Cousins and brothers in war

One hundred years after the First World War. The newspapers were full of the terrible
massacre in the summer of 2014 in the Gaza Strip, beside this the daily attacks against the
Palestinians are nothing worth remarkable. But even this massacre was nothing compared to
the slaughter started a hundred years earlier and lasted more than four years, a massacre
which was the end of an old world and signaled the opening of the twentieth century,
perhaps the most terrible century in human history. Nationalism was invented in the century
before and reached its peak in this massacre. As part of this nationalism were not lacking
anti-Semitism, charges of truancy, and the "knife in the back of the nation" and so on,
especially on the German side, but not only. You can see the Dreyfus case as a starting point
of all these last words, and this happened in France, not in Germany. German Jews did
anything to refute these accusations, and yet the authorities decided in the middle of the
war, in November 1916, to make the notorious "census of the Jews".
A picture of Max Liebermann, dedicated to "the mothers of the 12-thousands", the number
of Jewish German soldiers who died in WWI.

The family tree I am part of, focuses on one single pair settling in 1697 or 1698 in Köslin near
the Baltic Sea (then Prussia). I am 11th generation of this couple. The husband of generation
9, i.e. my grandfather, was actually a Swiss soldier in that war, so his life wasn't really in
danger. But thousands of Baruch's and Edel's descendants and their spouses joined the war
with great enthusiasm, most of them on the German side. Some of their descendants
migrated in the 19th century to France, England, America and Australia, so a small part of
them took part in this hideous massacre also on the other side of the barricades.
Apart from hundreds injured and dozens of medals this tree has more than 70 German war
dead from the endless massacre, five British casualties, two French, one American and one
Australian. The first was Albert Caron, grandson of Adolf Borchard, who was born in
Schwerin, settled in Bordeaux in western France, had a shipping business and was the
Austrian consul and vice-consul of Mecklenburg. His grandson Albert fell as French soldier in
Chazelles sur Albe, France, less than two weeks after the outbreak of war. The last one was
Samuel Wolf Würzburg, from my tribe, a German soldier. In the last month of the war his
unit tried to fend off another collapse in Belgium. He has been missing since October 16th
1918.
Following are some of the more shocking stories:
Willy and Joachim Borchardt: Joachim celebrated his 25th birthday in the shadow of the first
day of the First World War which changed the world overnight, and people felt it in real
time. He was a law student, and joined the war effort. Less than three weeks later, he fell in
Belgium. The obituary in the newspaper in the name of his parents says he fell"a hero's
death for the fatherland". His brother Willy was than two and a half years younger. He also
enlisted, and a year after his brother fell in Kaunas, Lithuania. He too has fallen a "hero's
death". Their mother died less than a decade later, their father was still alive until the
outbreak of the next war, and then he died, too. They weren't alive, when Joachim's and
Willy's two brothers Walter and Erich, and their wives, were murdered by the Nazis, and
Walter's daughter, Paula Margot.
Siegbert Busse and Noah Boss: two young soldiers, distant cousins, fought in the same long
and hard battle, in which fell eighty-nine thousand soldiers from both sides, Siegbert Busse
on the German side and the British side. The Germans were still deep in French territory,
and the British decided to attack with tanks.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cambrai_%281917%29)
Siegbert was born and raised in Berlin, his mother died when he was at the age of eighteen,
and his father was 59 years old. During the war he was a reserve soldier. Noah Boss was
born and raised in London. His grandfather Noah Borchardt, after whom he was named,
emigrated to London in 1853. A year later, Noah's mother was born. Siegbert Busse and
Noah Boss were at the same age, 26, when they died. Did they know, that on other side is a
soldier who is a distant cousin?

The following story, is one of the most shocking stories of our tree.
At the time, when I visited Ilana Michaeli in Hazorea, who died last Thursday, at the age of
95, I uploaded to the tree, among others, the portraits of Grete, Ilana's grandmother's sister,
and her husband Julius Isenthal, and their two children Lucie and Hans. Actually, a picture of
Grete, Martha's younger and only sister, wasn't there. Then it turned out that Julius Isenthal,
Grete’s husband, died young, at age 46, after a long and difficult illness. In the obituary his
employees wrote: "He was an employer always full of love, an example of diligence and
loyalty." He was survived by Hans, an infant of eighteen months, and Lucie, aged two to
three years. Later we found out that Grete remarried a year and a half later, a businessman
too, from Posen, Baruch Scherek, also known as: Bernhard Scherek.
And now I found the following:
In July 1898, soon after his marriage with Grete, Bernhard entered a partnership with Julius
Fleske in Berlin. But then his world fell apart when he was sentenced to prison for two years
for a business scandal. The sentence was commuted, and the family fled to London. Paul
Scherek was born during the course of this affair in Berlin, but Henry Scherek has been born
in April 1900 in London. According to the census of March 1901 went the two older children,
Lucie and Hans Isenthal (their mother decided to keep for them the name of their biological
father, or: her husband was not willing to adopt them) to school in Richmond in West
London, and the two small children Paul and Henry lived with their parents at the center of
London. Something made Hans Isenthal return to Germany at a young age. Was it some
resistance to his stepfather, who replaced his German identity with a new one, as an
Englishman, and did rather well as an international producer of theater? Did Bernhard
Scherek privilege his own sons, on the other children of his wife and somehow rejected Hans
(who remained with the name Isenthal)? Was it aunt Martha Weiler and Hans' cousins
Fritzwho attracted him to come "home" in some way? Or is the story another one: He went
to visit his aunt and his cousins, and was trapped in Germany in the outbrake of the war?
Hans was drafted for the Kaiser in World War I, like the son of his aunt, Fritz (Ilana's father).
The war lasted a long time. After two or three years his brother Paul joined the army, the
British army. In the spring of 1918 the Germans launched an offensive. Hans was killed in
Golancourt, France. But the mother was still mourning her son, when her other son Paul was
killed in action. He was killed after he walked with the Allies over the fresh grave of his
brother Hans, and began the final attack to take out Germany from France, in the battle of
Saint-Thierry, buried in the cemetery of British soldiers in Caudry, about thirty miles north to
the place where his brother was killed, in northern France. One fell for the Kaiser, the
second fell near him, for the British Crown. And in London Grete is sitting and crying over her
two sons, in Oxford street 343, near Soho Square, who fought against each other. For what?

She sat there with her eldest daughter, the 25-year-old, if Luciewas still alive. We do not
know anything about her. Her second husband, producer Bernhard Shrek, was also dead
already. How long did she live after this?
Her English second son, by the way, had also drafted towards the end of the war and served
at the same time in the Middle East, helping the English crown to expel the Turks from here
(from Palestine). After the war he continued in the path of his father: he became a rather
famous producer, married a beautiful actress, daughter of the nobility (7th Viscount
Falmouth), who lost also two brothers in that bloody war, and according his belly and his
Churchill-style cigar he probably had a good life.

The world is still bleeding from that terrible war, and especially today. Da'ish (what you call:
ISIS), Syria, Iraq, Palestine, all a result of the imperial constitution, one hundred years ago.
About Henry Sherek:
http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/103129661?searchTerm=sherek&searchLimits=