Marie Schmolková

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Marie Schmolková

Marie Schmolková (née Eisnerová, born June 23, 1893 in Prague , † March 27, 1940 in London ) was a Czechoslovak Jewish social worker , a staunch Zionist and chairwoman of the National Coordinating Committee for Refugees in Czechoslovakia . In the 1930s she helped save thousands of mostly Jewish refugees from persecution by the National Socialists . In July 1938 she was the only delegate from Czechoslovakia to attend the Evian Conference on Jewish Refugees. With the help of Nicholas Winton , she organized the so-called “ Kindertransporte ” to Great Britain .

Life

Marie Schmolková was born in Prague as the youngest child of an assimilated Jewish family. Her parents, Hynek and Julie Eisner, ran a textile business. She attended a high school for girls in Prague; One of her teachers was the well-known writer Gabriela Preissová . Marie did not undertake any further training, presumably for financial reasons, but in 1916 she attended lectures at Charles University in Prague . She helped in her parents' business and later worked in a small bank, where she made it to the position of deputy manager. The Eisners weren't very religious. At home they spoke Czech , but were also fluent in German. Marie also learned French and English very well . After her mother's death in 1923, she married the much older widowed Leopold Schmolka (1868–1928), a well-known and wealthy Prague lawyer. After five years of marriage, Leopold died. The marriage remained childless.

After the death of her husband, Marie Schmolková went on a trip to the Middle East and visited Egypt , Syria and Palestine . Under the impression of this trip, she joined the Zionist movement and joined the Women's International Zionist Organization (WIZO) in Prague, where she soon assumed a leading position. She was a staunch social democrat , was politically active and dedicated herself to social work. She was also a member of the governing body of the Jewish Party (Židovská strana) of Czechoslovakia.

Help for Jewish refugees

Arrival of Jewish refugees in London, February 1939.

After Hitler came to power in 1933, Marie Schmolková organized aid for refugees who sought protection from the National Socialist regime in Czechoslovakia . She chaired the National Coordinating Committee for Refugees (Národní koordinační výbor pro uprchlíky) , where she worked with Milena Jesenská and Max Brod . Schmolková negotiated with authorities at home and abroad, obtained visas and tried to find housing and jobs for the refugees. She also represented the coordination committee at the international level.

She became a representative of the Jewish aid organizations Jewish Colonization Association (HICEM) and American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (AJDC) and was involved in the aid committee of B'nai B'rith in Prague. As a representative of her country, she attended the meetings of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom . She was the only Czechoslovakian representative in the refugee commission of the League of Nations at the time . As a Czechoslovak delegate, she took part in the Évian Conference in July 1938 . Here she had to experience that the countries of the free world at the time refused to accept Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. The victims of the Hitler regime were often referred to as agents and propagandists of National Socialism or as economic refugees.

After the annexation of Austria and the cession of the Sudetenland to the National Socialist German Reich in October 1938, the refugee crisis escalated. More than a hundred thousand mainly German-Jewish refugees and opponents of the National Socialist regime also came to the unoccupied Czechoslovak heartland. The country was overwhelmed and there was also strong resistance against the Germans among the Czech population. Schmolková visited the areas where the refugees were concentrated, collected material to stir public opinion, and wrote appeals to foreign ambassadors in Prague and to Jewish organizations abroad.

“This woman knows everyone personally who has crossed the line in the past five years. She knows their fates, they know their dangers. Amid the flood of these fates, it is as if their own doesn't exist. She is constantly moving between life and death, between the authorities in London, Paris and Prague ... She sees almost nothing but hopelessness and, after a terrible effort, succeeds in awakening a little hope. But she is as wonderfully calm as believers are. "

- Milena Jesenská, 1938

No country was ready to help the Jewish refugees. Finally, the UK offered to take in at least children under the age of 17. Marie Schmolková and her team worked closely with British refugee workers, most notably Doreen Warriner , a representative of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia (BCRC). In December 1938 she invited Nicholas Winton to Prague. Doreen Warriner had asked him to organize the emigration of Jewish children. Schmolková had no doubt that Germany would soon occupy all of Czechoslovakia. In a race against time, she and her team tried to enable as many children as possible to leave the country. This “Czech Kindertransport ” managed to save a total of 669 Czechoslovak children of Jewish origin from the Holocaust . These children were often the only ones in their families to survive the war.

On March 16, 1939, one day after the occupation of the country , Schmolková and her staff were arrested by the Gestapo by the refugee committee . This was followed by two months in the Pankrác prison in Prague , where, despite being a diabetic , she had to undergo six to eight hours of interrogation. She was only released on May 18, 1939 after protests by the US embassy, ​​a number of Czech politicians and the women's rights activist Františka Plamínková .

In August 1939, Adolf Eichmann , head of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Prague , sent Marie Schmolková to Paris as a member of a Jewish delegation in order to accelerate Jewish emigration in negotiations with the AJDC. At that time, “emigration” still meant expulsion abroad, later it only meant deportation to a concentration camp . In Paris, Schmolková saw the beginning of the Second World War . She moved to London in 1939 and continued her efforts there to help the refugees.

death

Six months later Marie Schmolková died of a heart attack in London. Historian Anna Hájková writes that she “worked her way to death” . Leading representatives of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile and well-known Zionists gathered at her funeral service in London's Golders Green Crematorium . The funeral speech was given by the Czechoslovak Foreign Minister in exile, Jan Masaryk : “God commands, Mařenka, you can rely on us. We will be unanimous, we will love each other, we will win and we will take you home. Rest until then and let your spirit help us in our common holy work for peace, decency and freedom. ”The Czechoslovak government never kept this promise.

After the war, Marie Schmolková was completely forgotten. She doesn't even have a grave. The records state that her ashes were "carried away by the undertaker".

Commemoration

Monument to Nicholas Winton at Prague Central Station

WIZO's Czechoslovak exile group renamed itself The Marie Schmolka Society in her honor and published a commemorative brochure in 1944.

Historians Martin Šmok and Anna Hájková founded Společnost Marie Schmolkové - The Marie Schmolka Society in Prague in October 2018 . Her aim is to make Marie Schmolková known and to campaign for the establishment of memorials in London and Prague. Annual workshops and a Marie Schmolková Prize for the best work on female social workers during the Holocaust are planned.

Anna Hájková recalls: "We have forgotten that the Kindertransporte were mainly organized by women whose names have been forgotten today." They include Doreen Warriner and Marie Schmolková. "More precisely, Nicholas Winton was an intern of Marie Schmolková." Anna Hájková regrets: "While Nicholas Winton is commemorated by a statue at Prague Central Station and he received one of the highest state awards in the Czech Republic, there is no memorial for Marie Schmolková."

On October 22nd, 2019 Prague 1 awarded Marie Schmolková honorary citizenship in memoriam .

literature

  • Frederick Thieberger, Felix Weltsch, Max Brod: In Memoriam: Marie Schmolka . Ed .: Marie Schmolka Society of Women Zionists from Czechoslovakia. 1944 (English, 35 pages, online ).
  • Laura Brade, Rose Holmes: Troublesome Sainthood: Nicholas Winton and the Contested History of Child Rescue in Prague, 1938–1940 . In: History and Memory, Vol. 29, Number 1 (Spring / Summer 2017) . S. 3–40 (English, online PDF ).
  • Thomas Levelow Kaplan, Jürgen Matthäus, Mark W. Hornburg: Beyond “Ordinary Men”. Christopher R. Browning and Holocaust Historiography . Ferdinand Schöningh, 2019, ISBN 978-3-657-79266-5 , pp. 96-108 (English, online ). Chapter 7, pp. 96-108: Laura E. Brade: More than Helpers: Womans's Roles in “Communities of Rescue” in the Bohemian Lands, 1938-1939 .
  • Austrian Biographical Lexicon and Biographical Documentation, Vol. 10 . Publishing house of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, ISBN 978-3-7001-3213-4 , p. 341–342 ( keyword: Schmolka, Marie ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g About Marie Schmolka , The Marie Schmolka Society . Retrieved April 7, 2020.
  2. ↑ a b Austrian Biographical Lexicon and Biographical Documentation, Vol. 10 . Publishing house of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, ISBN 978-3-7001-3213-4 , p. 341–342 ( keyword: Schmolka, Marie ). Retrieved April 7, 2020.
  3. ↑ a b Nenaplněný slib, Marie Schmolková - zapomenutá hrdinka na cestě pomoci židovským uprchlíkům Anna Hájková, Martin Šmok in Respekt , September 26, 2018. Accessed April 7, 2020 (Czech).
  4. ↑ Milena Jesenská: V zemi nikoho. (pdf; 39.1 MB) In: Přítomnost . December 29, 1938, pp. 827-828 , accessed April 7, 2020 (Czech).
  5. ^ A b Laura Brade, Rose Holmes: Troublesome Sainthood: Nicholas Winton and the Contested History of Child Rescue in Prague, 1938–1940. (pdf; 287 kB) In: History and Memory, Volume 29, Number 1. Spring / Summer 2017, pp. 3–4, 20 , accessed on April 7, 2020 (English).
  6. ^ Anna Hájková, Martin Šmok: Dějiny zapomínají na hrdinky. In: a2larm.cz. November 13, 2017, Retrieved April 7, 2020 (Czech).
  7. ↑ a b c Robert Tait: Prague to honor little-known savior of refugees fleeing Nazis. In: The Guardian . November 10, 2019, accessed April 7, 2020 .
  8. ^ Frederick Thieberger, Felix Weltsch, Max Brod: In Memoriam: Marie Schmolka . Ed .: Marie Schmolka Society of Women Zionists from Czechoslovakia. 1944 (English, online ).
  9. ↑ Our Goals. In: marieschmolka.org. Retrieved May 2, 2020 .
  10. ↑ Ditta Kotoučová: Historici prosazují pražský pomník ženě, která zachránila tisíce Židů. In: iDNES.cz . October 15, 2017, accessed April 7, 2020 (Czech).
  11. ^ Ian Willoughby: Savior of Jewish refugees Marie Schmolka finally honored in Prague. In: Radio Prague International . November 11, 2019, accessed on April 7, 2020 (English, as mp3 audio ; 3 MB; 6:27 minutes).
personal data
SURNAME Schmolková, Marie
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Eisnerová, Marie (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Czechoslovak Jewish social worker and savior of the Jews
DATE OF BIRTH June 23, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH Prague
DATE OF DEATH March 27, 1940
Place of death London