My Parents

 
My father, Lavoslav Steiner was born in Osijek, on 21 August 1889.  Osijek
was a provincial town in the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918, the end of
the First World War, when it became part of SHS, the Kingdom of Serbs,
Croats and Slovenes (Kraljevina Srba, Hrvata i Slovenaca), later Yugoslavia. 
He came from a wealthy family in Budapest but earlier they had lived in
Alsace Lorraine. My father never told me when and why they moved from
there - I doubt that he knew.  His citizenship was of Sudetenland, as the
documents show. My grandfather had died before I was born, but I know that
he was a landowner and lived near Osjek.  My grandmother had been a teacher in
Budapest but when  I knew her she was very old. She was born in 1848 and
all  the time I remember her she looked exactly the same. She was a tiny
woman,  very, very thin, always in long black skirts,  with very long, thick
white hair, beautiful blue eyes, and she was so deaf that we had to scream in
her ear if we wanted to be understood and often we were not.  As a young
person she must have been very energetic and, as I was told, in sympathy with
Max Nordau.  He wanted to marry her but was considered by her family of
too low status, a simple unknown journalist!  Had the family accepted him
later, when he became famous as a writer and one of the founders of Zionism,
together with Tbeodor Herzel, who knows?
    My grandmother knew many quotations and poems, she repeated some to
me and I still remember them.  For example the story of a girl who pleased the
king so much that he sent her three gold pieces but she proudly returned them
with the answer


Drei Taler sind sehr wenig
Drei Taler giebt kein Koenig
Drei Taler bringt kein Glück,
Drum send ich sie zurück.


(Three gold pieces are of little worth.  Three gold pieces are not given by a
king. Three gold pieces bring no luck, therefore I send them back.)     From
her I learned the first lines of Gretchen's episode and recited them before I
could read:


Mein schones Fraulein, darf ich wagen
Meinen Arm und Geleit ihr anzutragen?
Bin weder Fraulein weder schon,
Kann ungeleitet nach Hause gehen.


(Fair lady may I be so free/To offer my arm and company?/I'm neither a lady
nor am I fair/And I can go home without your care.)  My love for poetry and
literature I certainly inherited from my grandmother.  My grandmother
was forty when my father was born.  He was the third and youngest son of
three; one died at the age of eighteen; the second, Leopold-Lajos had typhoid
in his childhood and was mentally affected by his illness, unable to earn
money.  My father's name was Lavoslav but everyone called him Pali or
Palika.  He most cherished, most beloved son, an excellent student and an
outstanding mathematician.  My father told us that during his final
examination in math (he graduated at the Academy for Commercial
Sciences-Trgovacka Akademija) the supervisor said to the professor:
'Gledajte, Steiner zonglira', by which he meant that my father played around
with numbers like a magician because he did all the calculations in his head. 
He retained this habit, I remember, when we went to a restaurant,
coffee-house or hotel and the waiter prepared the bill, before he started
writing, my father had the final sum ready in his head and he never made a
mistake! My father knew several languages; he loved music - in his youth he
played the drum in Osijek's orchestra: he had a good sense of rhythm and aural
capability needed for a drummer. His wish was to study law, but my
grandmother objected; she thought that  a young man has to earn his money
first and so my father started first as a clerk in a bank in Osijek, then in
Zagreb's Wiener Bankverein. Very early my father developed commercial
abilities and advised  my grandmother not to sell their property, a house in
Osijek.  Obviously, she  was obstinate and sold it, losing a great fortune.  She
lived with my uncle Lajos and a daughter couldn't have cared better for her;
my father supported them.  I remember very well my grandmother's home in
Osijek, Zrinjevac 3. It was  near the railway station and part of a block of little
houses, very simple and  primitive, typical of the East-European countryside
village; a large, wooden gate opened into a courtyard with apartments on
three sides and a fountain in the  middle, for the tenants to fetch water,
drawing it from the well with a bucket  attached to a chain that was pulled up
and down; they had no water pipes for  running water.  Behind the fountain
were little wooden huts serving as toilets;  each tenant had his own key.  The
ground was paved with big irregular stones  and grass grew between with
chicken and geese walking around, waddling and  gobbling.  There was no
electricity, only petroleum lamps were used.  The town  had street cars drawn
by horses.
     My father met my mother in Zagreb where she had lived since her 
childhood. She was born on 9 May 1894 in Jasenovac, then a slavonian
village,  later the doomed concentration camp where my father was fated to
die during  the Second World War.  My grandfather, Joseph Haas, was a
merchant in Jasenovac, but when he suddenly died of consumption, in an
attack of hectic  fever - he was only thirty-four or thirty-six - my grandmother
Ida moved to  Zagreb with her two little children, my mother Elisabeth, Elsa,
six, and her  brother  Oscar, four.  My
grandmother never married again; being left alone and  without means she had
to earn her living with needlework and was also  supported by the Jewish
community in Zagreb.  My grandmother came from a  very distinguished
family, Merkadi - when my father wanted to tease her he  rose from his seat,
made a slight bow before mentioning her maiden name -  he called the
Merkadis 'die spanischen Granden' (the Spanish nobility) and,  judging from
the way my mother was brought up they were indeed a noble  family.  My
mother and Oscar finished the required minimum of schooling and  at fourteen
my mother had a job in an office: they were poor and she had no other choice. 
Poor and modest, but neat and clean', said Mama when she told us about her
youth.  She had only two blouses but she washed and ironed them every
evening so that nobody could have guessed that she had no more.  My 
mother was very beautiful, with a well-shaped body, black hair, dark-blue
eyes,  though of weak eyes - she had two eye operations in her childhood.     
Before she knew my father, my mother was engaged to a 'goi', Valtrovic,  but
when she learned that his family did not want him to marry a Jewish girl 
mother proudly broke off the engagement.
    It was then she met my father who was a good-looking, rather slim young 
fellow with a girl-like, smooth, rosy complexion, well dressed with a walking 
stick and gloves.  When my grandmother saw him accompanying my mother 
she asked: 'Wer ist das jidische Jingl mit die roten Handschicher?' ('Who is the
Jewish young fellow with the red gloves!') Later, when my father used to
spend the evenings with my mother in her small flat and forgot to go home,
my grandmother said with a sense of humour: 'Herr Steiner, bitte machen's die
Tir von aussen zu!') ('Mr. Steiner, please close the door from the outside!') I
was never too tired to listen to these sweet recollections.
    My father was mobilized at the beginning of the First World War, in 1914,
and served as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army until the end of the
war in 1918, mostly in the front lines.  He was decorated several times.  At the
time he was engaged to my mother and during one of his leaves my parents
decided to marry.  The wedding took place
in 1917, on 27 September.  Food was then scarce and my father provided the
family with meat and other products. Immediately after the war my father
went through difficult times; he was despondent and depressive, haunted by
the nightmares of the war.  He could not see people and was withdrawn, but
he recovered gradually, sharing his general belief that a better world would
rise.  There was a deep conviction and almost universal hope that peace would
reign in the world. 


     When the storm and dust of the cannonade passed suddenly
     away, the nations despite their enmities could still recognize
     each other as historic racial personalities.  The laws of war had
     on the whole been respected. There was a common
     professional meeting-ground between military men who had
     fought one another.  Vanquished and victors alike still
     preserved the semblance of civilized states.1 
     
Who could have predicted that in two decades a Second World War was to
break out, a war that was to perish every bond between people. 

     Crimes were committed by the Germans, under the Hitlerite
     domination to which they allowed themselves to be subjected,
     which find no equal in scale and wickedness with any that have
     darkened the human record.  The wholesale massacre by
     systematized processes of six or seven millions of men, women,
     and children in the German execution camps exceeds in horror
     the rough-and-ready butcheries of Genghis Khan, and in scale
     reduces them to pigmy proportions..2 
     


Who would have predicted that among these unfortunate millions my dearest,
most beloved and unforgettable family would disappear!
    At that time things were different.  A strong desire for good human
relationship prevailed, optimistic views permitted one to look with more
confidence into a better future, to shape new ideas and prospects.  The atmos-
phere was suitable for gifted young men to believe that prosperity was a
reasonable goal.  My father was to follow this common trend.     Being
talented in business affairs and ambitious, my father advanced rapidly in his
career.  He soon left the bank and started to work in the paper trade, in 
a firm owned by my mother's relatives, The Croatian Paper Industry (Hrvatska
Industrija Papira), one of the biggest paper firms in the country.  Not for long;
after some disputes with the owners, he left the firm and started independently
in the same trade, at first very modestly in a small office with one clerk, Miss
Kurtovic, gradually developing into one of the biggest firms in Yugoslavia,
Lavoslav Steiner, Veletrgovina Papirom i Ljepenkom (Paper Wholesale).  My
father chose the right moment to start business on his own.  With little money
but much courage and initiative he anticipated a successful future. 
 
Table of Contents
Childhood