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Frank FEINER

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Frank Feiner, a retired advisory expert on community development and management, was born in the Netherlands in 1946, as the son of Viennese parents. They left Vienna in 1930 and survived hidden in the Netherlands after having lived in Germany and France. Frank was just 20 when his father died and his aunt asked him if he knew his father was a Jew. He immediately said yes, although he had never been told. Family history and what the Holocaust did to their family was never a subject of conversation for Frank’s parents. Nevertheless, as a child, he understood that this should not be questioned. Years later, in 1978, that unmarried aunt died in Vienna. Going through her things he found family documents which - together with bed linen and table silver - had been put in a suitcase by his grandparents and brought to the flower shop, the day before they were deported to Lodz. For Frank this was the beginning of a long extended and exciting research to learn about the family, mainly in Western Slovakia and Vienna. In 2001, genealogy became his main engagement and since 2007 he has been visiting Slovakia several times a year. In 2011 he left the Netherlands and settled in the Vienna area. Of course, genealogy is based on documented BMD data, carefully put together in a family tree. Having studied cultural anthropology and social pedagogy, Frank is interested in the aspects of community live of the family history. But, even more than that his motivation is the search for social and cultural family identity. Like many others, Frank had not known his grandparents who are usually the transmitters of family values. And his father did not want to tell about his youth and his family as it was probably too painful for him. Nowadays, Frank is also helping other people to explore their roots, honoring ancestry and finding traces of identity.

HIS / HER CONFERENCES

17/07/2012 - The Migration of Jews to, in and from Western Slovakia in the 19th Century - Hungary , Slovakia