World War One

World War One blew a hole through everyone’s lives. Most of the men were gone—the Austro-Hungarians drafted heavily from rural areas and villages, including yours.

The peasants went eagerly. They thought they were getting a great deal—spiffy uniforms and lots to eat, at least at first.

It’s likely that your older brother, Moses or Moritz, fought. Your younger brother, Aaron, was still too young.

Your other brothers, the ones who died as babies, Salomon and Abraham, would have been the right age, but alas, their journey in this world had already ended.

Chaim Bleier, Grandpa, your future husband, fought, not because of the food or clothes. He came from money, not uberwealth but bourgeois comfort of that era.

His parents owned a kretchma, a combination bar, liquor store, distillery, 7-Eleven, Motel 6, and even a dance hall, which is surprising considering how orthodox they were. Grandpa’s people also farmed.

Here’s Grandpa as a nattily dressed yeshiva student in Pressburg around 1905. He didn’t need the uniform.

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Everyone thought the war would end quickly—no big deal. Jews like Grandpa thought this was their chance to defeat the uber- antisemitic Russian Tsar Nicholas—the Bolsheviks later gave it to him and his family.

It wasn’t.

We dont think about it much as it’s been overshadowed by World War 2, but the First World War was a nightmare beyond everyone’s wildest dreams. Grandpa and the Austro-Hungarian sword-wielding horseback riding troops were like the Indians against Custer flattened by an enemy armed with self-loading machine guns, o-Hungarian losses were massive—roughly two million dead, either slaughtered on the battlefield or died as a result of injury, starvation, or exposure, including Grandpa’s oldest brother, Binyomin. Grandpa was one of the lucky ones—he was taken prisoner and sent to one of Russia’s Asiatic provinces, where he worked on a farm and was treated reasonably well.

The home front wasn’t great. With the men at war, the women were vastly overworked. Postwar wasn’t great either. First came the Spanish flu, which killed even more people than the war, and then chaos—food shortages, labor shortages, and inflation, all of which stoked an impulse for radical change.

Hungary, Béla Kun, a Jewish communist, tried to foment a homegrown Bolshevik revolution. Grandpa’s brother, great-uncle Martin or Mordechai, somehow found his way into Kun’s forces before departing for America.

Kun didn’t last long. In 1919, he was ousted by a right-wing government led by Admiral Horthy, and anti-Semitism soared.

Around this time, you met Grandpa.

More on that in the next episode.