KRNOV, Elementary School

One of the seventy life stories of the synagogue in Krnov

Our investigative and detective work started roughly two years ago when Mrs Janáková, one of our teachers, returned from a seminar called How to teach about Holocaust that took place in Terezín. She was telling us how the children started to search for Jewish inhabitants of their town, how they gradually and without assistance uncovered some of their histories to find out that their lives ended in a concentration camp. Her account was so interesting that we too wanted to start an investigation …

At the beginning the work was very difficult. We wanted to track down the life story of a former pupil from our school, because we knew it was built before the war. We believed we could certainly find some photos, class register or other documents that would make our work easier! But we were soon disappointed… After we discovered there were no documents from the pre-war era, we decided to search the Regional archive in Bruntál, where they were supposedly stored. But we were disappointed again… there were no documents, no records and no photographs from our school in the Archive. They must have been destroyed during the War or within the following years or by the floods in 1997. We were not discouraged, though. We knew that we had to start searching again, for other personal stories.

We visited survivors from our city and old people's home; we talked with old people and contacted the civil association called Krnovská synagoga. Suddenly we had material for three different stories. In groups we sorted out the material and we gradually found out more and more information. One of the stories was the history of the family of Mr Langshur, a respected professor of Krnov High School. We found out that his son Hugo survived and presently lives in Canada.

The story of Hugo, who was sent to his relatives in England in 1938 (at the age of 16) by his parents who feared for his life, appealed to us most. We got hold of Hugo's e-mail addresses and we soon discovered he was very helpful and he was willing to share his life-story and provide photographs and other necessary documents.

A story of a happy, talented boy living in our town before the war started to unravel before our eyes. His father was a professor at High School and his mother was a housewife and looked after him… and then the year 1938 came and everything changed. Young Hugo had to part with his parents (he didn't know then that it was the last time he saw them) and left to stay with his relatives in England.

Hugo sent us his memoirs, photographs of him and his parents and photographs of his friends and his first love with the memory of their first kiss. He answered our questions and willingly talked about his memories, although it must have been difficult for him.

Memories of Trude

"...Trude was intelligent, charming, beautiful. She was a year or two older. Adolescent boy like me had to admire her breasts. I courted her for a while, but Trude discouraged me without hurting my dignity..."

Memory of Edith Schmerler:

"I can't tell you what she was like because my interest in her was purely passionate. Not romantic, but passionate. Once, during a birthday celebration of Grete Fried we played an adolescent game and we started kissing in one of the dark corridors. It was the first time I tasted the sweetness of kissing. The kiss was utterly innocent but it was enough for me to encounter a thrill yet unknown. Edith, however, was much more experienced than I was (I realized that only later) and she preferred Leo Schwarz. It was my first defeat in courting women."

Jewish Museum in Prague also provided information about his parents: we discovered the transport numbers they were given on their journey eastward in 1942. In the course of the journey they were taken out of the trains and they were all shot and thrown into mass graves. We were stricken by the letters Hugo lent us. They were the last letters from his mother and father, addressed to their son on the eve of the transport and delivered by a family friend. They already knew they wouldn't meet their son again. They remembered the moments they had spent together and they said goodbye.

Commentary to the letters from his parents:

These letters from Hugo's parents were written to their son shortly before the transport to Terezín. They were delivered by a man they trusted. Mr Herbert Hugo Langshur later gave them to his son Eric as a memory of his grandparents he never had a chance to meet. Hugo himself says: " The last letters from my parents still break my heart. Let us hope that horrors such as Holocaust will never be repeated. Human beings, however, are very imperfect. Why are they written in English? Both my parents knew English well. They even met thanks to English - during private lessons my father gave to his future wife. I think they wrote the letters in English to stress that this was the beginning of a new life for me."

We put all the memories and materials together and sorted them out and in the end we were pleasantly surprised. From a stamp on Hugo's school report we discovered that before he was transferred to high school as a talented student, he attended our secondary school for four years (at that time called Chlapecká a měšťanská školy). Thus our former wish - to discover the life story of one of our school's pupil - came true. When we prepared all the materials, we started to create a display panel. We involved our schoolmates from the class specialized in ICT. They designed the panel and adjusted its graphics so that it could be printed out in the format required.

The work on the panel drew to a close and we had only one big wish: to meet Hugo personally. The distance between Krnov and Quebec is huge and Mr Langshur was 84 years old, but nevertheless we invited him to the official unveiling of the display panel, which was planned to take place in May 2006 in front of our school. Hugo gladly accepted our invitation.

He arrived in the Czech Republic on 13 May 2006 with his two sons and we prepared a welcome greeting and unveiled the memorial display panel in his presence. It was a meeting full of emotions and we will never forget it.

Memories from letters of Herbert Hugo Langshur, Canada

"My mother, Erna Kohn, was born on February 3, 1890 in Krnov (Jägerndorf) in Silesia. My father, Dr. Sigmund Langschur, came into the world on June 8, 1884 in Poběžovice (Ronsperg) in West Bohemia. He came to Krnov at a young age and became a professor at a local German high school. He joined the army but after a short service he was sent back to teaching. He taught German literature, French and English and also gave private lessons in Latin. We lived in Krnov at 30 Upper Square (Horní náměstí / Oberring) right across the city coffeehouse. From our windows I could see the playing cards in the men's hands.

I was born on 15 December 1921. In May 1938 my parents sent me to London. Our relatives - my mother's oldest sister - had moved there with her husband around 1900. My father, a respected teacher with a very good reputation in the town, could not imagine that something could happen to him or his wife. He also didn't want to leave his pension to "those villains". Also his pride kept him from accepting help from my mother's family. When my parents finally decided to leave, it was too late. They left Krnov after the Munich Agreement and found asylum in Olomouc with Theodor and Paula Briess (they were my mother's relatives and they suffered the same fate.) In July 1942 my parents had to leave Olomouc and go to Terezín. Few days after their arrival they were sent to Baranowicze extermination camp."

Note:

Baranowicze is a town located in western Belarus. It was a part of Poland until 1939, when it was seized by the Soviet Union. 12 000 Jews, more than half of local population, lived there before the War. After the invasion of the Soviet Union by German Army a Jewish Ghetto was established in Baraniowicze.

The AAy Transport from Terezín was the only transport that was sent to this place. Not a single person from 1000 people in the transport survived. For many years it was not clear where the transport was heading. According to the testimony of local inhabitants, the Czech Jews were not in the transport AAy brought to the ghetto. They were shot right after their arrival and they were thrown in mass graves not far from Baranowicze.

Herbert Hugo Langshur was born on 15 December 1921 in Krnov. He was the only son of his parents and spent a happy childhood in the region of Nízký Jeseník. Between 1927 and 1932 he attended boys' elementary school at Dvořákův okruh (Hasnerring), which houses now our primary school. In May 1938 his parents sent him to London, where his mother's sister, Aunt Wanda, lived with her family. In London he acquired a technical diploma. During the following years he fought in the British army against the Nazis for the freedom of Europe. He left the Army only in 1948. Later he worked in the factory producing aircraft engines.

In 1951 he moved to Canada and found an employment in a large American company Pratt and Whitney in Montreal. Today he lives in a small town Saint-Lambert in the Québec province.

Mr Langshur is married for the second time. He has three sons from his first marriage. Two of them are alive - Alexander Thomson Langshur (born 1961) lives in Boston and has two sons and Eric Lawrence Langshur (born 1963) lives in Chicago and has three children (two sons and a daughter).

In memory of the Holocaust victims from Krnov we organized a fund-raising campaign to reconstruct a bench in the synagogue in Krnov for Hugo's first love Edith and place names of other victims from Krnov on the bench.

Memorial of Krnov and Bruntál victims of Shoa:

"70 places - 70 histories" Project

In 2004 the civic association Krnovská synagoga bought historical oak benches from the Roman-Catholic parish in Olšany u Prostějova. They were preserved from the synagogue in Olomouc, from where they were taken shortly before its demolition in 1939. Seven rows with 49 seats were placed in the synagogue in Slezský Krnov; three rows with 21 seats were given to the synagogue in North-Moravian Loštice. Cards with the names of the Shoa victims will be placed on each of the 49 seats. In reality the Nazis murdered at least 200 Jewish inhabitants of Krnov region. You can support the purchase and reconstruction of the benches and establishment of the memorial by sponsoring the memory of one actual person. The amount of the donation is CZK 3000. The sums for the seats in the first row were higher.

Web-pages of the association: www.mujweb.cz/www/synagoga.