Kresch Placeline

If you thought the previous one too short, this one is even shorter, at least in number of generations. Though there are more places in it. If only because my great grandmother moved around a lot once she left her home in Galicia. 

There are two major groups in the US who have problems tracking their ancestors. The first is African Americans, who for some reason can't track their ancestry easily before the mid 1800s. </sarcasm> The other is those of Jewish ancestry. Our reasons are different, and yet in some ways, far too similar to African American issues. People would rather hate and destroy us than acknowledge what has been done to us. Because of this, I don't know any generations before my great-great grandparents on either side of my grandfather's line. And I have little hope I will find more. But I keep looking. Just in case.

As always, bold is places with major events (Birth, Marriage, and Death), and italics is other locations where they lived for at least a year.

1. Dobra aka Dora Kresch Hillinger

A. Chicago, Illinois. This is where the Hillinger clan finally settled in the US, after nearly a decade of moving around the South. While her husband was not in Chicago when he passed, Dora lived here with most of her children until her death in 1969.

B. Little Rock, Arkansas. After a few years in Memphis, the Hillingers moved to Little Rock, where Dora worked at either a hospital or a school, or possibly both, as a cook in their kitchens. I'm not sure what prompted the move, but I do know they stayed here through my grandfather's time in high school before moving once more.

C. Memphis, Tennessee. After the Hillingers arrived in the US, they settled in Memphis, near where Dora's sister in law and her husband lived. They lived there for at least four years before moving on to another location in the American South.

D. Paris, France. The Hillinger family settled in Paris while Alex worked to get the money together to get the whole family to the US. They traveled from Le Havre to Ellis Island, where they landed, and the family remained in the US to this day.

E. Frankfurt, Germany. After World War I, Dora and at least one of her sisters moved to Frankfurt together. I have record of another of her sisters and also one of her brothers moving there as well, and that their mother moved there and was living there when she died. I don't know much about her pre-marriage life here, but I do know that at this time, there was a rising community of Jews in Frankfurt, and one of the last Mayors of Frankfurt before the rise of the Nazi party was also Jewish. It was a good place to be Jewish in Germany between the wars. 

So it was here she met my great grandfather, and here that they married. All six of their children were born in Frankfurt, and the older ones went to school here. Dora and Alex ran several businesses here, and her focus was on a cafe they owned. But with the rise of Nazi power, things became difficult for the Jews in Germany, and after the last of their businesses failed, her husband decided it would be safer if their family left the country. They had two options for family to go be near at the time. Since he had been kicked out of England, he went for the other option--the US, where three of his four siblings lived. So the family moved to Paris to be safe until such time as they could get a visa to the US, and could afford passage across the sea.

F. Czudek, Galicia (now Poland). This is where my great-grandmother was born. A small village in a country that no longer exists. Galicia was a country that was part of the Austrio Hungarian empire, and by the mid nineteenth century, it was a very poor country. Many Jewish communities had been settled there, and it was an area rife with pograms, as was true of most Jewish areas of Eastern Europe. It is a short way away from Rzeszow, which was a center of Jewish learning in the 19th and early 20th centuries. After the first World War, it was absorbed into Poland and the Ukrane, depending on the part of Galicia. Cuzdek itself is now part of southern Poland.

I know very little about Dora's family's life there, but I can imagine what it was like, having grown up watching Fiddler on the Roof, because that's pretty much what it was like in most of Eastern Europe. What I know for certain is this. Shortly after the end of the first world war, there was a pogram here. I don't know for certain how Dora's family was affected, though I have a guess. And it was shortly after that, in 1919, that Dora and her sister left for Frankfurt.

2. Benzion Kresch

I really know very little about my great great grandfather. Just that he lived in and probably died in the village his children were born in. I'm not even sure he (or his wife) were born there.

A. Czudek, Galicia. This is the only location I am certain of for Benzion. I believe that all his children were born here, and my speculation is that the pogram I mentioned above either affected him so that he died, or that he was literally killed in the pogram. I have no proof. Just the mention that several Jews died in the attack, and that he was gone by the time my great-grandmother left Czudek. The only other thing I want to note here is that the cemetery he was likely laid to rest in was later plowed over by the gentiles in the area and used as pastureland. Upon reading that, never had I better understood African American anger. I could say a lot of angry things here, but I won't. I'll just let you imagine them.

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That's it. That's all I have. Six locations. In fact, until a couple years ago, I didn't even know my great-grandmother's siblings' names. Now I have names, and even a couple of photos. I still know very little about this branch of my family, but I hope someday to know more.