My grandfather Yossi Kaltmann always kept a picture of his classmates on his living room mantle. The black-and-white photograph of him and more than 30 of his peers was always given a place of prominence. For most people, looking at a photo of their school friends is a form of nostalgia. For my zayde, it was a form of remembrance, because most of his classmates were murdered by the Nazis. Captured during the 1936-37 school year at Bratislava’s Yesodei HaTorah School in Czechoslovakia, the image portrays young Jewish boys aged 8-9, many of whom would only live a few years more before being killed. The class photo that my zayde displayed was a duplicate of the only known surviving original. His lifelong friend Ernst Neugroschl, who had grown up with him in Bratislava (formerly known as Pressburg), also survived the war. During the war, Ernst had managed to hide some personal artifacts and photos in the thatching of a roof in Nitra, Slovakia, which he retrieved after the war. The class photo was one of these retrieved items. My grandfather is pictured third from right in the top row, with Ernst in the same row, sixth from right. After the war, Ernst, who was an only child and whose parents miraculously also survived, moved to Washington, D.C. My zayde, who was the sole survivor of his family, chose Melbourne, Australia. Despite the geographic distance, the two of them always kept in touch. My zayde and Ernst had the same accent, had both spent time living in Israel after the war, and knew what it was like to survive the destruction of European Jewry. Due to the close bond between the two of them, the Neugroschl family have always felt like my cousins, even though we are not officially related. Remarkably, the photo that Ernst hid in Nitra had the signatures of many of the boys in their class on the back of it. I love seeing my zayde’s signature, in his childlike scrawl, spelling his name as Jozef Kaltmann, using the German spelling for his first name, Joseph. Ernst’s name is also found on the back. While most boys seemed to have put their first initial and last name, Ernst and Jozef, always best of friends and always as thick as thieves, wrote their full names. ...

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