Family connection found in long-lost box of puppets

“I will never have closure,” Katy Haber said. “I hate to say it, but I think closure is such an awful word. What does closure mean?”

“No,” she said, as if to answer her own question, “you never have closure when you understand and learn what horrors your own personal family have gone through.”

Haber is a product of the Holocaust. Both of her parents fled Nazi-occupied Prague in 1939 and traveled to England, leaving behind their whole family, including Katy’s 8-year-old cousin, Martin.

Haber now lives in West Hollywood and owns a box of puppets.

It’s not really a box. It’s more like a picnic basket with old wicker braids, tightly knotted and covered with dust. Inside this basket are layers of bubble wrap, laid in like icing on a cake, inside of which are 20 marionette puppets that were sent from Prague by a man Haber has never met.

The puppets originally belonged to Martin.

Ash blond with an infectious smile, Martin is an enigma to Haber. “All I know is, I imagine Martin to be the love of my parents’ life and the love of my aunt and uncle’s life, because he was their first and only child. I know that he was a much-treasured child, a very happy child, because all the photographs I have of him are just how a child should be,” she said.

In 1944, Martin and his parents were transported to Auschwitz in a crowded cattle car. They arrived at the camp in mid-October.

Sixty-four years later, when Haber returned to the city her parents had fled so many years before, she found the names of Martin and his parents inscribed on a wall at the Pinkas Museum in Prague.

“It’s just a museum with thousands and thousands of people’s names on the walls. And I came to the name Zelenka, and I found Franta, Trudy and Martin. Each one of them had their date of birth, and they all died on exactly the same day: Oct. 14, 1944. And I stood there and saw these names with the realization that this is my family.”

Haber was born and raised in England, where her parents settled, against all odds, escaping Prague after Hitler’s arrival. “I remember my parents spending endless hours trying to find out what happened to their family, but they never did,” she said.

Haber, 72, has auburn hair and a thick British accent. She came to the United States in the 1970s to work in the film industry, a right-hand woman for Hollywood director and screenwriter Sam Peckinpah. She now lives on the second floor of an art deco complex filled with family heirlooms. Haber is a busy woman, always on the phone or in a meeting. But in those rare moments of down time, when she isn’t on a conference call about her next project, she’s able to reflect on family — she’s even joined a genealogy website, Geni.com, to reconnect with relatives. “It means everything to me, since I don’t have family,” said Haber, who lost her parents years ago.

Before being deported, young Martin’s mother gave the family’s most precious belongings for safekeeping to her good friend and neighbor, Hana Chabra, including the 20 marionette puppets. Chabra faithfully held onto the box, awaiting the family’s return. They didn’t come, and the marionettes remained stowed away in a closet for seven decades.

It wasn’t until 2008 that Haber, for the first time, returned to the city where her family had once lived.

On that journey, Haber retraced her lost relatives’ footsteps. She visited their old neighborhood; she also went to Terezin and Auschwitz. And along the way, she found some of what she was looking for.

There’s a picture of Trudy and Martin. Trudy is gazing somewhere off-camera, Martin is sitting on his mother’s lap, flashing a precocious smile. For 70 years, nobody knew who this picture was of, two nameless victims, as it hung in the Jewish Museum in Terezin. That is, until Haber visited the camp’s museum and identified her aunt and cousin.

“So this identification that I did at the museum became huge, huge news. And it was in all the magazines and newspaper articles, that this Jewish woman from Hollywood had identified, you know, a photograph that had been unidentified for over 70 years,” Haber said.

In 2008, when Pavel, Hana Chabra’s son, read about the identification in a local paper, he emailed Haber, saying he had a “box of memories.” He asked for her address, so he could send them to their rightful owner. Weeks later, she received the wicker box.

“This was something they had in their apartment up until 1943, in a war-torn country and living under the most terrible conditions,” she said. “So I had in my hands something that they had in their hands. Martin had been holding them, my cousin had been holding them.”

These puppets are a bridge to the past, the belongings of an 8-year-old boy, cherub-like with blond hair, round cheeks and a beaming smile, who suffered a tragic fate, his memory nearly lost to time. These are his toys, now with frayed cloth and chipped paint. And through these objects that Haber inherited — 20 marionette puppets and a handful of faded photos — we can piece together the puzzle of who Martin was.