Schatzky Family Collection

Karl and Eva née Gorzelanczyk Schatzky were both born in 1914 in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland). Karl was born into a wealthy family; his father, Erich Schatzky, owned a successful printing company started by Karl’s grandfather, Theodor Schatzky, called Druckerei Th. Schatzky. Erich Schatzky was killed in an explosion on a refugee ship in Haifa (the Patria disaster of November 25, 1940), the year he and his wife Hilde née Brinitzer Schatzky escaped Germany; Hilde died in Haifa in 1971. Erich’s brother Hellmuth committed suicide in 1935; another brother named Siegfried died in 1938. Erich’s eldest brother, Georg Schatzky, was a lawyer in Berlin who escaped to England in 1940.

Karl Schatzky and Eva Gorzelanczyk met in 1931, became engaged in 1935, and married in 1937; these events all occurred in Breslau. After two unsuccessful attempts, Karl and Eva escaped to London in 1939. One year later, Karl was interned, first in Liverpool and then on the Isle of Man; even as a Jewish refugee, Karl was considered an enemy alien because of his German citizenship. After his yearlong internment, Karl found jobs mostly in the agricultural sector until he was hired by Jarrold Printing and Publishing in 1948, allowing Karl to utilize the skills he had learned as a publishing apprentice in Germany. Eva, meanwhile, had trained as an X-ray technician in Germany and worked in that same field in England. Between 1940 and 1948, Karl and Eva often lived separately from each other, sometimes for extended periods of time. They lived in England until 1953, when they moved to Toronto with their three sons, Thomas, David, and Anthony.

Karl Schatzky’s sister Kate married Kurt Kalish and then emigrated with her husband to Palestine in 1933, where they had one daughter and one son. Eva Scahtzky’s father, Samuel Gorzelanczyk, died in 1919; Eva’s mother, Gertrud née Block Gorzelanczyk, died in the Treblinka concentration camp in 1942.