IN JANUARY 1913, Leon’s older sister Gusta left Lemberg for Vienna, to marry Max Gruber, a Branntweinverschleisser (seller of wine spirits). Pinkas attended the ceremony, signing the marriage certificate against a backdrop of unrest in the Balkans. Serbia had allied with Bulgaria and Montenegro and, supported by Russia, gone to war against the Ottoman Empire. A peace treaty was signed in London in May 1913, offering new boundaries. Yet just a month later, Bulgaria turned on Serbia and Greece, its former allies, catalyzing the Second Balkan War, which lasted until August 1913. This was a precursor to the greater upheavals about to be unleashed on the region, as Bulgaria was defeated by Serbia, which acquired new territories in Macedonia, a matter seen as a threat to the all-powerful Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Vienna concocted the idea of a preventive war against Serbia, to rein in Russia and the Slavs. On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Within a month, Vienna had attacked Serbia, prompting Germany to attack Belgium, France, and Luxembourg. Russia entered the war alongside Serbia, taking on Vienna and the Austro-Hungarian army and, by the end of July, invading Galicia. In September 1914, The New York Times reported that Lemberg and Żółkiew were occupied by Russian forces, following a “most colossal battle” that involved over a million and a half men. The newspaper described a “thousandfold, cosmic destruction and wrecking of human life, the most appalling holocaust history had ever known.” One of the casualties was Leon’s brother Emil, killed in action before he reached his twentieth birthday. “What was a single murder,” Stefan Zweig asked, within “the cosmic, thousandfold guilt, the most terrible mass destruction and mass annihilation yet known to history?”
Pinkas Buchholz fell into despair and died of a broken heart just a few weeks later, overwhelmed by guilt for having prevented his son Emil from immigrating to America a year earlier. Despite my efforts, I found no more information about the deaths of Pinkas and Emil, and no graves, beyond confirmation in a Viennese archive that Pinkas died in Lemberg on December 16, 1914. I was unable to find where Emil fell. The Kriegsarchiv (War Archive) in Vienna offered a crisp explanation that “no personal files are available.” This was a quirk of history: when the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed, the 1919 Treaty of Saint-Germain determined that all Galician files were to remain in the various successor states. Most have been lost.
In the space of three months, Leon had lost his father and brother. At ten years old, he was the last man in the family. He left for Vienna with his mother and sister Laura as World War I pushed the family westward.