I have displayed here two photographs and the death certificate of my grandfather Rudolf Michael Rosenthal (born Vienna, December 21, 1885) who was killed fighting in the Austro-Hungarian army in the first world war. He was 29 when he died of a head wound in a field hospital at Galagonyas, Hungary on October 14, 1915. My father was only two when my grandfather died, so he had no memory of his father. All he knew about his father that he worked in a bank and that he gave poetry readings in his spare time (he recalled as a child being shown newspaper advertisements for these readings). The death certificate gives my grandfather's religion as israelitisch; he was one of thousands of Jewish soldiers who died for Austria-Hungary or Germany in World War I – the irony needs not be spelt out. Galagonyas is now known as Glogonj and is in Serbia, about 20 km north of Belgrade. There was fierce fighting between Austro-Hungarian and Serbian forces from the beginning of the war, and my grandfather died in the third attack on Belgrade that began on October 6, 1915. He is described as a rifleman in a rifle battalion but says his civilian occupation and marital status are unknown. My Czech friend Tomáš Vůjta has done much research into this as his wife's great-grandfather died at Galagonyas on October 10, 1915, four days before my grandfather. The Czech embassy in Belgrade told him that the Nazis in 1942 reinterred 1,623 German soldiers from Galagonyas and other cemeteries in Serbia in the central cemetery (Novo Groblje) in Belgrade. There is no list of names of those who were reinterred but it's safe to say that my grandfather, being Jewish, was not among them. Tomáš visited the cemetery in October 2015 to mark the centenary of his relative’s death and discovered that much of it is abandoned and overgrown, although some graves and buildings survive. He wasn’t able to penetrate far into the abandoned part of the cemetery but it is possible that our relatives’ graves survive somewhere in bushes and undergrowth that have sprung up over the last century. There is a sign saying much of the graveyard was destroyed in floods in the 1940s, but the walls remain and Tomáš believes the damage may not have been very serious. He ran into a tour guide who spoke English, who told him that on October 6, 1915 Austrian and German troops reached the Danube and the following day they reached the River Sava. Our relatives were killed as they attempted to cross the Sava. Belgrade was conquered a few days later, on October 9. In the first photograph of my grandfather he has on his desk (probably a studio prop) photographs of Emperor Franz Joseph and Empress Elisabeth, who granted Jews equal rights and were therefore highly respected by Austria's Jewish population. The second photograph shows Rudolf (left) with his brother-in-law Arthur Bauer who married his sister (my great-aunt) Frieda. Arthur was managing director of the Theater an der Wien where the Magic Flute was first performed (also Lehár operettas). My father was a theatre fanatic, he must have been greatly influenced by Arthur who I think paid for him to attend the Reinhardt Seminar, Austria’s most famous acting school. Frieda and Arthur fled Vienna in 1938, emigrated to Buenos Aires where he died in 1952, aged about 62. He is buried in the Tablada cemetery in Buenos Aires http://www.hebrewsurnames.com/burial_records_BAUER .Frieda came to visit us in Cambridge in about 1953, she loved England and wanted to settle here but died on the ship back (aged about 60). I was about three when Tante Frieda visited us; all I remember is that she was dressed in black and wore a necklace of large black beads. My father was very fond of them both. My father gave me his father's death certificate in about 2000, after he had suffered a severe stroke on his 83rd birthday in 1996. I had no idea he had it and I'm not sure when or how he got hold of it. But he did mention something about it before his stroke and said he had written to the Hungarian embassy for more information, but received no reply. My father born (Hans) Ewald Rosenthal, better known as Hugh Rank, fled Vienna in 1938. He studied German at Cambridge in the early 1950s and later became a teacher. He died in Cheltenham in 2006. I wrote an obituary of my father here http://www.theguardian.com/news/2006/dec/15/obituaries.mainsection Tomáš gives more information about the Glogonj cemetery and his relative Bedřich Hroch here http://glogonj.vujta.cz/ (English link at top right). I can be contacted at: rank(at)mailbox.co.uk
Death certificate and photograph of Rudolf Rosenthal