By Suzie Schwartz and Anita Leigh
When Anita Leigh, whom I first met through our shul community showed me her European Postcard Collection originally belonging to her family, I was enthralled. Anita's father Gideon and grandparents Hermann and Natalie Kolb lived in Vienna where they ran a textile business until the outbreak of World War 2 (WW2). Besides the family coin and stamp collection, there was also this collection of postcards dating from the early 1890s until after the end of WW2.
Carefully categorized and preserved by her father, Anita inherited this collection. Comprising over 1500 postcards, beautifully handwritten in German, the reason they arrived in England is a remarkable story.
Hermann Kolb was on a business trip in Prague. A long standing and trusted employee, Arnold Lenhardt, advised Anita's grandmother, Natalie, to leave Vienna immediately and for Hermann to go straight to London from Prague in order to join their son Gideon, who was already established there and was running the UK side of the business. Mr Lenhardt, despite having recently become an SS officer, promised to pack up their Viennese household and ship it to the UK. Among the contents was this postcard collection and all Anita's father's schoolbooks and memorabilia from his childhood.
Anita and I meet weekly to digitize the collection to ensure its preservation for posterity. We enjoy mulling over the postcards and the historical era they evoke. Every detail seems to matter and has something interesting and unique to convey about the period in which they were written, whether it be the pictures, stamps, addresses, postmarks, dates and the handwriting. Each postcard is a testimony to a world that has disappeared. Slowly but surely, we are achieving our goal of digitizing the entire postcard collection. In doing so, Anita and I are reliving the journey her family took through Europe and using it as an opportunity to brush up on our European history and geography.
The Lenhardt and Kolb families kept in touch for many years after the war.