Palárikovo Part 2: The house on Štefánikova Street
- Mattan Segev-Frank
- Apr 5
- 8 min read
Updated: Aug 4
In this post, I would like to tell you about a special house that stands on Štefánikova Street, in the heart of Palárikovo and also in my own heart. I am not a person who normally feels a strong connection to real estate, but I certainly feel connected to history and heritage, and this house, in its various incarnations, is an inseparable part of my family's heritage and has accompanied it in its good and horrible moments for more than a century.
My father's childhood memories
Originally, I know this house from stories I heard from my father. After my grandfather Juraj Frank escaped Slovakia and Europe during World War 2, he settled in the Kibbutz Sha'ar HaGolan in Israel, where he went by his Hebrew name Yehuda. In 1956, he asked the Kibbutz Secretariat for permission to take his wife and eldest son, 10 years old at the time, to visit his parents who survived the Holocaust. They never met his wife, and he wanted to introduce her and their son, for the first time. He received permission to miss work, visas for travel were arranged at the Czechoslovak embassy, and the trip was planned with funding from my grandmother's father.
Then, the Sinai War broke out, and all plans were cancelled. A year later, when the atmosphere died down and they could leave again, their new application for visas to enter Slovakia was denied. However, Yehuda heard from a friend that there was a possibility to easily get an entry visa if they apply for them in Vienna. My grandparents decided to take a risk and travel to Vienna, unknowing if they would really be granted passage into Slovakia to be reunited with his parents (it is hard for us nowadays to remember, but before the Schengen treaty – all borders within Europe were closed and the one-hour trip from Vienna to Bratislava required a visa from the Slovak government).
In August 1957, they set out on a journey. First, they travelled to Kfar Hess and left their two young daughters, aged 7 and 4, with my grandmother's parents. From there they continued to the port of Haifa and boarded the ship “Artza” which sailed to Cyprus, and on to the port of Genoa, Italy. They continued by train from Italy to Vienna, where they stayed with my grandfather's cousin Manci and her husband Rudi. My father received new and more European clothes from their store “Neue Mode” on Vienna’s Mariahilferstraße, ahead of the next part of the trip.
My grandfather went to inquire regarding Visas at the Slovak embassy in Vienna. He was so sure it’s not going to happen, that he didn’t take the passports with him. To his surprise – the consular service people immediately approved and asked for the passports. My shocked grandfather had to apologize and return the next day to get the visas stamped into them.
After successfully arranging their visas to Slovakia, they continued to Bratislava, where they met acquaintances and relatives. They also flew to Prague and back, and then continued to Palárikovo, where they stayed with my grandfather's parents, Arnold and Terezia Frank, in the house on Štefánikova Street.
My father didn't know any language other than Hebrew, so he couldn't communicate much – neither with his grandparents whom he first met, nor with his cousins with whom he was sent to play or with the relatives who were strangers to him. However, he still made a few long-lasting memories of that visit:
He remembers the local delicacies cooked by his Grandmother Terezia, who kept the pantry of the house full of bags filled with nuts, almonds, spices, homemade jams, pickled and canned vegetables and all kinds of surprises. The pantry was located outside the apartment itself - under the covered passageway through a door that leads down half a floor below street level.
On their first day in Palárikovo, they passed by an elderly woman who was excited to see Yehuda and jumped on him with a big hug, and later brought home-made delicacies. It turned out that she was the midwife who delivered him in 1922 in the nearby Nové Zámky.
He remembers his mother's attempt to learn to ride a bicycle in Palárikovo. Yehuda and Amit used to do bicycle tours in the village and Shoshana got a bit jealous and wanted to join, but she never learned to ride a bicycle, and never had the time for that. But now, in the atmosphere of freedom and leisure - she asked Yehuda to teach her. To do this, they went to the park of the Graf Karolyi Castle and practiced. At some point, Shoshana overpassed, took a sharp turn, and disappeared from view. By the time they arrived, they had only found her bicycle. Turns out she had flown off the bicycle and right into a thorny bush of raspberries and was stranded there, unable to move. They couldn't stop laughing and that was the end of her riding lessons.
He remembers walking with his grandfather to buy Ice Cream in the village, who taught him to ask for "Zmrzlina" by himself.
One day during the visit, Yehuda took his son to the nearby Váh river to fish. They sat there all day and didn't catch a single fish, not to mention they didn't even see a single fish... Until my father gave up and demanded to go home.
He remembers that a pear tree and a fence separated Arnold and Terezia's plot from the neighbors, who had two blond sons. My father remembers the children he played with, who called him “chlapček” (little boy) but he didn't know what the word meant.
As children, Grandpa Yehuda told us stories from Palárikovo. We understood from him that it was there that he was born and raised, and that it was the home of his youth and the childhood home of his father Arnold. But as is it often goes with my research of Slovak Jewish history and genealogy and its revelations - the documents unravelled the narrative I grew up with and spun entirely new stories, and here is what I learned about this house:
The Reisz Family, 1891-1936
The ownership of the house on Štefánikova Street before 1891 is unclear and its not known who built it. On 27 April 1891, it was purchased by Philip (Yom-Tov Zvi) Reisz and his wife Katerina (Cheila) née Menzer. The couple married where the bride’s family lived, in Mostová, on 11 April 1877 and then settled in Palárikovo, Philip's birth village.
Philip and Katerina's family grew rapidly and frequently, which caused them to need replacing their homes to accommodate the growing number of people in the family. Their eldest daughter, Johanna, was born on April 18, 1878, when the couple lived in house No. 57 in Palárikovo. Within two years, daughters Betty (who died in infancy) and Leni were also born.
Philip's father, Ignatz (Yitzhak) Reisz, who had moved to Palárikovo from Sered and lived in house No. 150 in the village, died on 23 November 1881. Apparently, as a result of the inheritance Philip received, the family moved to house No. 11 in the village. They lived in this house for about ten years, during which time seven more children were born: Ignatz, Friderika, Hermina, Henrietta, Emil and Mina.
About a week before the birth of their tenth daughter, Sarolta, on 6 May 1891, the Reisz couple bought the spacious and beautiful house on Štefánikova Street, then house No. 18 in Palárikovo, with a wide façade facing the street and a large inner courtyard. Ideal place for a large family. After Sarolta, their 11th and last daughter, Rözsi, was born on 23 March 1893.
After Rözsi’s birth, a number of tragedies befell the family: in May 1893, the daughter Friderika died, and in December of the same year, daughters Mina and baby Rözsi also died. Ten years later, in 1903, the eldest daughter, Johanna, also died at the age of 25.
The remaining six children reached adulthood, and all the girls married – Leni married Juda Bär Elefant and lived in Vienna, Hermina married Hugo Koloman and lived in Bánhida (the old quarter of the Hungarian city of Tatabánya), where she ran a restaurant. Later, she remarried Géza Berenyi, and from 1939 lived in the Hungarian city of Győr and ran a grocery store there, Henrietta married Moritz Neumann, and Sarolta married Ferdinand Ruhig.
The mother of the family, Katerina Reisz née Menzer, died on 5 March 1923. Her husband Philip was still alive, as his tombstone indicates that he died on 26 July 1933, but he is not mentioned in the 1930 Slovak census. After his wife's death, her part in the family home was inherited by their six living children - the four married daughters and the two sons, Ignatz and Emil.
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There seems to have been some drama about the house, for about two months before the death of Philip Reisz, the family house was sold. There’s a chance that it was sold in order to cover a debt or to finance medical treatments, but Filip and his children sold the house, along with the yard and garden, to Alexander Schwarz for the sum of 100,000 Kčs (Czechoslovak crowns).
Schwarz was just 23 years old at the time. He was born in Valaská Belá in the Trenčín region of Slovakia and moved to the village with his family in 1920, when he was 10 years old. It seems he bought the house with the intention of “flipping” it, (meaning buying a property, making improvements, and then quickly reselling it for a profit. The goal in flipping is to buy low, renovate, and sell high within a short timeframe), as just three years later, the house was put on auction again.
In 1936, Henrietta Neumann nee Reisz, one of the original sellers, bought the house, yard and a part of the garden (which her parents purchased separately in 1898) back from Mr. Schwarz for 87,000 Kčs, while the other part of the garden was bought by Viliam and Aranka Frank for 30,000 (meaning, Mr. Schwarz made a profit of 17,000 Kčs in 3 years). However, Henrietta immediately sold everything she JUST BOUGHT to the Franks (on the very same week), for 2000 Kčs less than she paid.
Judging by information gathered from Mr. Kolečany, who documented oral histories from his family members, combined with information from the houses’ property deeds, it seems that Henrietta Neumann née Reisz, who was childless and lived with her brother who also had no, children, had no use of the large house. She sold the house to Viliam and Aranka Frank, who’s family was growing, and in return Viliam let them live in the house his parents owned for a very cheap fee (if at all). This deal is not documented anywhere, as Herman Frank’s house was never officially sold and ownership was not passed, but Mr. Kolečany claims that they moved into Herman Frank’s house. It should be noted that there were three different Reisz families in the village, with repeating names, so information collected from oral history might in fact be confused.
Like most Jewish families in the village, the two sides had a family relation. The seller, Henrietta, had a paternal uncle named Károly Reisz, whose wife Emilia née Gerstel was a 1st cousin of Helena Frank née Alt, mother of the buyer Viliam Frank. There is no way to know if their family connection played a role in the process, but the unequivocal result is that Viliam and Aranka Frank became the new owners of the whole property – the house (including a residential part and a shop), the yard, and the garden.
As for the fate of the Reisz family, not much is known. I know that Henrietta Neumann continued to live in Palárikovo until World War II, when she was deported on a transport from the city of Nitra on 15 April 1942 to Lublin, Poland. Her fate is unknown, but she was apparently murdered in one of the concentration and extermination camps in that area. Her sister Leni Elefant was deported from Vienna to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, and Sister Hermina was deported from Győr to Auschwitz-Birkenau and murdered there on 15 July 1944. Hermina’s descendants who survived the war live in Israel. Their sister Sarolta Ruhig was deported from Šaľa with her husband Ferdinand and their son Paul Leopold to the Nove Zamky ghetto and then to Auschwitz, where they perished. Only their daughter Magdalena Ruhig survived. What happened to the two Reisz brothers is still unknown.
In my next post, I will share the story of Viliam Frank and Aranka Frank née Weisz and the time they spent in the house on Štefánikova Street.