On December 4th, 2024, Southern Oregon University hosted a very special Campus Theme discussion. This month’s speaker was Dr. Marianne Golding, one of our professors at Southern Oregon University, who spoke on her family’s experience navigating Nazi-occupied Europe. A large part of Dr. Golding’s work has been involved in researching and teaching about the Holocaust and Jewish experience in World War II, including taking on extensive research about her own family’s experience during this dark period of history.
This year’s Campus Theme at Southern Oregon University is “unveiling reality”, of which many speakers have been invited to give relevant lectures surrounding this theme. The goal of these discussions is to unite people through information about their lived experiences, and to highlight many different perspectives. Dr. Golding’s work definitely plays a role in unveiling the reality that many Jewish families had to go through during World War II, and the aftermath that present-day descendants have had to live with.
A primary focus of Dr. Goldings talk was to cover the history of her father, Edouard Seidler, and his experience escaping German-occupied Czechoslovakia. Edouard was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, in 1932, and lived in the city with his parents and younger sister. The Seidler family made their living off of a successful textile factory, and lived peacefully in Brno until 1939, when the Germans moved in to occupy the state. Miraculously, Edouard’s mother was able to escape with her young children to Paris, France, while their father was forced to stay behind to hand over his textile factory.
This began the Seidler family’s life as refugees. Edouard, his mother, and little sister were able to find some reprieve with the Czech community in Paris, but their safety was never guaranteed. Eventually, the children had to be sent away to Switzerland with the Red Cross, separated from their mother. After several months, the children were able to go back to Paris. But soon after, the Nazi invasion began in northern France, pushing the family to head south to Agen for their survival.
While in Agen, many raids were carried out by the French police, who were tasked to look for Jews in hiding. It is very sad to see that in the French police records, the names of ten year old Edouard and his family were on a list of Jews to capture. One day, a raid took place while Edouard was away from home. A local rabbi, who warned the family of the oncoming raid, sent someone to take Edouard to safety. He and his little sister were able to take shelter with a Quaker orphanage, who primarily housed Spanish children that had fled the Spanish Civil War. Nobody would be looking for Jews in this place, so the children were safer for a little while. During their time at the orphanage, their mother was working and visiting them as often as she could. But, she had to keep her identity a secret and not reveal herself to be their mother, in order for the children to stay there.
During much of the children’s time as refugees they would have to lie about their circumstances; that they weren’t Jewish, that both their parents had been deported, that the woman with them was not their mother. These young children had to keep careful and lie like this for years, while only being the age of elementary schoolkids.
In November of 1942, the Nazis moved in to take over the unoccupied zone of southern France. Once again, the children had to flee to Switzerland in the following February. Each child was taken in by a separate Swiss family, and were able to stay in the safety of these homes until the end of the war.
Unfortunately, others of the Seidler family were not as lucky as Edouard and his sister. His father who stayed behind in Brno was put into forced labor, and then two concentration camps. In his second concentration camp he eventually perished. Edouard’s grandmother was sent to the concentration camp Terezin, where she was also killed. The remaining Seidler family would grieve these losses for years, and consider themselves very fortunate to have survived.
After giving this account of her family’s experience, Dr. Golding then spoke on a very special trip that she took in the summer of 2024. She was lucky enough to have lots of physical evidence of events and places that her family was involved in, documented in dozens of letters, refugee cards, ration cards, police reports, and other such receipts. This directed her to many addresses, or simple descriptions of places, that she would visit on her enlightening trip to Europe.
In Brno, Dr. Golding was able to find the original home that Edouard grew up in during the peaceful time before the war, as well as the Seidler family textile factory. In Prague, she was able to find the name of Edouard’s father memorialized in the Pinkas Synagogue, which recorded hundreds of names of Czech Jews that perished in at the hands of Nazi camps. And in a miraculous finding, Dr. Golding was able to walk the same route that her father had taken when he fled France to Switzerland, and stood on the exact bridge that was described in her family’s letters. In Switzerland, she was also able to visit the house that her father had stayed in until the end of the war, and stood in what was believed to be the room he had lived in. Dr. Golding emphasized how much she valued being able to stand where her family once stood during this tumultuous period of history, and how lucky she was to be able to find these locations.
Dr. Golding explains that this journey of research and physical exploration began after the death of her father, when she inherited the many letters that her grandmother had written to him. She described how her father and aunt, after surviving this traumatizing ordeal, did not want to speak much of the experience at all. So Dr. Golding took it upon herself to find answers, and piece together her family’s miraculous journey of survival. In her findings, she saw many instances of her grandmother writing about how “lucky we were” to survive, and how much they were “fighting hard for our life”. Edouard, his mother, and sister were true survivors, and reunited to live the remainder of their lives peacefully in France. Edouard went on to get a bachelor’s degree in political science in France, a master’s degree at UCLA, and raise a family of his own. His sister still lives in France to this day.
It is truly special to be able to get such a detailed glimpse into the past, and to remember the difficult fight that the Seidlers, and many other families, had to go through. We thank Dr. Marianne Golding very much for sharing her family’s story, and allowing Southern Oregon University to learn more about this important yet tragic period in history.
