Stephen Kornreich papers

Stephen Kornreich (1912-1989) was born in Munkács, Hungary (Mukacheve, Ukraine) to Ignatz Kornreich (1880-1944) and Sheindl Schoenfeld (1884-1916). He had five siblings: Sarah (Sula, 1905-1944), Marcus Joseph (nicknamed Joska, later Joseph Korda, 1907-1993?), Blanka (later Blanka Kornreich Ney, 1908-1944), Bela (later Bert Korda, 1910-1992), and Benedict (later Beno Korda, 1914-2010). His mother died giving birth to his sixth sibling, who also died during childbirth. Stephen’s father remarried to Blanka Kellermann (1895-1944) in 1921, and they had two more children: Andor (1927-1944) and Miklos (1933-1944). The family primarily spoke Hungarian at home with Sheindl, and Yiddish after Ignatz married Blanka. Ignatz was a businessman.

Stephen attended architectural school in Bodenbach, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic). He went to Palestine in 1933, on a six-week visa, but decided to stay and work as an architect, first in Tel Aviv, and later in Jerusalem. In February 1939 Stephen immigrated to the United States aboard the RMS Queen Mary. He worked as an architect in New York, and in 1942 he enlisted in the United States Army Air Corps. He served in the Pacific Theatre in New Guinea, Australia, and Philippines. In 1943, Stephen married Lisbeth Modley, a Jewish refugee from Austria, and after the war they had two daughters. After he was discharged in December 1945 he resumed his architecture career in New York. In 1951 the Kornreich family moved to Maryland.

Stephen tried to get his family to leave Europe, but his family remained in Munkács. His father; stepmother; two half-brothers, Andor and Miklos; brother Joska and his wife Piri (née Moskovics) and son George (1939-1944); brother Bela; sister Sula, her husband Ernest Rosenfeld, and their son Norbert (1935-1944); and sister Blanka, her husband Tibor Ney (1906-1991), and their son Tomas (1937-1944) were all deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Only Joska, Bela, and Tibor Ney survived. Stephen and Lisbeth sponsored Joska and Bela’s immigration to the United States. After they arrived in the U.S., they changed their names to Joseph Korda and Bert Korda respectively.

Stephen’s other brother, Benedict, was in Prague during the start of World War II. He fled to Budapest, Hungary in December 1942. In 1943 he was conscripted as a forced-laborer in Košice and other locales. He later fled the labor battalion and joined the Russian Army. He returned to Hungary with them. After the war, he married a non-Jewish Czech woman and they lived in Prague until June 1968 when they fled to Edmonton, Canada. He changed his name to Beno Korda.