One family's story the correspondence of Paul, Balbina, and Richard Schifter

Richard Schifter was born in Vienna, Austria on 31 July, 1923, the son of Paul (also known as Pinchas, 1886-1942?) and Balbina (née Blass, 1893-1942?) Schifter, both of whom were originally from Poland. Paul, who was from Stanisławow (modern day Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine), originally had citizenship in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Balbina, who was raised in a town near Warsaw, and later in Lublin, had citizenship in the Russian Empire. Following World War I the birthplaces of both of them were in the new Republic of Poland. They opted for Polish citizenship, but settled in Vienna. Paul had apprenticed in a drugstore in Stanisławow, and around 1907 came to the United States and worked for a pharmaceutical firm in Rochester, New York. By 1913 he had saved sufficient funds to enable him to return to Stanisławow and purchase a drugstore. When World War I began, he was inducted into the Austro-Hungarian army, and served for the duration of the war with the pharmaceutical staff of various military hospitals, first in Hungary and later in Poland. When he was stationed in Lublin in 1916, he met Bajla (Balbina) Blass, whose parents had previously owned a farm near Warsaw prior to moving their family to Lublin. Paul and Balbina were married in a Hasidic ceremony in Lublin in 1919, and after they settled in Vienna, they repeated their vows in a temple in that city. By that time, Paul had sold his drugstore in Stanisławow and used the funds from that sale to purchase another one in Vienna, which he operated until he was forced to give it up, after the Nazi takeover of Austria in 1938. On March 11, 1938, as Paul, Balbina, and Richard heard Austrian Chancellor Schuschnigg announce, on radio, his resignation and the Nazi assumption of power, they immediately decided to emigrate to the United States. Paul promptly wrote to an uncle in New York, Harry Brettholz, seeking affidavits. Because of the family’s limited means, and since Paul and Balbina were both natives of Poland, and had to wait on a much longer quota list to qualify for a U.S. immigrant visa, they decided to send their Austrian-born son, who qualified for a visa on the German quota, first. Meanwhile, in late October 1938—on the day of their wedding anniversary, it turned out—both parents were arrested due to their former Polish citizenship (of which the Polish government had deprived them). Before they were released one day later they were ordered to emigrate promptly. The family witnessed the events of Kristallnacht, and continued their efforts to leave the country. Richard travelled to Rotterdam, and from there left for New York on a ship of the Holland-America Line in December 1938, while his parents were smuggled into Poland in the spring of 1939, intending only to stay there for as long as it took to receive their visas to travel to the United States. Paul went to live with relatives in Stanisławow, and Balbina did the same in Warsaw, so that when war broke out in September 1939, and the Germans and Soviets invaded Poland, they were separated, with Paul living in Soviet-occupied territory, and Balbina in the German-occupied area. In 1940, Balbina moved to Lublin, and Paul to Lwów. Richard, by that time living in New York, maintained contact with his parents until the United States entered the War in December 1941. The last letter he received from them through the International Red Cross, dated July 1942, showed that Paul had joined Balbina in Lublin, and were in a ghetto in Maidan-Tatarski. After the war, Richard surmised that his parents had likely been killed during the liquidation of that ghetto in November 1942. After arriving in New York in December 1938, Richard lived with relatives, primarily the family of his father’s aunt and uncle, Sophie and Harry Brettholz, in the Bronx. He attended DeWitt Clinton High School, and after graduating from there, enrolled in City College of New York, hoping to obtain enough education to apply for a civil service job with the Federal government in Washington, DC, which led him to study economics. Upon graduating in the spring of 1943, he was inducted into the U.S. Army, being sent first to Camp Fannin in Texas for infantry basic training. In October 1943, he was assigned to the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP), and sent to Stanford University, to train for the planned occupation of the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), with linguistic and other training. It was during that time that he received his U.S. citizenship. In early 1944, he was among those German-speaking soldiers who, as the Army prepared for the landing in France, were assigned to Camp Ritchie, Maryland, in order to be trained in military intelligence, including techniques for the interrogation of captured German soldiers. He deployed to the European Theater in July 1944, arriving first in England and then in France, in August 1944. Beginning in October 1944 he was stationed in Aachen, Germany, and charged with interviewing German civilians, work that led to one of the first studies of everyday life during the Third Reich. Following the end of the war, he was discharged from the Army, but remained in Germany as a civilian employee of the U.S. military government until 1948. Upon returning to the United States, he enrolled in Yale Law School, earning an LL.B. degree in 1951, after which he joined the law firm of Riegelman, Strasser, Schwarz and Spiegelberg, in Washington, DC, with whom he worked as an attorney in the following decades. He served as Washington counsel for the Oglala Sioux Tribe of South Dakota, the Pueblo of Laguna of New Mexico, the Nez Pere Tribe of Idaho, and the Metlakatla Indian Community of Alaska and became a specialist in Federal Indian law, serving on the Presidents Task Force on American Indians in 1966-1967. From 1959 to 1979 he served on the Maryland State Board of Education, from 1975 onward as its President., During the administration of President Ronald Reagan, he was appointed U.S. Representative to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (1983-1986), and Deputy U.S. Representative to the United Nations Security Council (1984-1985), after which he was nominated and appointed as Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, a post in which he served from 1985-1992. President Bill Clinton appointed him as a Special Assistant to the U.S. National Security Council in 1993, where he served in that capacity until 1997, followed by service as Special Assistant to the Secretary of State from 1997 to 2001. Since 2005 he has been Chairman of the Board o Directors of the American Jewish International Relations Institute, AJIRI.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

The correspondence of the Schifter family was compiled and translated by Deborah Esther Schifter. The German letters were transcribed and then followed by an English translation.