Treasure Chest

by Jill Cousins

The identical red lacquered Chinese boxes were always prominently displayed in the homes of Ruth and Dr. Oswald “Valdik” Holzer. Their youngest daughter, Joanie Holzer Schirm, recalls the boxes sitting on opposite ends of the bookshelves behind her parents’ beds in their Indialantic home, and later the boxes were displayed on the top of bookshelves in the living room of her parents’ Melbourne condominium.

Joanie, her brother Tom, and sister Pat never thought much of the boxes. They were simply attractive pieces of home decor. The siblings never asked their parents about the boxes and certainly never thought to look inside.

It wasn’t until after Ruth and Valdik died – two days apart in January 2000 – that the siblings would make a startling discovery.

“One month later, we had a celebration of their life,” recalls Joanie, who now lives in College Park with husband Roger Neiswender. “We had 200 people there, and everyone was laughing like it was a wedding reception instead of a memorial. The next day, everybody went home except the three of us. We went back to the condo and went through everything. And that's when we opened the Chinese boxes.”

Joanie was mesmerized. Inside one of the boxes was more than 40 letters, mostly handwritten in her father’s Czech language, from between 1939 and 1943.

By the time Joanie and her siblings had finished going through all of their parents’ belongings, they would discover nearly 400 letters, including many carbon copies of their father’s correspondences with family members and friends as he made his escape from Nazi-invaded Czechoslovakia to Shanghai, China. Valdik’s three-month journey began on March 31, 1939, when he escaped from the Nazis, and would take him through seven other countries including France, Egypt, India, and Sri Lanka.

During 19 months in China, where he worked as a physician in both Shanghai and Peking (now Beijing), Valdik wrote detailed letters describing his life in the strange new world. He also saved letters he’d received from his friends who had fled to other countries to escape the Nazis.

////“I somehow feel adventurous, but all that is really against my will,”///// Valdik wrote in a letter to a friend in London in 1940.

About eight years after she discovered the letters, Joanie would embark on her own adventure. The founding president of Geotechnical & Environmental Consultants (GEC) in Orlando, Joanie sold her business and retired in 2008 so that she could devote herself to researching and telling her father’s story. It’s a story of bravery, adventure, dedication, and sacrifice. But, ultimately, it is a story about how one man escaped a horrific destiny to live a life full of love, laughter, and service to his country and his fellow man.

A Tale Worth Telling

Joanie had gotten a head start on her project back in 1989, when she interviewed her father and recorded much of his life story on seven hours of tapes. But now she also had time to go through the mounds of letters and other items that would fully reveal Valdik’s genuinely amazing journey.

“When I did the interview with my father, I got some of his story,” says Joanie, who has two grown children, Kelly and Derick, from her first marriage. “But he didn’t go into the difficult things. We knew growing up that our Jewish great-grandmother and grandparents from my father’s side had died in the Holocaust, but my dad never really talked about it. He just told us lots of fun stories from growing up in Bohemia (now the Czech Republic). He was a happy man, living his life.”

Joanie says she was always curious about her father’s story, but “we never got into the hard stuff.” That changed in 1993 with the release of Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning movie /////Schindler’s List//// – about one man’s role in saving 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust. During a visit to her father’s home, Joanie asked if he would go see the movie with her, and he said, /////“Absolutely not.”/////

Without saying another word, her father sat down at his old manual typewriter and typed his own list. Valdik’s List, as it would be called, was a detailed list of Valdik’s 44 relatives who died in the Holocaust. He coded each entry with all the information he knew, including when and where they died (mostly in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland) and how they were related to him.

“That’s when I knew it was much worse than we thought,” Joanie says.

But it wasn’t until she retired that Joanie had the time to begin the meticulous research that has now resulted in two books: /////Adventurers Against Their Will///// and, most recently, /////My Dear Boy/////. The title of her second book came from a letter written to Valdik from his father, Arnošt Holzer, in April 1942 – three days before both Arnošt and Valdik’s mother, Olga, were taken away by the Nazis to the Sobibor extermination camp.

My Dear Boy was going to be the name of Joanie’s first book. It would be the biography that her father said in his old letters that he wanted to write. But when Joanie finally took the time to tackle the mounds of memorabilia that Valdik left behind, she unveiled so much more than she expected.

Adventures of a Lifetime

In all, Joanie had discovered nearly 400 letters from 78 different writers, as well as hundreds of photos, postcards, menus, brochures, and travel itineraries from her father’s adventures. But, since most of the letters were not written in English, Joanie needed the help of 14 translators to reveal the contents. Once she was able to read the letters, she embarked on additional journeys to find the writers and their descendants and discover their connections to her father.

Joanie traveled around the United States and Europe as part of her research, and she found the stories of the letter writers to be so fascinating that she stopped writing ////My Dear Boy///// and instead wrote Adventurers Against Their Will. In that book, Joanie chronicles seven of those letter writers in a threaded narrative that links each story to the next one.

When she finally had the chance to write My Dear Boy, Joanie decided to do it in the first person, in her father’s voice.

“I think my father represents somebody who went through a horrific life experience but came out of it as an ordinary-seeming person with an extraordinary destiny,” Joanie says. “The choices you make are what make you who you are, and in my father’s case, he chose to live his life in the light and not in the dark.”

Living History

In addition to her two books, Joanie has also put together the Holzer Collection: 534 paper items, such as letters and official documents, as well as film, photos, slides, clothing, artwork, maps, books, and her tape-recorded interviews. The Holocaust Memorial Resource & Education Center of Florida in Maitland is displaying several of those items in an exhibit that is scheduled for completion in April. Visitors can see the first portion of the exhibit, currently on display.

“Joanie’s genius is in her extraordinary ability to put her father’s story together and then do the meticulous research of learning who the letter writers were and locating them and their descendants,” says Pam Kancher, the Holocaust Center’s executive director. “It was just amazing to meet her father through these books. He was such an interesting renaissance man. But the thing that warmed my heart the most was that – even when he was safely in the United States – he always wanted to do something to better this world, and he continued to do that until the day he died.”

A Doctor’s Journey

Valdik had always dreamed about becoming a doctor, and his parents were determined to help their only child achieve his goal. They moved from a small town in Bohemia to Prague so Valdik could attend medical school, and after graduation, Valdik would serve as a physician officer in the Czechoslovak Army.

Valdik eventually made his way to the United States in 1941 with his new wife Ruth (see sidebar), and he would work in California, Indiana (where he became a U.S. citizen in 1944), and New York before moving to Florida in 1948 while Ruth was pregnant with Joanie. He also spent time working in Peru, Ecuador, and Peking.

After three years working at Florida State Hospital in Chattahoochee, Valdik heard that doctors were needed in Brevard County, so he moved his family to the barrier island that includes Indialantic and Melbourne Beach. When Valdik opened his family practice in 1952, he opened his doors to everyone – regardless of their color, religion, or ability to pay.

During the first 10 years after his retirement, Valdik became the campus doctor at Florida Tech in Melbourne (donating his salary back to the school) and founded the college’s student health services. He and Ruth also established an endowment in genetics medical research.

Joanie, now 70, feels an urgency to tell her father’s story and hopes that others can learn something from it.

“My father lived an extraordinary life,” Joanie says. “I knew I wanted to write something about him, but I didn’t know what I was going to write until I found these letters. I never would have dreamed that I was going to be doing this now, but I absolutely feel I am doing what I was meant to do.”

Love in a Faraway Land

Joanie’s account of her father’s escape from Nazi-invaded Czechoslovakia is not the only fascinating story in her family. Her parents’ love story is also one that reads like a dramatic movie script or novel.

Ruth Alice “Chick” Lequear was born in China in 1916 while her American parents were working as Christian missionaries. She came to the United States as a young girl but then returned to China as a teacher after completing her college education. Just two days after arriving in Peking (now Beijing), in September 1940, Ruth was introduced to a young Czechoslovakian doctor named Valdik who – like her – was taking Chinese language classes.

Valdik didn’t speak much English, and Ruth did not speak the Czech language, but the two were immediately smitten with each other. Valdik asked Ruth to marry him just eight days after they met, and they were married five weeks later on October 19, 1940, near the steps of Peking’s historic Temple of Heaven. The very next month, the two embarked on a journey to the United States after foreigners were urged to leave China, as its war with Japan began to escalate.

The couple would be married for nearly 60 years, dying just two days apart. Ruth, who had mentioned she was hoping to live to see the new millennium, died one hour after midnight on January 1, 2000 of Parkinson’s disease at age 83. Valdik died on January 3 of congestive heart failure at 88.

Ruth and Valdik raised three children, eventually settling in the Melbourne area, where Valdik was a family physician. Joanie, the youngest child, recalls attending services at the local Presbyterian church with her siblings and mother, who was a Sunday School teacher and church elder.

Since her father “didn’t want anything to do with organized religion,” Joanie says, the Holzer children were raised as Christians, although Joanie now considers herself simply "spiritual.” She is hoping her books and her stories teach others to appreciate their families, learn about their families, and encourage their family members to love life and help others – just like her parents did.

“I feel this responsibility,” Joanie says. “It’s all about teaching respect and love and caring for one another. It’s a great combination of the Jewish heritage and the Christian heritage coming into one. That’s the way I feel about it.”