Red leather portfolio used by a Czech Jewish refugee

Tom Kovary was born as Tibor Kövári on June 23, 1920, in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. Tom’s parents were Olivio and Esther Fuchs Kövári. He joined his one year old brother, Ernö (Ernest), born April 2, 1919. Tom’s parents spoke Esperanto at home and taught this to their children as their mother tongue. Tom and Ernest were the first native Esperanto speakers in the world. Their other native languages were German, Hungarian, and Slovak. The brothers were extremely athletic and belonged to the Bar Kochba Jewish Sports Club. They were national champions in gymnastics and wrestling.

Their father, Olivio, was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on November, 4, 1890. His parents, Alexander and Josefine Berkovits Kovari, arrived in the US in early 1890. Olivio’s birth was never properly registered. The family returned to their hometown of Galanta in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, because Josephine was ill. She died soon after; Alexander remarried and did not return to the US. Gaining recognition of his status as a US citizen was a consuming passion for Olivio; he finally achieved this recognition in 1949. Olivio tried to emigrate to the United States in the early 1930s, but the United States did not recognize his citizenship. As part of the preparation for their imminent emigration, Olivio pulled the boys out of school, in 1934, to teach them the fur trade. But the US response remained negative. Tom and Ernest returned to school and Tom graduated from a vocational school in Bratislava in 1937. However, his father did officially register their desire to emigrate with the US consulate in 1936, a fact that would aid them in their flight from Czechoslovakia in a few years.
On September 2, 1939, Tom and Ernest got into a fight with two Nazi sympathizers on the street in Bratislava. This landed the Nazi sympathizers in the hospital and Tom and Ernest were arrested, along with their father. This was an internationally publicized instance of Jewish resistance; it was even broadcast on the BBC. Widespread street fighting and vandalism followed and the Kovary store was broken into and looted. The district attorney and the head of the prison feared that the boys would be killed by Nazi sympathizers, so they released them in the middle of the night. The Jewish Central Committee assisted with the release and helped the family to go underground. On December 12, 1939, the family crossed illegally into Hungary. They stayed in Budapest until they were able to obtain immigration visas to the United States and transit visas for Yugoslavia and Italy. The Kovary family left Genoa, Italy, on February 20, 1940, on the ship, SS Conte di Savoia. They arrived February 29, 1940, in New York. Upon arrival, they changed their last name to Kovary.

In January 1943, Tom joined the United States Army. He served first in the Quartermasters Corp, but because of his linguistic abilities, was transferred to Military Intelligence. Tom served stateside, chiefly in Louisiana, until he separated from the service in February 1946. Ernest was posted to the European theater and landed at Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944. After the war, Ernest, fluent in seven languages, stayed in Europe working as a translator for the US Department of Justice. He searched for surviving relatives, but found only one cousin, Herta Fuchs, who survived Auschwitz death camp.

After the war, Tom attended Ohio State University on the GI Bill of Rights. While there, he met and eventually married Ingrid Neuhaus, a Jewish refugee from Germany. Ingrid was born in Hamburg on August 2, 1921, to Julius and Marie Eisner Neuhaus. She had two siblings, Annelore, born September 23, 1923, and Hans, born July 20, 1925. Her father was a leather merchant and the family was assimilated. In 1933, they joined a synagogue in reaction to the growing anti-Semitism in the city. The two younger children were sent to England on a Kindertransport in January 1939; Ingrid arrived there by ferry in February. Their parents were deported to the Minsk ghetto in Belorussia in November 1941 and murdered there by the Germans in 1942. They married on July 30, 1950, and had two daughters. In 1953, they moved to New York so that Tom could continue his academic studies at Cornell University. In 1959, he became a professor of Spanish and Linguistics at the State University of New York in Cortland, NY, and retired in 1985. He was devout and active in various Jewish organizations throughout his life. Tom died of cancer in 1988, age 68. His mother, Esther, died a few months later at the age of 91. Ingrid, 88, passed away in September 2009.