Pollatschek family papers

Henriette Heller (1870-1942) was born in Hořice, eastern Bohemia on 26 February 1870. She married Hermann Pollatschek (1858-1926), who was director of a coal mine in Aussig (Ústí nad Labem) in 1890, and the Pollatscheks had four children, two sons, Hans and Willi, who were killed during World War I, a daughter, Helene (or Lene), and a son, Friedrich (1897-1967). In 1927, Friedrich married Elisabeth (Liesl) Lederer, and the couple moved into the Pollatschek family home in Aussig, where they had two children, Hans and Renate. In the late 1930s, with the rise of Nazi sympathizers in northern Bohemia, Friedrich and Liesl moved their family to Prague, before leaving for Switzerland in September 1938, just a few weeks before the Sudeten regions of northern Bohemia were ceded to Germany. Friedrich tried to persuade his mother and sister to join them there, and Henriette visited her son's family in Lucerne in February 1939, only to return a few weeks later, and in March 1939 the German army marched into Czechoslovakia. In April of that year, Friedrich and Liesl and their children left for Cuba, where they remained until September 1940, when they were able to immigrate to the United States. During this time, Friedrich tried to get Cuban visas and ship's passage for his mother and sister, but by the time he was able to obtain those, in 1941, the Germans were no longer permitting Jews to leave Czechoslovakia, and in 1942, Henriette was deported to Theresienstadt, and subsequently to Treblinka, where she was killed. Lene was deported to Poland, where she was a forced laborer before she was presumably killed. Friedrich, Liesl and their children lived in New York, first in Queens and later Lake Placid, before moving to California in 1947.