Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
Josef Bergmann began life in 1879 in an ancient town in a corner of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, in what today is the southeastern corner of Poland. The town is Przeworsk, but Bergmann also most likely would have
known it by its Yiddish name, Pshevorsk, as he was a Jew.
All seemed well—one might even say auspicious—when Bergmann graduated from Berlin’s most prestigious university with a medical degree in 1905. Eight years later, he was granted German citizenship. In World War I, he fought for Austria, serving with a medical unit in an infantry brigade. In 1916, Emperor Franz Josef awarded him the medal pictured at far left, for bravery on the day that 15 Austrian divisions broke the Italian lines at Asiago. (Bergmann, by the way, stood just 5 feet tall.)
After the war, the small, brave doctor apparently built his practice in Germany. He was still practicing in 1935, when the German government awarded Bergmann the other medal shown on the opposite page, in recognition of his service in World War I. Yet this was also the year of the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jews of citizenship. In 1939, Bergmann was issued the passport shown here. Two months later, his right to practice medicine in Germany was revoked. And here is the truly unusual part of his story: Less than a week after that, he got an immigration visa from the American vice consul in Berlin.
Bergmann was one of relatively few Jews who made it out of the Third Reich, along with his wife and daughter. He became a U.S. citizen in 1945, in St. Louis, where he lived on Waterman Boulevard. He died, apparently of a heart ailment, in 1953. One can hardly wonder that his heart would have been weak by then.
We know these things about Bergmann thanks to Creve Coeur’s Holocaust Museum and Learning Center, founded in 1995 as a department of the Jewish Federation of St. Louis. It holds Bergmann’s papers and medals in its archives, along with 40 cubic feet of other documents, as well as photo albums and even a Nazi dagger, much of it donated by Holocaust survivors. The archives are open to researchers by appointment.
