FISCHMANN Samuel (Samu)

Õr-Ladány

    My great-grandfather Samuel FISCHMAN was born in Or Ladany, Hungary on May 8, 1872.  Õr-Ladány is in Szabolcs County is today known as Mezõladány.

   Little is known about Samuel's early life in Õr-Ladány.  His birth entry in the temple registry in nearby Kisvárda lists his god-father as "Schvarcz H.".  This was probably a relative of his future brother-in-law, Herman SCHWARZ (1861).  (Herman was only 11 at the time, but he would become a major godfather of the FISCHMANN-SCHWARTZ clan).

   At the age of 8, Samuel lost his mother Juliana who was only 28.  As was the custom, his father quickly remarried only four months later only to be widowed and remarried again two years later.  Samuel's father Mor was known to be a mean-spirited man and he probably got little comfort from him.  Samuel was the oldest boy, but his father had many children between his three wives, although many died of infant mortality.  According to the custom of the time, the children would have been raised as one family with the younger children perhaps not even realizing that their natural mothers had died.

Munkacs

   We have no clue as to why Samuel left his birthplace of Õr-Ladány for the city of .  On August 8, 1898, Samuel left a job as a grocer's assistant in nearby Mentok to move to Munkács and marry a wine agent's daughter, Viktoria SALZBERGER.  Munkács was a city on the eastern edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  Today it is called Mukachevo in the Ukraine.  By the time his first son Adolf was born in 1901, Samuel was a grocer living at Var utca 1.    
    When Munkács was seized from the receding Ottoman Empire and annexed to Hungary, the Emperor titled lands to the Von Schonborn family to develop and assimilate into the Empire.   The Austrian aristocrats often used Jews as property managers to manage their remote estates since they were often better educated and less unruly than the local rabble.  The Von Schonborns may have brought the SALZBERGERs with them from Bavaria or they may have they may have been Serphadic Jews that remained after the Turks retreated.   In any event, the SALZBERGERs were "yard Jews" for the Von Schonborns managing their lumber business and brewery in nearby Paszika.
   Was it an arranged marriage as so many others were in the FISCHMANN-SCHWARTZ family.  Or perhaps, as a young man interested in adventure, he wanted to Munkács because it was a center of Jewish culture.  He stayed in Munkacs for at least another 4 years when his daughter Sari was born.

Beregszasz

    Samuel and his family then moved to nearby Beregszasz where my grandmother Cila was born in 1907 and her brother Marcel was born in 1910.  At least in the eyes of his daughter Cila, Samuel was a big success: "Before my mother died my father was a very successful sales representative for a chocolate manufacturer in Vienna, and he traveled most of the time.  I helped my father in his business, and of course, I helped him at home in the kitchen and I learned to sew to help the family."
   Samuel's father had died in 1906, but he kept up his family connections.  In 1907, he went to his step-sister Leni's wedding in Õr-Ladány with his brother-in-law Herman Schwarz.   Samuel and his wife were very religious orthodox Jews.  In 1914, Samuel took his family to Munkacs to visit the SALZBERGER grandparents during the high holidays when catastrophe struck:

   As my grandmother Cila, tells it: "In September 1914, my parents took my two brothers, my sister and myself to a town very close to the Russian border to visit my grandparents during Jewish high holidays, Sukus, Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippor. We went to temple and prayed for 10 days and the last day we fasted for 24 hours and prayed for our sins of the past year. Then we celebrated the New Year or Yom Kippor, the highest holy day. While we were visiting relatives, my mother became very sick and she died. She was 38 years old. As a 7 year old girl, I saw my mother dying and heard her loud crying. My brother cried very loudly. Later we went back to Grandpa’s house and I saw them open the casket. According to the Jewish religion she had to be buried before sundown. I did not understand it all but I cried and cried.  This was during World War I and this city near the Russian border was almost empty, people were packing their possessions and they were moving because the Russians were coming."   
    No doubt shaken by his wife's death and the sudden outbreak of war, Samuel took his youngest children to his brother-in-law's farm in Tiszasalka: "After my mother died, my father and my oldest  brother went to Budapest to make a living for the family.  It was a very difficult time for my father who was a businessman.   I went to live on a farm with my father’s sister."

Budapest

  As if reliving a scene from his own childhood, Samuel scrambled to find a new mother for his motherless children.

   My mother's version of the story is that "Samuel quickly arranged a second marriage for himself to provide a mother for his four children.  He married Gisela, a beautiful and vivacious woman half his age.  She came from Ujfeherto, the same village from which my father’s family hailed.
     As the story goes,  smart and spirited Gisela was  interested in a man outside of her faith.  Her family owned and operated a pub at the railroad station so she had opportunities to meet many men.  This  romance so horrified her folks that they quickly married her off to my grandfather."

  But according to Cila the marriage caused strife at home particularly between her older brother Adi who was only a few years younger than their new step-mother: "In January 1916, my father, age 46, married a beautiful girl about 22 or 23.  She was from a small village and wanted to escape and live in the city.  The marriage was a bad thing for myself and my sister and brothers.  My step-mother was a nice person, but we did not have a good life.  My brother and sister did not accept her as their mother.  I was a good girl, but I was frightened.  My brother left home when my father married.  My brother was very religious and our step-mother, though Jewish, was not religious and that was one of the reasons my brother left home."

   Cila remembers that times were tough and she was jealous of the new additions to the family:  "Two years later my step-mother had a baby girl, Eva.  We loved this baby but she was spoiled.  Later my step-mother had a boy. We came from a proud middle-class family.  Times were bad, my father was sick a lot and it was hard for him to make a living.  I had only one doll in my life and it broke the day my half-sister was born.  I wanted to be married and get out of the house because it was not a peaceful home."

    My mother's version of the story gives credit to Gizella for being an extraordinary woman:  "The marriage produced two very bright offspring Eva and Paul,  but Samuel and Gisela did not get along and the household was fraught with dissent.  My grandfather, Samuel,  had trouble making a living.  ... He opened a grocery store in Budapest.  The store was located between two convents in an anti-Semitic neighborhood  so it did not take him long to go broke.  After that Samuel opened a haberdashery but unfortunately, that failed too.  Gisela helped to support the family by taking in sewing.  They also let a room to help with expenses.  Arguments constantly erupted about the lack of money.  The four children, including my mother,  from my grandfather’s previous marriage gave their young stepmother a hard time. I heard a lot about their wicked stepmother from my mother and her siblings,  but  I liked and enjoyed Gisela."

  After her older sister finally married a relative of the Schwartz family, my grandmother was finally free to marry her sweetheart.  My grandmother was ignorant of matters involving sex and had no idea how the baby would come out of her belly.  Uncharacteristically, her father was comforting to her: "I became pregnant and I told my father that I was very frightened.  He said if God provides for little lambs, He will provide for you and your baby.  Nine months and two weeks after our wedding we had a cute healthy baby, Agnes.  My father gave me a small check." 

   My mother did not share this same fondness for her grandfather who she saw infrequently on holidays: "My involvement with my mother’s side of my family was limited although they lived close by.  There was just too much strife going on between our households. I remember going to my grandparents’, Samuel and Gisela’s apartment to celebrate Passover.  My grandfather sat at the end of the table in a white nightgown, his armchair lined with pillows.... At the beginning of the evening my grandfather hid a piece of matzo folded in a napkin (afhikoimen) and the children hunted for it throughout the evening.  The child who found it was supposed to get a present, something he or she wished for.  I do not  remember ever getting anything from him, I thought it was a sham."

Tel Aviv

   Agi explains how her grandfather became paranoid and had to be hospitalized in the mental hospital Lipot Mezo in Hungary:  "My grandfather, Samuel,  started to show signs of decline, perhaps from Alzheimer’s, when he was only in his sixties.  He was hospitalized in a mental hospital for a while and I remember he was always agitated, talking incessantly about business associates and family members cheating him and stealing from him.  His son Adi and my father (his son-in-law) were his favorite targets.  Samuel and Gisela survived the War but had lost their son Paul in Mauthausen, the concentration camp, and in 1948, they moved to Israel where my Aunt Eva lived.   My grandfather lived on into his nineties and Gisela took very good care of him as she took her marriage vows seriously.  "

In 1948, Samuel's daughter Eva and her husband Michael Gileadi decided to move to Israel.  Michael insisted they bring their parents and Gizella wouldn't leave Samuel so they transfered him to an institution to the Beilison Hospital at Petah Tikva.    Amazing Samuel died one day after his 90th birthday just as his daughter Cila would die 7 days before her 90th birthday.  Like Cila, Samuel probably died in an advanced stage of Alzheimer's although the disease was not commonly diagnosed at that time.  My mother believed that, as her 90th birthday approached, somehow Cila knew that her time, like her fathers, had come.   Samuel was buried in the Machpela Cemetery in Israel. Giza died in an old age home between Haifa & Matanya^[3].

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