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Search digs up personal history



By Lisa Nuch Venbrux
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
July 11th, 2007 issue

Tomáš Jelínek, who has been highly active in Holocaust-era restitution and claims issues, searched the Knesset’s list of account holders in 2005. He discovered no acquaintances on the site, but a search for his own family yielded surprising results.

In 1938, as parts of Czechoslovakia fell into German hands, Jelínek’s great-grandfather Adolf Krokauer was expelled from his home in Teplice, north Bohemia, along with his wife and four children. Upon arriving in Prague, Krokauer began making plans to flee by depositing assets in a bank abroad.
“At that time it was still OK for Czech Jews to leave,” Jelínek says. “He was trying to get his family to Palestine.”
Three years later, before the Krokauer family could move away, they were rounded up by the Nazis and taken to Łódź Ghetto in present-day Poland. All five were killed by the exhaust fumes of German trucks.
Only one family member survived — Jelínek’s grandmother, Margarete Janský, 86. As a married woman, “she had not been sent with the rest of the family,” Jelínek explains. Instead, she was sent to Terezín concentration camp with her husband, then to Auschwitz where she was later freed.
Jansky, who now lives in Vienna, is eligible to make a claim through the Company for Locating and Retrieving Assets of People who were Killed in the Holocaust’s Web site. Like any claimant, however, she must endure the wearisome process involved in most restitution cases, each of which is decided on an individual basis.
“She knows about the claim, but she cannot fill out the forms,” Jelínek says. “She is already too old.” He will make a claim for her once the English part of the site is active.
While neither Jelínek nor Jansky knows what family assets are held in Israel, he says the value of making a claim cannot be measured in crowns.
“For me, the story I will learn from the archives in Israel is more important.”

Lisa Nuch Venbrux can be reached at lvenbrux@praguepost.com


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