Frank Meissner papers

Franz (Frank) Meissner was born on September 18, 1923, in Trest, Czechoslovakia to Norbert and Lotte. He had an older brother, Leo, and his paternal grandfather also lived with them. His father had owned a wooden shoe factory, but it closed during the economic crisis of 1929. His mother worked as a secretary at her brother’s machine factory to support the family. His father was the president of their synagogue and they went to synagogue every morning. The Jewish community in Trest was small, with only 64 members in 1930. There was no secondary school in Trest, so when Frank was 11 years old he attended school in a neighboring town. In 1937, he left school to apprentice at his uncle’s machine factory. That year he also joined Youth Aliyah, a Zionist youth group, and traveled to Prague to learn Hebrew and to develop a farm proposal for emigration to Palestine. Both brothers wished to emigrate from Czechoslovakia, with the entire family joining them later.
In October 1939, because of increasing persecution by the Germans, Youth Aliyah arranged the emigration from Czechoslovakia to Denmark of many members, including 16 year old Frank. Leo, still waiting to go to Palestine, chose to remain with their parents. Frank was strip searched at the border wehn he eft October 24. He and the other boys were sent to live and work on farms in Denmark. After an initial unpleasant placement, Frank stayed with the Nielsen family, where he was made to feel like part of the family and became involved with the Nielsen’s church. In 1941, he earned a scholarship to attend an agricultural high school in Denmark. Through these early years of the war, Frank received weekly letters from his family. In May of 1942, his family wrote that they were getting ready for their departure, although they do not know where they are going. They tell Frank that they are proud of him and that he should not worry about the family.
After graduating high school, Frank enrolled in the Agricultural College of the University of Copenhagen. In October 1943, he received a call from his landlady telling him not to return home because the Gestapo was looking for him. With the aid of a friend with connections to the underground resistance movement, Frank was smuggled on a fishing boat to Sweden, where he finished his education. While mail service to Europe temporarily improved, and Frank could occasionally send packages of food, he no longer received any letters in return. In September 1944, Frank went to England and was told that if he wanted refuge and a Czech passport, he had to volunteer for the Czech government in exile army. He served in the Royal Air Force in Scotland for the rest of the war. He intensified his efforts to find his family and learned that they had been deported to Theresienstadt. Around May or June 1945, Frank went back to Prague to search for them. A woman from their town wrote Frank that his family had not returned after the war and that after a year in Theresienstadt they had been sent to Auschwitz where they perished. In 1946, he was demobilized and returned to the University in Copenhagen, graduating in 1948 with a bachelor of science in agronomy. He returned to Czechoslovakia, but left six months after the Communist coup that February. He emigrated to the United States in January 1949. He attended Iowa State College and after receiving a masters in agronomy, transferred to the University of California, and 3 years later to Cornell where he earned his doctorate. In 1953, Frank married Margit Morawetz, originally from Austria. She had fled from Prague to France, eventually emigrating to the US in April 1941. 1953. Frank, age 67, died from cancer January 19, 1990, in Maryland.