“You are the sum of your ancestors,” says a Jewish proverb, expressing the sentiment that each individual is a living continuation of those who came before them.
In the wake of the Holocaust, it’s not unusual for people to unearth long-lost Jewish roots, and a lineage they may not have known about. Out of fear for their survival, many people concealed their Jewish identity.
Such is the case for Virginia resident Linda Ambrus Broenniman, 69, when an unexpected discovery after a 2011 fire in her parents’ home led her to uncover a treasure trove of a lost Jewish heritage and relatives going back eight generations to 18th-century Hungary.
Buried within 77 boxes in her parents’ attic were documents, photographs, heirlooms, letters, and other ephemera of lives lived and lost, and a long history of accomplished artists, doctors, business owners, freedom fighters, art collectors, and musicians—all of whom Broenniman was unaware.
Broenniman was the middle child of seven born to Julian Ambrus and Clara Bayer, Hungarian physicians who survived World War II and started their new life in Buffalo, New York, in 1949. She was raised Catholic in a family that went to church every Sunday. She had no idea that her father was Jewish and that her non-Jewish mother had actively hid Jews, including her father and his mother, during World War II and the Nazi occupation of Hungary.
The revelation was like opening a door to a lost part of herself, igniting an eight-year journey back in time, culminating with a book she researched and wrote, titled “The Politzer Saga,” which reconnected Broenniman with the people, traditions, and history that silently shaped her identity.
Broenniman was in South Florida in March to talk about her book and spoke at the Sinai Residences in Boca Raton and at Harbour’s Edge senior living in Delray Beach. “I didn’t intend to write a book,” says Broenniman, who has an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University and worked as an entrepreneur and in corporate America.
“I just wanted to understand my family’s history,” she says. As she learned about that history, she read many books about the era her relatives lived in and says the more she read, the more she realized she needed to capture it and make sense of it all, and she began writing it all down.
While as a child, Broenniman had a sense there were family secrets, it wasn’t until she was in business school in 1983 at the age of 27 that she learned of anything. Her older sister went to a medical convention in Montreal, Canada, and stayed with a relative. Her question, “What was our great-grandmother like?” elicited a surprising response. “Well, like most strong, Jewish women…,” the relative began, and “shocked her sister into silence.”
Busy in graduate school, Broenniman didn’t fully absorb the clue until a friend, Yona Eichenbaum, gave her Daniel Mendelsohn’s book, “The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million,” one of the first books to come out searching for lost Jewish ancestry.
“I’m so proud of Linda and what she has accomplished,” says Eichenbaum, an essayist for The Forward and The Toronto Globe and Mail. The two met in graduate school and have remained friends.
In 2023, Eichenbaum and her husband accompanied Broenniman to Hungary where they attended Shabbat services in the Dohány Street Synagogue, the largest in Europe, and sat in the same seats as had Broenniman’s grandparents. “Linda is one of the smartest and most resourceful people I know,” Eichenbaum says. “I’m so proud of what she’s accomplished.”
As a child of Polish Holocaust survivors, Eichenbaum saw similarities in her family’s story of immigration to Canada with that of Broenniman’s family story immigrating to the U.S. “I was bowled over by Linda’s discoveries of her family history,” she says. “Bowled over, but not surprised.”
Eichenbaum encouraged Broenniman to write down everything she was uncovering and said, “If you don’t write it down, they [your relatives] will have died twice.”
Broenniman took her friend’s advice. In 2006, her mother had received a letter in the mail from Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial museum dedicated to preserving the memory of those Jews murdered in the war, wanting to honor her with a designation, “Righteous Among the Nations,” an honor given to non-Jews who took great personal risks to save Jews during the Holocaust.
At just 19 years old, Broenniman’s mother, Clara Bayer, risked her life and endured nine months of terror, hunger, and cold to save Jews during the Holocaust.
In addition to her future husband and his mother, she hid her friend Éva Fisher Klein and her boyfriend, Rabbi Béla Eisenberg, as well as both their families. Ironically, in 2006, while her father gave the acceptance speech in New York (“inspirational,” says Broenniman), he never once mentioned that he was Jewish and that Bayer had saved his life by hiding him from the Nazis.
Despite having advanced Alzheimer’s disease at the time, when receiving the honor, Broenniman’s mother said, “I did what any decent human being would do,” something Broenniman is proud of to this day. It was the first time she learned of her mother’s heroic actions during the war.
To write “The Politzer Saga,” Broenniman enlisted the help of Hungarian researcher András Gyekiczki, and the two uncovered not only a long line of accomplished ancestors, but also tales of resilience and achievement.
“I was blown away by the incredible rich heritage that we found,” says Broenniman, whose own sense of identity and belonging has evolved as she pieced together the threads of her family’s past and discovered a newfound interest in Jewish history and culture. Many of her ancestors came from the town of Politz in then-Czechoslovakia and had the surname Politzer.
One of the most well known was Ádám Politzer, a famous otolaryngologist known as the “founder of clinical otology” (the study of the ear), who lived in Vienna (1835–1920) and treated the Emperor Franz Josef and Tsar Nicolas II.
To this day, the Politzer Society for Otologic Surgery and Science is an active society with annual meetings and awards. Politzer was known for his skills as a physician, researcher, teacher, historian, and artist. “Ask any ENT surgeon today, and they will know the name Ádám Politzer,” says Broenniman. “He was the most influential otologist of the 19th century.”
Learning about Politzer’s life and achievements had a special resonance for Broenniman, who came to realize that her father, an oncologist who loved his patients and students, almost certainly modeled himself and his career after Politzer’s. “To hide that knowledge and awareness must have been very tough for my father,” she says.
Other ancestors that Broenniman came to cherish and feel connected to include her great-grandmother Margit (Broenniman’s middle name is Margaret) and Rachel, a young woman at the time who chose Judaism when her parents converted to Christianity and moved to the U.S. After her older brother convinced the family to convert from Judaism and emigrate to the U.S., Rachel refused to be baptized and to leave home. She fled from her father’s home in the middle of the night, and the rest of her family left Zalaegerszeg in western Hungary for the U.S. without her. “Your descendants will be blessed forever,” she was told by the rabbi.
“My eyes welled up when I read this story,” Broenniman writes. “I was one of Rachel’s descendants, her great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter.
“I sighed, grateful that her courage and convictions were rewarded with such a blessing,” she writes. Hard to put into words, she was touched by the story and its meaning.
Broenniman also admires another relative, Ignácz Misner, an attorney who helped found the Hungarian bar and who was the father of her namesake, Margit. They were forced into the Jewish ghetto in 1944 under the Nazis and to wear the yellow Star of David, and the family home and all their possessions were confiscated. They were ordered to move into a “yellow star home” and forced to share the home with other families, one family to a room.
“Ignácz did not want to take off the yellow star; he wore his Judaism as a matter of pride,” Broenniman quotes a cousin in the book.
“I found remarkable relatives who believed in truth and justice and had unshakeable faith,” says Broenniman. She has reconnected with lost relatives, and she’s found Politzers in Hungary, England, and France.
In addition to the book, the results of Broenniman and Gyekiczki’s research turned into a permanent exhibition in the education and cultural center of the 1872 Rumbach Synagogue in Budapest, Hungary. Along with Zsuzsa Toronyi, director of the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives, Broenniman worked to create the exhibit, comprising 10 lyrical and artistically rendered seven-minute films about eight generations of Politzers, all based on the stories Broenniman uncovered.
“Zsuzsa shares a vision that my family’s stories can stimulate new awareness, especially among Hungarian Jews, about the power of ancestral legacies,” Broenniman writes in her book.
Broenniman herself has a newfound awareness of her Jewish background and says she was most surprised by her family’s “incredible, rich heritage.” She writes, “It wasn’t enough to find the family my father never spoke of, I needed to write their stories.”
She says, “It is a way to connect to their lives and to make them even more real. I honor my ancestors’ memories and experience the true meaning of the Jewish statement of condolence, ‘May their memory be for a blessing.’”
And while Broenniman hasn’t replaced going to Sunday services at church with Saturday services at synagogue, she does say she has found a new appreciation for Jewish culture and is more sensitive to the effects of anti-Semitism.
“I am more aware of Jewish holidays, ‘Jewish-isms,’ and keep abreast of Jewish issues,” she says. “My mother always raised us to treat everyone with respect, dignity, and compassion, and I live by that.”
To learn more, visit politzersaga.com.