R' Dr. Mayer Herskovics

From Mooze (his wife):

. We are joining (in Vienna) a kosher organized group tour and are scheduled to spend time in Vienna, Budapest (over Shabbat), Bratislava and Prague, and some other places. My husband lived in this region before the Holocaust and knew well many of the places we will be visiting . So it's kind of an emotional tour for me. We shall also be spending one night in the Czech Republic's second-largest town, Brno (in German: Brünn). My husband's beloved sister, Chaya Devora, her husband (a judge) and two little boys lived in that town, and my husband spent several years in Brno studying secular subjects, after he had received Semicha at age 18, learned a couple more years, and then had to serve three years in the Czech army. Geulah obtained information from the Brno municipality on the institution where he studied, and they actually sent her two photographs. It's is a quite ordinary building, which the Germans put to other uses, but which now again belongs to whatever Jewish community there is in that small town. So I am quite excited about visiting it; I just wish we could have had the opportunity to go there when he was still alive.

Chaya Dvora and her family were deported to Theresienstadt, and my husband had always believed that they died there shortly before the end of WWII. But, a few years ago, Josh & Aviva visited Theresienstadt, which has very good records, and they discovered that the family had been shipped off to Auschwitz already in 1942. This I'm glad my husband didn't know.