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Holocaust Memorial Education Center

Shimon and Sara Birnbaum Jewish Community Center

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Descendant Profile

BARBARA GILFORD

BARBARA

GILFORD

SECOND GENERATION

DESCENDANT:

BARBARA BUCHSBAUM GILFORD

  • DESCENDANT BRIEF BIOGRAPHY BY BARBARA GILFORD, author of Heart Songs: A Holocaust Memoir

    Over the last half century I have taught school, published numerous articles on ballet and modern dance and practiced psychotherapy as a Clinical Social Worker. Writing my family’s story is an act of love that carries my determination to insure that their memory is preserved for succeeding generations.

    My father gave me many gifts. The gift of his family, in a big box of black and white photographs, and bedtime stories about their family life in Czechoslovakia, entered my imagination and placed me in their midst when I was only eight years old.  Before I ever heard the words “Holocaust” and ” gas chambers,” I believed I knew them. I loved them and, my father assured me, they would have loved and adored me. When I grew up, I told their story to friends and my own family, including the story of  my father’s heroic flight to safety in England and ultimate arrival in the United States.

    Several years ago, by chance, I found a cache of letters, forgotten for decades in a folder amid a stack of oversized books on the bottom shelf of an old blue cupboard.  Written during the war, they tell my grandmother Clara’s story of trying desperately to get out of Europe. Now I am writing her story and that of the larger Buchsbaum family. 

    Editor’s Note: In 2020 Barbara Gilford published Heart Songs: A Holocaust Memoir.

    When the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia in March 1939, the Buschbaum family chose different paths to escape Nazi brutality. Intelligence was not enough to survive the SS; bad decisions could prove fatal. Their stories live in the Heart Songs–a Holocaust Memoir, and form the legacy of love and loss inherited by the author, a second-generation Holocaust survivor.

    Grandmother Clara Buschbaum fled to Italy in 1939 and found refuge in the mountain village of San Donato Val di Comino. There, the local residents sheltered twenty-eight Jewish refugees, risking their own safety by hiding them from German soliders.

    Clara’s letters to her son, John, who escaped to England before emigrating to the United States, illustrate her relentless efforts to obtain a visa to a country beyond Europe’s borders. She sustained an unimaginable optimism despite separation from her beloved family and an uncertain future.

    In telling the tragic story of the grandmother she never knew, the author explores historical, familial and psychological aspects of the Holocaust. Heart Songs illuminates the consequences of inherited grief and unmourned losses, and celebrates the strength and resilience of those who died and those who survived. (Back cover of Heart Songs)

     

    Editor’s Note:

    When an only child’s imaginary friends include her unknown first cousin, Zuzana (Susi), and her unknown grandmother, Oma Clara, both lost in the Holocaust, we know we are about to read a heartfelt true story. But not only. This book is much more. This but sings because it is written by an extraordinary writer, journalist with a passion for research, an artist with a passion for life, and a pyschotherapist with a passion to know deeply the heart. Heart Songs takes us on an odyssey through the author’s childhood, to her grandmother’s last letters, to her father’s monumental efforts to save his mother to the weaving together of three generations whose legacy transcends their tragic deaths. Heart Songs is filled with longing, loss and grief, yes, but also enduring love.  

     

  • DESCENDANT SUBMISSION(s):

    TESTIMONY SUBMITTED BY BARBARA BUCHSBAUM GILFORD

    CLARA  BABAD BUCHSBAUM  (grandmother of Barbara Buchsbaum Gilford)

     

    My father, John Buchsbaum, wrote:   “My mother was the mainstay of our lives.  She was the foundation on which we built our lives.”

    CLARA:  Born July 1, 1882 in Bielitz, Silesia, Austro-Hungarian Empire,: Poland today.  On February 7, 1906, Clara married Ignatz Buchsbaum,  bookseller in Ostrava, CZ.    They were citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until Czechoslovakia became a sovereign nation at the end of WWI and they and their two children, Gretl and Hans, automatically obtained Czech citizenship.   

    From the beginning of their marriage until the death of Ignatz in 1937, Clara worked in the I.BUCHSBAUM publishing company, one of the largest German language publishing houses in Czechoslovakia.  In 1913, Clara received her bookseller apprenticeship diploma.  In 1937, she became co-owner and publisher with her son Hans (John) Buchsbaum.

    She was a devoted wife to Ignatz and mother to her children.  She adored her granddaughter “Susi.” She was a woman of enormous energy and competence, managing a household while working in the publishing company. 

    In March of 1939 the Germans invaded Czechoslovakia and the family strove to obtain visas in order to emigrate.  Only my father, who escaped his homeland with the SS on his heels, found sanctuary, first in England, where a fraternity brother from Charles University in Prague sponsored him. Two years later he was admitted to the United States.

    Clara fled to Italy in September 1939 and was interned first in Florence and later in San Donato Val di Comino, a small town in the foothills of the Apennine mountain range, about sixty miles east of Rome.

    San Donato provided sanctuary to twenty-eight German -speaking Jews until May of 1944 when a Fascist in the town betrayed them to German soldiers who were fighting in the battle for Monte Casino.

    My grandmother was rounded up with sixteen others, taken to jail in Rome for a few days, then transported to the Fossoli Concentration Camp in Northern Italy. After a few months, they were sent to their deaths in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau.  There is a discrepancy regarding the date of my grandmother’s death.  The family observes it on September 30, 1944 since that is the date recorded in the town records in Ostrava, CZ.

    GRETL BUCHSBAUM SPITZER: (my father’s sister) Born Feb. 12, 1907 in Mahrisch Ostrau (That was the German name of the city).  Today its name is:  Ostrava.  Last place of residence:  24 Strelnice, M. Ostrava. Wife and mother.

    Committed to Ghetto Theresienstadt on September 30, 1942 and transferred to Treblinka with Transport “BT” on October 5, 1942.  This was known as a “death transport” since Treblinka was strictly an extermination camp.

    HUGO SPITZER:  (Gretl’s husband) Industrialist; manager at Viktovice Iron Works.  Born:           See above information regarding round-up and death.

    ZUZANA SPITZER:  Born June 3, 1931  see above information.  My cousin Susi, eleven years old, a math whiz and excellent skier, lost her precious life with her parents in Treblinka.  She had written to my father, her “Onkel Johnny,” that she was eager to emigrate and meet her American cousins in Philadelphia.

    Remembrance of my Father

    My father gave me many gifts. The gift of his family, in a big box of black and white photographs, and bedtime stories about their family life in Czechoslovakia, entered my imagination and placed me in their midst when I was only eight years old.  Before I ever heard the words "Holocaust" and " gas chambers," I believed I knew them. I loved them and, my father assured me, they would have loved and adored me. When I grew up, I told their story to friends and my own family, including the story of  my father's heroic flight to safety in England and ultimate arrival in the United States.

    John Hans Buchsbaum Biography:

    John H. Buchsbaum: 1910-1988. Received Doctor of Jurisprudence degree, Charles University, Prague, 1933; Publisher in Ostrava, Czechoslovakia, 1933-1939; United States Army Intelligence Officer, 1944-1963; Received Ph.D. in History, Georgetown University, 1960. Professor of History, Pace University, 1962-1985.

  • Sources and Credits:

    Credits:

    Historic Family photographs, biography and testimony donated by Barbara Gilford. Excerpts from Barbara Gilford, Heart Songs: A Holocaust Memoir (2020) Amsterdam: Amsterdam Publishers.

    The SSBJCC  Holocaust Memorial & Education Center gratefully acknowledges the donation by Barbara Gilford of a hardcopy of her book, Heart Songs: A Holocaust Memoir. The memoir is available at Amazon.

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