Eckstein family collection

Overview

Collection Summary

Silverware and recipe books, some pages pasted with newspaper clippings (recipes). Susan Cernyak-Spatz’s mother and father Ernst and Frieda Eckstein moved from Berlin then to Vienna. In 1939, Szymon (Ernst) fled to Belgium where he was able to survive in hiding. Frieda and Susan were deported to Theresienstadt and then individually to Auschwitz where Frieda was killed. Susan survived and eventually met and married an American soldier and came to the United States. When Susan’s grandmother, Fanny Tauber, left for the United States prior to the war, she brought with her two cookbooks. These cookbooks have recipes that Fanny hand-wrote. They also include newspaper clippings that date as late as 1937, of printed recipes. These two books were entrusted to Susan, eventually, after the Holocaust. They are entirely in German. The other part of the donation includes pieces of silver, some of them engraved with the initials HT. On July 12, 1938, a number of items were confiscated from Frieda Eckstein, including silver. The silver was in Frieda’s family, which included her aunt Helena Tauber, who fled to Belgium. Many years after the war, Susan was contacted as the only living relative and the the silver was returned to her possession by the Austrian government. A document of this confiscation exists.

Provenance

The collection was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2024 by Jacqueline Fishman, the daughter of Susan Cernyak-Spatz and granddaughter of Frieda Eckstein.