General Research notes, 2/18/07

On Friday, 2/16/07, I spoke briefly with MLL, who used to work at the IRO Children's Village in Bad Aibling, and now resides in the US. She had no recollection of my father (he would have been one of about 500 children there, so that was expected). We still had an enlightening conversation about the IRO facility at Bad Aibling and the lot of those children who were sent to the US. I hope to keep in touch and find out more.

On Monday, 2/19/07, I'll be mailing off an application to the Red Cross' International Tracing Service to see if they have any records.

This week I found a listing at the Albert Eintstein Archive of a correspondence between Fr. Emil Komora and Albert Einstein in 1940. Fr. Komora is listed as my father's legal guardian on his intake form at Boy's Town, near Omaha. The AEA archivist who responded to my query indicated no relevant information, but I am trying to see if I can get any background info about Fr. Komora or any refugee organizations he worked with. The archivist I emailed wrote back on 2/19 that there is no relevant information of any kind in the correspondence in question—another dead end.

Here's a picture of the Children's Center at Prien, where my father was turned over to UNRRA custody:

There was another DP Children's Center nearby at Kloster Indersdorf, which I will also try to research. This photo came from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum's online photo archives. I'll post an article on the IRO Children's Center at Prien when I get more information about it.

Displaced Persons Camps in Germany

I recently found this site (www.dpcamps.org) which is an info exchange about UNRRA/IRO's Displaced Persons camps in Central Europe after WW2. My father lived at the following ones in Germany:
1946- Camp Hammerweg, Weiden
3/1947- Prien
9/1947- Aglasterhausen
11/48- Bad Aibling

It was at Prien that his former guardian, Mrs. Proniewicz, turned him over to UNRRA custody. Many of the experiences Dad has talked about, playing on former battlefields, collecting war artifacts, stumbling into a former concentration camp, probabaly occurred during the transit period of 3/1947-11/48.

I'm a little unsure about this timeline, taken from his UNRRA registration form, however. Dad mentioned Aglasterhausen as a sorting facility, probably for repatriation purposes. According to his account, the staff was sorting between German, Polish and Russian children. As he was apprehensive of the Russian staff, and could barely understand them, he chose to tell them he was German, so he could stay where he was. However, he has indicated that he considered Bad Aibling/Rosenheim his home.

His memory of life in Bad Aibling, however, wasn't much happier. He has told me of at least 2 attempts to run away. During one period a family in nearby Rosenheim took him in. He doesn't have an accurate sense of how long he was with them before he was returned to the IRO camp at Bad Aibling.

I would like to hear from anyone who has any information about the above facilities.

Where is Iwacewicze?

This whole story begins in a town in Poland. However, proper spelling of Polish place names was not a major concern of the case worker who prepared my father's transfer form. The town from which Mrs. Proniewicz, her two children, and my father were
evacuated in 1944 was alternately spelled Iwaniewicze, Iwaczewicze, and Iwacewicze. After my friend Evan (who had lived briefly in Poland) and I investigated further, we decided that the town in question was Iwacewicze.

Iwacewicze is in the Brest Voblast (province) of current-day Belarus. However, until 1939 it was part of Poland. In 1939 it was ceded to the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR) under a secret agreement with Nazi Germany. In 1942, the Nazis seized the provincial capital, Brest, decimating the Jewish population. In July, 1944, the Red Army retook the city. In 1945, the province officially became part of the BSSR and the majority of its Polish population was expelled.

According to the testimony given by Mrs. Proniewicz when she turned my father over to UNRRA custody in 1947, she was asked to take care of him in March 1942 by the operators of a children's transport. As mentioned above, they were evacuated from Iwacewicze in 1944 to Weiden, in northern Bavaria.

I have some questions about the reported time frame of the Proniewiczes' departure from Iwacewicze:

1. What military action in the area between May 1941 and March 1942 would have resulted in the necessity to gather orphans into a children's transport?
- The German offensive in the area began in June 1942, completing in August.

2. What agency would have organized this effort? How would an orphan have been assigned to Mrs. Proniewicz? Did she volunteer, or would she have had a soldier or relief worker show up at her door with a baby saying "Here, have an orphan!"?

3. In 1944, they would have been fleeing the Red Army. They ended up in Weiden, which was then under Nazi control
- Why would a Polish family run to Nazi-ruled territory?
- The mass expulsion of Poles from Belarusian territory didn't begin until 1945.

Cross-referencing the testimony with the widely-accepted history of the region in 1941-1944 has given me reason to question a number of details of Mrs. Proniewicz's report. Anyone with any information on the background of these events is encouraged to post a reply to this entry, or contact me via email.

Welcome to Iwacewicze

Hello everyone. Welcome to the "Back To Iwacewicze" blog.

The history of the West has been one of severe turbulence. While we think of Europe as a peaceful and somewhat unextreme place, this has only been true for the last few decades. The unbridled slaughterfest that we know as the two World Wars was the culmination of centuries of increasingly vicious and widespread tribal combat. The nations involved could be considered civilized only by the measure of the convoluted justifications, and technological prowess, put into the effort to grab land and resources on a crowded continent. In the ebb and flow of borders, the movement of populations, and the devastation/reconstruction of cities and counties, many stories of ordinary people, the ones who ultimately pay the price of military adventures and political demagogy, are lost.

One of these stories is that of my father, Konstanty Monclair. His official story begins in March 1942, when testimony given to a United Nations Relief and Rehabiliation Administration intake officer states that he was handed over to the care of a Mrs. Proniewicz in a Polish town called Iwacewicze. His birthdate was estimated at May 1941, making him about 9-10 months old at the time. There are no hard details between that time and March 1947, when he was given over to the care of UNRRA. As he was a small child, he remembers very little about that time. When he came to the United States in late 1950-early 1951, the only records that he has (that he knows of) were his UNRRA registration form and his First Communion photo taken while living at the IRO Children's Village in Bad Aibling, Bavaria. I definitely have my work cut out for me.

So why am I taking on this seemingly hopeless project? In the past, my father had said that he tried to look into this, and about 5 years ago, my mother had tried to research this, without much luck. Several things have given me hope that I might make headway where they could not. An increasing amount of information has been made available on the internet. With a few hours' Google searches, I've been able to find the beginings of info trails that may lead me somewhere. Also, the establishment of Dr. James Watson's DNA Shoah project (http://www.dnashoah.info) may give some leads past the dead end of the paper trail. Other second generation of displaced persons may be out there looking for their past.

I am undertaking this project in three stages:
1. Research on whereabouts and details of the pre-UNRRA custody period of May 1941-March 1947.
2. Research on any records of his time under UNRRA custody, March 1947-the end of 1950.
3. Research on details of his life from entry into the USA up to his intake into Boys Town in the late 1950s.

In addition to information on my search, please feel free to post any thoughts or information on any other displaced person info search. While the focus of this blog is on my father's past, I'd also like to hear from anyone else who is engaged in a similar hunt for their past.