Fiderer-Margulies Family of Tluste
by Regine Bloch, Marseille, France
My father, Koppel Fiderer (also known as Margulies) was born 17 Feb 1908 in Tluste. His parents were Schlomo Margulies and Raice Fiderer. Their other children were Zuddik, Mordechai (Motel), Samuel, Minna, and Anna. All the children were born in Tluste.
This family was certainly not rich! Shlomo spent much of the year inVienna buying used clothes. He would return to Tluste for Jewish holidays,and when he was there he would sell the used goods in Tluste and vicinity. I think that is what the family lived on. As a result, my father seldom saw his father. When his father would return, he wanted to take on paternal authority and the children were punished or spanked for whatever foolishness they had done in the past months. So the children did not have good memories of their father's trips home.
My grandfather served in the Austrian army during World War I. In 1915 he was granted leave to visit his mother (name unknown) in Tluste, because she had cholera; within days, he himself died of the disease.
My father used to tell us that as a child he had to hide in the nearby town of Horodenka during Cossack pogroms in Tluste. (The relations between Tluste and Horodenka were very good, he said.) A few months after my grandfather's death, my newly-widowed grandmother, fearing such pogroms, decided to move to Vienna with two youngest children, Koppel and Anna; the older children were already working there. She lived in Vienna (in Josefstadt, in the Jewish quarter) until World War II. During the war, she and her two daughters-in-law--Samuel's and Motel's wives--were deported to Theresienstadt; none of them returned.
Zuddik too was most likely a victim of the Holocaust. He lived in the Tluste area--perhaps in Lvov. The family never heard from him again after the war. The other children were able to leave Vienna in time. Samuel, Motel, and Minna went to America. By chance, my father ended up in France, where he joined the Resistance. He stayed there after the war, so now I am a Frenchwoman. Samuel's son and Motel's daughter were rescued in time and sent to Palestine. After the war, their father's found them and brought them to America.
Anna had gone to Leningrad before World War II, and found work in a shoe factory. (At that time the Russians needed skilled workers and Austria was going through an economic crisis. For a while, my father, the youngest child, was the only wage earner in the family and the entire family depended on his small income.) Anna married an Austrian named Wachter. I don't know whether he was Jewish. He died sometime during the war years. I have no idea of the circumstances. Anna was forced to remain behind the Soviet border when the war ended; at least she survived the terrible years. After the war, during the Stalin regime,my aunt Anna was deported somewhere. Her son, my cousin, spent several years in an orphanage. Later she was able to live with her son again in Leningrad and work. She never wanted to talk about the details; I only know that her relationship with the son became very bad, and that he wanted nothing to do with her or her family. So I know only that I have a cousin named Wachter in Leningrad,
When we found out in 1978 that Anna was alive, she lived in a small town near Leningrad. The family hadn't heard from her since the war, and it was a shock. My mother and my Aunt Minna met Anna in Leningrad, and she wrote for four or five years after that, then she surely died. Since we have no relationship with our cousin, no one let us know.
I know that other family members remained in Tluste. For certain, my father had uncles, aunts, and cousins. I don't know what became of them, and I would be like to learn what I can. Naturally, nobody from my father's generation is likely to be alive--so many years have passed.