Leo and Fanny Körner
Please click on the marked fields in the "Massif of Names" to learn more about the Koerner family.
Past
The Körner family, consisting of father Leo, mother Fanny and son Heinrich Sieghart. They lived together in their Viennese apartment at Am Tabor 13 in Vienna's second district. After the "Anschluss" of Austria to Germany, son Heinrich emigrated to the USA in September 1938, while his parents stayed in Vienna. On 6 April 1939 Heinrich Körner reached New York, where he changed his name to Henry Koerner. The correspondence with his parents broke off in 1941.
Leo and Fanny were taken to a collective apartment at Rueppgasse 14/6. The Jewish religious Community has documented the deregistration note: "on 9 June 1942 with wife to Minsk." [1]
The Körners were taken as part of the 1,006 passengers on the special deportation train Da 206 (the "Da" stood for David, as in Star of David) from Vienna's Aspang railway station via Volkovysk to Maly Trascjanec, where they were shot in the Blahauščyna forest on the afternoon of 15 June. [2]
The grandparents of Joseph Körner
Interview with Joseph Koerner (son of Henry Koerner, grandson of Leo Körner)
“How did they die? Where did they die? What happened to them? It never was discussed.”
– Joseph Koerner talks about how his family dealt with the fate of his grandparents.
“He [J. Koerner’s father, Henry Koerner] did express regret that he didn´t […] turn around to his parents to say Goodbye cause he knew that it was likely he wouldn’t see them again. But he had the sense that to get out you needed so much energy and so much commitment that he didn’t want to look one way or the other.”
Present
Heinrich Körner's son Joseph tells us that the fate of his grandparents was always the great family secret. Henry Koerner chose an artistic approach to process his family history and portrayed his parents in his artwork "My Parents I" in the flat at Am Tabor in Vienna. [3]
Interview with Joseph Koerner
„You can see that the questions get passed on from generation to generation.“
„I would say that cryptic messages are sent from the parent to the child. […] Messages that start of as enigmatic because a child can’t understand but they’re there. And then people work through those messages. And the messages can be as simple as silences, as planks, as ‚ […] ‘why can I not go into that room’, ‘Why can’t I know about that letter’[…].”
Future
It is important to Koerner that we keep the crimes in mind:
„I think historians need to work on this, and people need to be vigilant about the kind of stubbornness, the deepness, the weird explanatory force that is sometimes attributed to some idea about Jewishness, that keeps on being formed and reformed."
For further reading here: Joseph Koerner's essay on Maly Trascjanec, to be found at: Maly Trostinets | Joseph Leo Koerner | Granta
As well as the trailer for his film "The burning Child": The Burning Child -- Official Trailer - YouTube
Sources:
[1] Barton, Waltraud (2015): Das Totenbuch – Maly Trostinec. Den Toten ihre Namen geben. Wien: Edition Ausblick. p.376.
[2] Koerner, Joseph Leo (21.11.2019): Maly Trostinets, https://granta.com/maly-trostinets/.
[3] Koerner, Joseph Leo, 21.11.2019, Maly Trostinets, https://granta.com/maly-trostinets/.
The grandparents of Joseph Körner