we don't know.
Was that an accident?
Was that just a twist of fate?
No cell phones back then,
so that wasn't an option,
and there was no mail.
So I don't know how they
how they ended up in the same place,
I think it was a twist of fate.
And I believe that they went to
Australia and he came to the United States.
>> So before we get into
how he came to the United States,
in your research, were you able to
determine who the general was that he was with?
>> No. And we have photographs.
We have one photograph of
several officers and soldiers standing in
a row behind the general who's sitting with
another officer and the general's wife
is sitting next to him.
So we have photographs of the general and we've
tried to find out who
he is or get some inkling
and there's just no information
that can be obtained, so no.
>> Now it's probably not
the time either to be peaching out.
>> Yeah, it's probably not.
>> But aside from that,
do you have a sense for whether at that point,
they would have known he was Jewish or was
he hiding that part of his identity?
>> My guess is that
he probably didn't tell people that he was Jewish.
He may have told the general that he
was Jewish because they were close,
but the Soviets were not
known for their love of the Jewish faith.
So I don't think that my father would have felt
comfortable telling people that he was a Jew.
My guess is he didn't.
So getting now to how he came to the United States.
So what year was he in the DP camp? Was this 1945?
>> Forty five, '46, yeah.
>> And did he reach out then to his brother?
>> Yes. He wrote to Arthur first telling him that he was
alive and then asking Arthur
to help bring him to the United States.
And Arthur did just a phenomenal job getting him here.
My cousin Norman, who I'm still very close to,
Arthur's son, apparently,
the kids would go out and they would sell fruit to
neighbors to try and
raise money to bring my father over,
but he he worked with
[inaudible] and worked with
other government agencies and
my father came over in 1947,
I think it was June of 1947.
And he came over on the SS Ernie pyle.
>> What was that boat like?
>> It looked like just a cruise liner.
It was not a military ship that I could tell.
And the photographs we have,
it's a section of the lower deck
and people are just packed in,
I think I told you this,
we've looked at all the faces the along the rail.
There's an opening, a door,
and there's a gentleman standing at the edge of
the railing where the opening is.
And from his posture and from
his look and from his size because he was very skinny,
we're almost sure that's our father standing there.
He told me an interesting story and he thought this was
a funny story and it was, I guess,
but he told me that when they were coming
across at the beginning of the journey,
almost everybody on the boat became sea sick.
So my dad didn't want to be on deck,
he didn't want to be below deck certainly.
And he collected some blankets and
got as much food together as he could
find and he climbed up the smokestack.
And he made the trip across from Europe to
the United States on
the little ramp around the smokestack.
>> I guess he got as much air as he possibly could?
>> He probably got more than he wanted, I think,
but he just didn't want to be down.
I'm sure he went down at times,
but he just didn't want to
be in that crowd of everybody being sick.
>> It makes sense to me.
So what was your father's arrival like?
>> Again, he never really talked about it very much.
I'm sure he went through Ellis Island.
We have some paperwork from him coming through.
Someone told me, though,
that they may have docked on the Hudson River further up.
So I'm I'm not 100% sure, but again,
we're picking at straws here because we're
finding little bits and pieces here and there,
but when he got off of the boat,
he met a couple and they became
friends and then they
adopted each other and there was Joe and Alice Pure.
For me growing up,
they had three kids who were pretty much my age,
Vivian and Ellen and we'd go there all the time.
We lived close together.
If my parents were going out to dinner,
that's where I ended up.
If they were going on an overnight,
that's where I ended up.
And we were cousins.
There was no question in my mind
that Uncle Joe was my uncle Joe.
And my cousin told me,
at some point, when we were late teenagers,
that she really wasn't my cousin,
that my father and
her father and mother adopted each other because they
had lost their entire family and he had lost
his entire family and they needed each other.
And he was my uncle, there's no question.
I don't care where he came from,
but he was one of my closest and most loved relatives.
>> And you had told me they had
a remarkable story too where they knew each other.
>> They met in Auschwitz and they still bore the tattoos,
they still had the numbers on their arms.
And they fell in love in Auschwitz and somehow,
I'm not sure how they did this,
but they married in the camp.
And then when they were liberated,
they came to the United States.
>> So once your father was in New York,
he reconnected with his brother?
>> He did. My brother at the time lived in the Bronx.
I used to think that he lived in
New Jersey at that point because
that's where he lived when I knew him,
but he lived in an apartment in the Bronx,
and in the apartment was his son
and daughter and his wife and my father.
So he lived with them when he first got here.
We're relatively sure that
Arthur introduced my father to my mother.
My father, with all of his expertise and languages,
did not speak English
so it made it a little bit difficult.
But Arthur and Julia,
his wife would go out and they would accompany
my parents to dinner and wherever they went somewhere.
And Arthur would translate from my father.
And I've always wondered if my father said something to
Joe or did Arthur say the same thing to my mother,
but they fell in love and they got
married in 1948, I believe.
>> So what did they do once they got married?
Where did they settle
and what kind of business were they in?
>> My grandmother, mother's mother,
and my grandfather owned
a floor-covering business and originally,
it was on Third Avenue in the Bronx.
And my father also worked with my uncles,
with Abe and Allan and they
did appliance repair and appliance sales
so he did electrical work and he did plumbing.
And then eventually he talked my grandmother
into opening another carpet store
on Castle Hill Avenue in the Bronx,
which is further up and it's still there.
And that was called Lots Car and Hoopert floor covering,
and they actually lived in the Bronx at that point.
>> And your mother what was her name?
>> Francis. Well,
actually, interestingly enough, her name is Frida.
[LAUGHTER]
And my grandmother
named her Frida when she was born at the hospital,
and my grandfather said I don't like that name.
We're going to call her Francis.
So nobody ever called her Frida.
We found out when we found
her birth certificate, but that was her name.
>> So they were living and working in the Bronx.
What kind of a community had they built for themselves
or who they spent time with at that point?
>> Again, a lot of my mother's relatives.
My grandmother was fairly close to a lot of
the Italian families that were in the area.
She was friends with
Mary Damilia so there
were a lot of people they were close to.
Some of them had businesses that were interesting,
but all very nice people
and they were part of my family growing up.
>> And then your sister,
was she born first?
>> My sister well, it depends on who you ask,
but yes, she was born first.
>> And when was that?
>> She was born in 1951.
>> And then you came along in 1955.
>> Yeah.
>> And at that point, they had moved to Queens?
>> No. They actually moved to
New Jersey to Franklin Lakes in New Jersey.
And I actually got a call from my aunt
last night telling me that
their next-door neighbor in Franklin Lakes was West Paul.
[LAUGHTER]
So they had an interesting next-door neighbor.
But my father had a long drive home from
the Rox to Franklin Lakes
and at that time, there was nothing,
and it was just an open area and
apparently he fell asleep on the way home and drove
off into a field one night
and my mother said we're moving to
Queens and they moved up to
Queens and that's where I lived.
>> And at that point, did he take the subway?
>> No, he drove [OVERLAPPING] he owned Cambridge.
[LAUGHTER].
>> So what were some of
your first memories of your parents?
>> Happy memories. I didn't see them a lot.
And I think it was just that period of time,
my father worked all day,
and he basically worked
every day and my grandmother the same.
They would get home 6:30,
seven o'clock at night and they would
leave almost before everybody was up.
My mother was home.
My mother was part of the PTA
and she had friends in the neighborhood.
And I had friends in the neighborhood as well.
So my memories of being in my youth were playing
stickball on the street and doing things with
my friends but also
working around the house with my father.
And we had a riding lawn mower
that I would hold onto him,
and he would ride me around, we'd mow the lawn.
Whenever he was doing something in the house,
whenever he was home,
I was with him, pretty much.
We planted bushes and trees
and took beetles off of my grandmother's rose bushes.
And he taught me how to do electrical work,
he taught me how to weld,
he taught me how to deploy.
I am a terrible baseball player
because I never played
baseball and I never played football.
But if something breaks in your house,
I can come fix it for you.
>> And growing up, basically in the city,
when did you find out that
your dad was soaked with horses?
Did you see that?
>> Yeah. There was actually a stable in
Flushing New York at the time.
I believe it was Flushing.
But anyway, so he wanted me to learn to
ride and took me to the stable.
And literally, we got there and it was not huge,
but a corral, and the horses
weren't tremendous and we walked over.
I remember putting my foot on
the bottom rail and my father leaning over
it and four or five horses coming over to my dad.
And I took riding lessons there and
that's where I learned to ride.
And then I went to summer camp it's called trails
and what they would
do is that when you got
there in the beginning of the summer,
they would give you a horse or assign a horse,
and they get to keep them.
They would assign a horse to you and
then you took care of that horse through
the summer and rode
and learned how to
care for them and did other things as well.
>> Do you still ride now?
>> I haven't in a long time.
I would love to.
>> And what about skiing?
Was that something that your dad taught you how to do?
>> My first ski, I still have it.
My first ski is this long and it looks like
a little toboggan and it's got
a little strap where you strap your shoe on it.
And I have photographs of
my father holding me between his legs,
and I don't know if you know what a snowplow is.
It's a skiing loop where
you put your skis together like this.
So there are pictures of my father doing a snow plow down
the mountainside with me in between his legs going down.
So I was literally on skis almost before I could
walk and I skied all of it until we moved down here.
I instructed in Mount Snow in Vermont for a while.
That was my winter.
Every winter if there was snow on the ground,
I was sliding down.
[LAUGHTER]
>> So you mentioned that you
really didn't have an inkling,
what your dad's experience was.
Do you remember the first time
even learning did you
learn about the Holocaust in school?
Was that something that came up at all?
>> No. Back then,
there was very little talk even
of World War II, for that matter.
There was no talk of Auschwitz or
Bergen Belsen or there was no real discussion
about Hitler and certainly no discussions
about the horrors that went on
and we talked about
the bombing Pearl Harbor and entering the war.
And everything that we learned was from
the United States' point of view.
So really, it was
just the major battles that were talked about,
but even that it wasn't a big part of our education.
And there was no talk about it really,
during the time that I did go to the temple,
you would think that Rabbis
would talk about it
and people in the temple would talk about it.
There was none at least not in front of us.
And I really do think that my father,
had he lived longer when I turned 20 or 21,
we would have probably sat down and he would have
told me more about
our family and more about what happened.
I think a lot of it was him not
wanting us to carry the weight that he was carrying.
But really in the neighborhood,
there was no discussion of the Holocaust at all.
It just was non-existent.
>> And you had told me a story
about discovering some of
your father's things as a child?
[LAUGHTER]
>> I found his red star.
He used to keep it in a box by the bed.
And my mother had bought me a denim jacket.
This is when denim jackets
were very cool. Very few people had them.
So I had a denim jacket and I put
the star on my denim jacket and I went to school,
and I didn't think anything of it.
And at that time,
you had little closets, so you hung
your jacket in the closet.
I went to school, put my jacket on,
went home, hung it on my door.
And my father got home around 7:00 and went
upstairs and saw my jacket and the star.
And my dad, I could count the times my dad yelled at
me on my fingertips, and he hit me
once in all the time that we were together.
I lied to him and he did not take that well.
So he didn't say anything to me, really.
He took the star off the jacket,
and he went away and you could
tell by the way he was moving and by
his demeanor that he was less than not happy.
And he came back up shortly afterwards and sat me
down and didn't tell me about what it was.
He just said, this is something you are never,
ever to touch again.
You're never to speak of it to anybody,
and you will never take it out of its spot.
It will stay there.
You don't touch it, you don't talk about it,
nothing, and that was it.
So I didn't know why.
I certainly didn't touch it again. It was clear.
And it wasn't until I found out what it
was and then put together
the relationship that the United States had with
the Soviet Union at
the period of time when I wore that to school.
It was not ideal.
And my father was afraid that he would get deported.
And my uncle Joe was actually the same way.
He was very nervous about.
He had people going to South America.
He wouldn't go to South America because he was
afraid he wouldn't be allowed to
get back into the country.
So there was a lot of fear back then about,
it was so hard to get in here.
I don't want to take a chance, I'm getting thrown out.
>> And at that point, did
the United States government still think
your father was from Germany
or had that ever been cleared up?
>> No. It never was cleared up.
I don't know if there was anything that everybody would
look at but on his paperwork it said.
His name on his driver's license
and I have his original,
he had a chauffeur's license, was Joseph Bloch.
So he used my uncle's name
and then he became Joseph Hoopert Bloch.
And I believe it was
probably when my sister was born that
he dropped the Bloch portion
of the name, became Joseph Hoopert.
>> Did he ever seek US citizenship?
Was that something he wanted?
>> Yeah.
>> He did?
>> He was going to be US citizen.
This was his country.
This was a big deal for him.
And when you look back in time and you read books
and see films about what things were
like in the regions that he was from.
You watch films about Austria
and everybody's eating and having a good time dancing.
But you watch films about rural areas
and people who were not always nice to each other.
There was a lot of anti-semitism.
And to come to
the United States was to be in the sunshine.
It was a total
different and I know he loved where he was.
I'm not saying that if the war never
happened, he would have stayed there.
He loved his home and it was beautiful.
There were rivers,
there were beautiful woods and things.
But the United States, that was his home.
He was not going anywhere.
>> Did you ever get a sense growing up for
what his political beliefs were?
Was he a fan of Truman?
>> I'm sure he spoke to my mother and my grandmother.
And when I was little,
I may have been in the room during that,
but I didn't know what they were talking about.
I know that my family has always been a little bit
left of center to a little bit more than left of center.
We've always been Democrats
and we've always been liberals.
And my father believed
that every human being was a human being.
It didn't matter what color you were.
It didn't matter if you
were short or tall or fat or skinny.
It didn't matter if you were a person, you were a person.
If you did bad things,
then that pushed you into a different category for him.
But everybody had an equal chance with my dad.
When you met him,
he would like you and it
didn't matter if you had an accent.
If you you're a human being, you're a human being.
But they were very liberal, very free minded.
>> So you were I guess,
only 15 when your father passed?
>> I had turned 15 the week before my father died.
>> What was what was that time like for you?
>> Well, I my father came home on Monday.
I have the date written down,
but I can't remember it exactly.
But it was May 31st or June 1st, 1970.
And like I said, he would come home late in the evening.
And he came home I believe it was
a Monday and told
my mother he was tired he was going to go lie down.
And he went upstairs and I was home and dinner was ready.
And my mom said,
you're going to go get dad.
We'll have dinner.
And I went upstairs.
My father was very not meticulous.
I don't think it's that.
I might be pushing it a little bit,
but his coat was on a hangar,
his jacket was on hangar hanging on the door,
his shoes were next to each other on the floor.
So it wasn't like he threw his stuff off and laid down.
And he was laying on his back
on the bed and I can picture
him as if it were yesterday.
And I tried to wake him up and he was gone.
He had a massive heart attack.
I ran down the street and we had
a a doctor and we had a dentist down the street from us.
The doctor wasn't there and
the dentist was and I grabbed him
and I don't know
how the person sitting in the chair felt,
but he came over
and there was nothing
anybody could have done.
He was gone.
It was a very, very
I don't know if there's even a word for it,
difficult doesn't come close.
I played guitar back then.
And my father took
our house the top floor of
our house was supposed to be the master bedroom.
So it was the full width of
the house and then downstairs were two more bedrooms.
So my mother and father took
the downstairs bedrooms and my bedroom was
upstairs and my sister had to come
through my bedroom to go
into her bedroom, which was lovely.
But the windows in my room open
to a section of roof that wasn't
terribly steep and then the street was in front of me.
While we were sitting Shiva,
I sat with the family most of the time and then
I'd go upstairs and take my guitar and
go out on the roof and play a guitar.
And my cousin, Fred,
who was considered to
be one of the least sane people in our family,
but certainly one of the
best would come up
and climb out the window and sit next to me,
never said a word to me
to sat with me until I went back inside.
And so I did that and then in the Jewish religion,
you psychotish for 11 months.
There was somebody from the temple who
would pick me up every morning,
I would go to temple and psychotish and then
I'd go to school and I'd come home.
I had a very hard time, I
didn't want to be with my friends.
I mostly stayed up in my room and played guitar,
I was not interested in school anymore.
And it was the '70s,
I did some things that you're
not really supposed to be doing,
but that's what carried me through for quite some time.
And I became hippy,
I grew my hair down to
my belt and that was pretty much it.
I had three friends that I was very close to,
and we hung out together and we'd talk
and we'd do things and get in trouble.
But everything just changed
it was like the world stopped.
And when I got out of high school,
to give you an idea of how much I school,
we had a headmaster he would come around and room,
the halls and things, and he and I did
not see eye to eye all the time,
mostly because I was really into the Marx Brothers and I
would mouth off to him and in a grave show.
But he handed me my diploma and shook my hand
and pulled me in close and said you will
never amount to anything.
So that was the end of my high school career and I told
my mother that I didn't want to go to
college, I was done.
I wanted to find something that I enjoyed doing and
work and travel around a bit and that was it.
And so a friend of mine and I
decided that we were going
to hitchhike across the country.
This is something that if my son came to
me when he got out of high school and said,
Larry and I are going to hitchhike around
the country and come back through
Canada or where we actually went to
Canada and came back through the States,
I would say and that's nice go watch TV.
And she said okay,
come on we'll go by a backpack and a sleeping bag.
And she outfitted me
to go and we hitchhiked around the country,
I came back and she said, now,
I want you to apply to four schools.
And you pick the schools and if you get in,
then you go to college and if you don't get in,
then you don't go to college and I said, okay.
So I picked four of
the most difficult schools I could find.
My grades were actually really pretty good
and got into all of them,
and ended up going to
the University of Hartford in Connecticut,
which was actually a very good thing
for me because it gave me
a different viewpoint and brought
me out of a lot of
the darkness that I was in it carried me out of.
>> And you met people that you liked in college?
>> I met people that I liked and I met one person that I
loved and we've been together 43 years.
I was a biology psychology major,
and then I was premed for a while.
Until I met the rest of the people in premed.
So I was a biology psych major and it's a long story.
But my mother had gotten a dog and she returned it to
the kennel she got a Siberian husky, I don't know why.
And she couldn't take care of it,
so she asked me to take it back to
the kennel and I did and she said,
just tell them, find
it a good home, I don't want the money.
And the woman at the kennel said, well,
let me have your phone number and I gave it to her
and she called me several.
Well, I can't remember how many months later,
but it was quite some time
later and she said a doctor just
bought an Alaskan Mlamute and put him in a crate,
shipped him out to or flew out to Arizona with him,
put him in a crate, the next day
shipped him back to me and said,
I don't want this dog, find him at home.
I don't want any money back.
And she called me and she said,
do you want him he's 10 months old.
And I went and got him and his name was
Willie because Willie and
the poor voice was on the radio when I got him.
And the head of
the biology department and I got to
be friends during the time that I was there.
And I used to sit in my car during the day,
he didn't need a leash
or anything he would just stay there.
And one day, she said,
why are you doing that?
And I said because he can't come in
the building and she said,
of course, he can come in the building.
And she opened her bag and she had
these two little dogs in her bag and she said,
if anybody says anything, just send them to me.
So he would come to class with me
and every once in a while he would get up,
he'd walk out the door.
And when he'd walk out the door,
the professor would stop talking
and then when Willie got outside,
he would say, I guess I was
going on a little too long about that.
Let's switch on something else.
And one day, I walked out and my wife
was in the hallway petting
my dog and I looked at her and,
that if anybody ever ever tells you
there is no such thing as love at first sight,
you give him my phone number because there is.
>> What's her name?
>> Her name is Cindy.
>> Now, this was still the '70s when you were in college?
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah. And so were
you concerned about Vietnam and the draft and all that?
>> I protested pretty regularly.
I can tell you what tear gas feels like.
My mother actually worked very hard to make sure that,
if I did get drafted,
I would end up in another country.
They were doing the draft lottery
back then and my number was 51,
which was not a good number to have.
And I went down it was like Alice's restaurant.
But I went down and they put me through
a couple of things and then I ended up
sitting in an office with an officer.
And he looked at me and he said,
tell me a good reason why you shouldn't go to Vietnam.
And I said, because we'll get killed.
And he said, well, a lot of people will get killed,
why should you be different?
And I said, because I can't shoot anybody.
I won't shoot anybody.
So if I'm standing there and
somebody's pointing a gun at me and I'm
pointing one at him, I'm not going to shoot him.
So he said, so you're a pacifist.
And I said I guess, yeah.
And he said get a signature from
your rabbi or your priest and and bring it in.
And we'll put you down as we'll pass you through.
And then he looked at me and he said,
just go home. Don't worry about it.
And it was towards the end of the war and
he I think he was tired of sending people over.
And so I didn't have to go.
>> Yeah. It's amazing.
And that was a very tumultuous time in this country.
Were you following everything going on you were up in
Hartford in the South
and with the civil rights marches and all of that?
>> Yeah. Actually, Cindy was from here from
Atlanta and her family was from Alabama.
Yeah. We weren't involved physically involved with it,
but certainly emotionally and verbally we were
and I think we both felt
like this is a good change coming,
that this it's not good right now,
but it's going to be good.
And we've still got ways to go.
>> So coming back around to
your father and learning about his story.
When did you really start the journey in
terms of uncovering more about his past?
>> My mom had decided that she was going to
remarry and she was going to move out of
the house that we grew up in.
And I had the metal.
I had kept that when
I left one for college, I took it with me.
And I went to the house just to look for things I
wanted to keep and things that were important.
And I found there was an envelope about
that thick manila envelope of letters,
and I had found those before and I took them
and I held onto
a little bit and gave them to my sister
and she held onto it,
but none of them were in English
and they were all in different languages.
It wasn't like one language.
And my cousin, Doris who was
my father's sister's son was also
interested in what because
her family her family story is very difficult as well.
She was with my father and her sister and Henry.
But so I took the letters and I
gave them Andre and she held onto
them and then Doris's brother
found somebody who could translate them.
And we sent them out and they translated them
and I still have them have the translations.
I sat and I was up to,
like two in the morning reading and there was poetry
and there were letters and letters from before the war,
letters during the war, letters after the war,
and just descriptions of things.
There was actually a letter from Gudi asking if
he could go and stay in.
This is after clearly after the war,
if he could go back and and stay on the property.
So there were a lot of just interesting facts
that came up and and names that came
up that we didn't know about.
And so Doris and my sister and I just started digging,
just started looking for things
and trying to find out things.
And there wasn't a whole lot that
we could find out and it was difficult most of
the people that we could have talked to had
we started 20 years earlier, we're gone.
There weren't people we could talk
to But then when the Internet came around,
things got a little bit different.
So I went online looking for my father's town.
This is one of the first things
that happened along the way
and I was looking all over
Austria for it's going to ball.
And I had a woman that worked for me.
She was from Germany and she came
upstairs and said, what are you doing?
I said, I'm looking for my father's town and she said,
well you're spelling it wrong.
And I was like, okay.
And she said where are you looking in Austria.
I said, because that's where he lived.
And she pushed back rolling chair.
She pushed me into the ball and she
got on the computer and she
said, there's your father's town.
And we just started and Doris started a family tree,
and we started to discover all these people.
My sister found a website called
Ostrava And they were a group
that you could send information to and they
would send anything that they know that they could find.
And for a long time, we didn't hear anything.
And then my sister
got an email saying that we had a relative in
Australia and his name was
Ray Hoopert and we
didn't have a Ray Hoopert in the family,
but we contacted him.
And it was Otto Hitlinger.
He was my father's cousin and he
thought that the entire Hoopert's family
had been murdered.
So he changed his name to Hoopert
and there was an Otto Hoopert in family,
so he changed his first name to Ray.
And if he had not done that,
we wouldn't have found him,
and he answered lots and
lots of questions and told us a lot of things.
And we found another relative in London.
So little by little, we came up with
these little bits that we would
put together like a puzzle.
And then I found or I learned
about the book that my
father's I guess she would have been cousin.
Her name was Ruth Hoopert.
And she was taken to
Teresa Star where she married and became pregnant in
Teresa Star and then she was sent to
Auschwitz and Mangla and
decided that she would be a good patient because
she was pregnant and
I'm going into all things that he did.
But she wrote a book and she
wrote it for her grandchildren, basically.
And it starts with her
being a little girl in her house and growing
up and everything that happened all the way
through until she settled in Israel.
So there was a lot that we
learned just from reading through that she
unfortunately passed before we found out about
her and we weren't able to talk to her.
>> And she was his cousin?
>> Let's see. She would be a cousin, yeah.
>> So once you graduated from college and married,
and how did you come to Atlanta?
How did you come to Georgia?
>> Well, we started out just
doing work in Connecticut, in Hartford.
I had, since I was a very little boy,
wanted to be a truck driver.
So I went to the New England school of tractor-trailer,
and a friend of mine had taught
me how to drive a tractor trailer.
He was a tractor-trailer driver,
and so I drove for Roadway
for a while and then for a private trucking company,
and Cindy, actually,
when we got married, she was working as a bartender.
The woman was filling out
the form and she looked at us and said,
"Which one of you is
the driver and which one of you is the bartender?"
We did a couple of different things here and there,
and Cindy's parents were here in Atlanta.
So we came down to be close to them.
When we got married, we actually
spent nine months driving around the country.
So we had to travel around
looking for a place that we wanted to be.
But we came down here.
I worked for a company for an outfitters here in Atlanta.
I managed most of their stores,
and then ended up going back up to New York when
my grandmother passed away
and went into the carpet business,
which I swore I'd never do.
And I've worked in the Bronx
for a while and we had our son,
and we decided we'd move back to
Georgia and be close to Cindy's mother and father again.
>> And when you got married,
was it a big wedding, a little wedding?
>> It started out as a little wedding,
[LAUGHTER]
and we lost control of it.
It was medium-sized. It was a big wedding.
And it was a lot of fun.
>> And is her family Jewish too?
>> No.
>> So how did that work out for the wedding?
>> Actually, at the wedding, there was nothing.
And for the most part, Cindy's family, they're
not abrasive and they're not confrontational.
I never felt out of place, for the most part.
There were a couple of people that made me uncomfortable,
but really it was never an issue.
And like I said, we were not religious at all.
Both of us were not religious at that point in time.
And one of her uncles, once at a party,
after we were married for a few years,
came over and put his arm around my shoulders and said
that he'd come to figure
out that I was one of the good Jews.
That's about the anti-Semitic statement
I got from the family.
And that wasn't so bad.
I think he meant it as a compliment.
No, her mother was amazing,
just one of the most wonderful,
gentle, soft people you'd ever want to meet.
Her father worked for AT&T,
and he was an executive.
We met people here,
we built a home here,
and then we ended up going back up to New York,
like I said when my grandmother passed
and we lived in Fresh Meadows in Queens.
And Cindy worked for the phone company
at that point in New York,
and we decided that we liked what we were doing,
and I actually did like the carpet business.
But we didn't want to live in New York.
So we moved back down here and we
opened a business, actually,
right next to the Botanical Gardens,
and we were there a little over 20 years.
And then sold that, and went on from there.
>> And so how did you come to decide
to stop sharing your father's story more widely?
>> Charlotte's fool. When I
was sitting watching the news and they were showing that.
And my cousin, Doris, lives in Charlotte.
Well, she's an Attorney,
elder care attorney there.
And I sat there, I'm not sure I breathed,
and I watched people scream Jews will not replace
us and I watched people carry swastikas and flags,
and torches down the street,
and I watched fights and I
watched everything that happened,
and I couldn't get past it.
The phrase is, this can never happen again.
And my father always said, yes,
it can, and it probably will.
So just be careful that,
yes, it can happen again.
And I watched that and I thought,
here it is. It's happening again.
And for the next couple of days
I was probably difficult to be around.
I think [LAUGHTER] my wife came
home one day from work and she said that she had
found that the Breman Museum
was having a docent class and
you could be a docent at the Breman Museum,
and I said, okay.
And so I went down and I met Jennifer who was there,
and you probably know Jennifer,
and Jennifer took me on
a private little tour through the museum,
and we got back out of the museum
and I literally had tears in my eyes,
and I said, "Yes, I'm going to take the course."
And she said, "Are you all right?"
And I told her about my father, and she said,
"Do you have like a half an hour more so?"
And I said, "Yeah."
And she sat me down with one of the speakers,
and he talked to me about speaking to,
as a second-generation speaker,
to school children all the way up to senior citizens.
So I worked as a docent for
a period of time and then became speaker.
And that was it.
I felt like if there was ever
a time that people needed to
know about this and know what can happen,
what was the end result going to be?
And the thing that
I try and get across to people
is that it's not just Jews.
Anti-Semitism is certainly targeted,
but it can be anybody.
Some powerful speaker decides that he doesn't like
some group and convinces a number
of people that they shouldn't like that group either,
and they convince more people,
and before you know it,
you have Nazi Germany.
And I just couldn't, for the life of me,
allow myself to let that go by.
So I just became involved.
>> What do you most hope then that students will take
away from learning about your family story?
That people are all people.
I've had kids come up and hug me at the end.
I hold up the star so they can come and see it.
I had one girl who told me that
her great grandmother was
one of the last people in the slave,
that she was a slave.
And I said, take your phone.
And I said, do you have a phone?
She said, of course, I have a phone.
I said, take your phone, put it against a bottle or
something and mean it up and
talk to her and record her story
because you want to play it for your great grandchildren.
But one of the thing I use as an example,
I guess, is that you're in school,
and some new kids shows up.
I never seen them before.
And at some point during the day,
he takes out a rug and he rolls it out on the floor and
he takes off his shoes and he kneels down and he prays.
And you have a split second in your head to decide,
I've been taught these people are dangerous and I should
stay away from him and watch out for him,
or that's really interesting and beautiful and just
wait until he's finished and then go over to him and say,
you know what, that was just amazing.
Can you explain that to me?
Can you tell me more about it?
And then maybe I'll ask you about you.
And before you know it,
you might be best friends and it's that split second
that everybody has during
their lives all the time to decide,
I like you, I don't like
you or I'm scared of you or I'm not scared of you.
And people need to start understanding.
It doesn't matter if you're gay. It's fine.
It doesn't matter if you're black, if you're white,
if you're Chinese, if you're Japanese,
if you're Hindu, it doesn't matter.
And in fact, it does matter because we all
have different things that we know and
different experiences and different life stories
that we can share with each other and it will make
you a better person because you'll know more.
So that's what I try is to send them away
with the idea that hatred is not acceptable.
Learning from somebody is fine.
If you don't want to learn from somebody,
just stand off to the side, and it's your loss.
But hating somebody and wanting to
hurt somebody is not acceptable.
>> So is there anything that we
haven't talked about that you'd like to share?
>> Oh, goodness.
[LAUGHTER]
When I do my presentations,
I bring this up on the screen.
I have a screenshot of my family members.
And in the screenshot,
the ones that were still alive
or that didn't die during the Holocaust are
in white and everybody else is in
red and majority of the screen is in red.
And what I try and say to people and what I
think is important is
that everybody needs to know that Hitler failed.
It's not a question of,
he did a really good job,
he did the best he could, he failed.
And then I show pictures of my kids and my
grandchild and I assume to be other grandchild.
And, well, I don't show that picture.
I just want people to understand
that what he did was unthinkable.
And how anybody could have
stood by and watched that and not said no,
is something I will
never ever comprehend, never understand it.
But it happened. And we
all need to understand that number one,
he didn't succeed and number two,
it can and probably will happen again.
And number three, you have a choice.
You can be a bystander and
you can watch it all go and just say,
well, they're not after me. It's cool.
Or you can stand up and say no.
That's not allowed.
We're not going to allow you to do that.
And you guys need to
be the ones that stand up and say no.
>> Thank you so much for
your time and for sharing your life with us.
Really appreciate it. So thank you.
>> You're welcome. I hope we are all good.
So we have continued our search literally for
over 40 years and we thought we had things
pretty well ironed out and knew where the blank spit.
And I was out visiting
my my grandson and my son and daughter in law,
sorry, was visiting my grandson.
And a couple of things happened.
My sister was contacted by a woman in Saskatchewan,
she's a teacher, I believe,
but her hobby is helping
families find and locate information
about members that were lost in the holocaust
or just members that survived the holocaust.
And she sent us a number
of papers and a lot of them had nothing to do with us.
But one in particular showed that
my father was actually
drafted into the Soviet army while he was in the vote.
We thought that he had gone through
the woods and fought with partisans.
I found out the name of
the general and we
found out a lot more information
about how things had gone.
There's one photograph that I have
that shows there are seven soldiers
and the general and his wife are sitting and
my father is standing alongside with the seven.
And we thought it was just,
an end of the war photograph.
It was actually the award ceremony.
Each one of those soldiers received an award,
and that's when my father was awarded the Red Star.
So also within the two weeks that we were out visiting,
my sister called me and said that she
had received a phone call from a woman or an email,
actually, I guess, from a woman who had a DNA test
done and discovered that she was our cousin.
My sister had been tested,
had a DNA test done, I've not.
And she contacted my sister and they started
talking and it turns out that she's a cousin.
So we're going to pursue that and hopefully
get together with her and trade stories.
But it was amazing that after all of this time,
there's still information coming in.
>> She was a cousin from
your father's side of the family?
>> More than likely
from my grandfather's side
of the family would be my guess.
>> Really fascinating. Isn't it?
>> Yeah. So this I actually used
to carry in my pocket [LAUGHTER] and hold up.
And Jeremy at the Breman,
who was the archivist saw me do it once and said,
bring your things into my office and put them all
in boxes and special papers.
So I'm not allowed to touch it anymore.
[LAUGHTER]
>> They are in really good shape.
>> This is the Soviet star.