The Power of Sibling Influence: Extraordinary Acts of a Family Hero

Amidst the shocking history of his family's escape from Austria during the Nazi invasion, Christopher Bock discovers the remarkable life of his great-uncle Paul Patek, a metal worker and artist who played a key role in their survival, inspiring Bock to write a book about him and uncovering hidden talents in his own family lineage.

"[Researching] really did make me understand my family a lot more in a lot of ways."

Key Points:

• Traverse Christopher Bock's lineage, as we uncover the intricate details of his ancestry.
• Learn about the gripping escape from Nazi-occupied Austria and the challenges of starting anew.
• Comprehend the value of investigating family histories and the talents concealed within.
• Discover the profound influence of family tales in shaping our self-awareness and identity.

About Christopher:

Everything Christopher Bock does is with passion and thoroughness fueled by curiosity. The list is diverse—photography, collecting baseball cards, keeping bees, and his own hardwood flooring business, Geronimo Floors. But he never thought of writing a book until he was handed his grandfather’s autobiography. That same curiosity and passion led him to the extraordinary story of his grandfather’s escape from Austria in 1938—and the key role a mischievous uncle played in the family’s survival.

Christopher's book, "An Ordinary Man: from Vienna to Japan and Back During World War II" is available on Amazon. (affiliate link)

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Transcript

The Power of Sibling Influence: Christopher Bock Reveals the Extraordinary Acts of a Family Hero

Stories in Our Roots
Episode 69

Heather Murphy: Hi Chris. Thanks for joining me on my podcast today.

Christopher Bock: Thank you for having me. happy to be here. 

Heather Murphy: Could you tell me a little bit about yourself? 

Christopher Bock: I am from California, just north of San Francisco and I have a hardwood flooring business and I've been doing that for years. Genealogy wise, I wasn't something I was into in particular, but I've always been interested in a lot of different things, so it kind of came natural to me to want to be into it. And it's interesting. So

Heather Murphy: Yeah. So what is your story of how you became interested in learning your family history? 

Christopher Bock: I'd say it really started when my grandpa, he wrote an autobiography and I read it like a little bit after he died in 2006. And the story of how the family got out of Austria was just amazing to me. really just made an impression on me. Honestly, I never really talked to my grandpa at all growing up. You know, obviously I knew him, but I didn't, you know, I never got any stories from him about anything. But, um, he wrote his entire life down, like literally by hand and my, his, uh, niece put it into, you know, typing so we couldn't read it cuz his handwriting wasn't very good. So I went through and just started reading all of it.

So I had like, in terms of like going back, I, I knew quite a bit. From what he had written, you know, like the people. And then obviously getting on different, you know, ways of finding people beyond, I found a lot more people going back further, which was interesting too. But this story is what really got me interested in, I couldn't believe it it happened to my family, honestly, cuz like, it's very, Fortunate, a lot of the events that happened in the event of my grandpa's life and his particular, his uncle. 

Heather Murphy: Well, I'd love for you to share that story if you would with us. 

Christopher Bock: Yeah, I mean, I, I wrote a book about it, so it's gonna be, you can read everything that I've found but the main, the main part is, you know, my grandpa, his uncle was this guy named Paul Patek and he, he had an ability to work with all kinds of things. He was very artistic, so he made all kinds of stuff in his lifetime and including a bunch of people apparently.

He was a metal worker, which is the main reason why he ends up getting the opportunity that he capitalized on in, uh, 1938 when the Nazis came into Austria and took it. and he got shown an ad in some Jewish newspaper. A guy named Carl Rosenberg in Japan had. They were looking for a Drop forge engineer and Paul Patek, my grandpa's uncle knew how to do that cuz after the war, you know, before the World War I, he had just graduated. And, uh, some mechanical school and got a degree as a, you know, engineer.

And then he, basically right after the war, he survived. He was in the war for like, you know, three or whatever years in Italy. And then he, gets out of the, out, you know, gets a job and some train factory in Weinernostat and works there for five, six years or something. I don't know exactly how long, but with that knowledge is how he, you know, saw this ad and applied for the job, got the job in Japan, and took off and went to Japan and got there in, like, uh, September of 38.

And then my grandpa ended up getting over there too because Paul, right before he left, he ended up winning the lottery, winning a whole bunch of money and, you know, had the the ability to get it cashed cuz they probably wouldn't have given it to him being Jewish, I'm sure. So he, he didn't really have any time apparently, cuz it was right towards the end of him leaving and he handed it off to his boyfriend, this guy Carl Von Hassinger and Carl walked into a lottery house and cashed the ticket, took the money and put it into a bank somewhere, I'm sure, and used the money to buy all the passages for my grandpa and his brother first to go.

In the beginning of 1939, like January, they leave Italy. Finally. It's a big, long story about finally getting to the boat, which is very interesting. And then they go from there to Shanghai on like the basic passage with a whole bunch of other fleeing Jewish people, they're like kind in the beginning of that fleeing period of Jewish people going to Shanghai.

So they get to Shanghai and it wasn't like massive amount of refugees there, but there were a good amount and they saw that whole. You know, refugee accepting, you know, they people coming in and going, and they stayed there for a couple weeks and my grand, they ended up be meeting this, financier of a Rockefeller funded medical school. He's like a, um, trustee. He's, he worked in the United States and he gets on the boat when they're in Bombay, I think.

And you know, when they're in Shanghai, they send a letter. off to this. Medical school in Peking that my grandpa ends up going to. The first letter is like a denial letter and then my uncle or my grandpa's brother, yeah, it was my, my great uncle ends up, you know, saying, Hey, let's reconsider. And they reconsider. And then there's like a different person at the second meeting, some Austrian like, um, doctor that knew the situation really well and knew the doc knew the, the school, my grandpa was like four exams away from getting his medical degree from the University of Vienna. So he knew that he wasn't in some just average school over there. So he got, ends up getting into the school so that they'd send that letter when they're in Shanghai, the first one. And then from there they'd take like a, a first class, uh, passage because Paul wants them to get, accepted very nicely in Japan cuz they're showing up without visas. 

So it's, it's a crazy story. It's like, and so, you know, obviously that was just like insane. So I started looking at all kinds of stuff and I found a bunch of other neat things about, you know, other parts of my family and whatnot too. But, you know, that was a huge thing. 

Heather Murphy: So what did It mean for you to discover that story and all those intricacies of getting your family where they needed to be? 

Christopher Bock: I mean, it was shocking. It still is shocking. I've known him for, since 2006, obviously. And then like, yeah, I reread it in 2020 and I had a bunch of time on my hands, like everyone, and then it just really took over my life. And now I was like, I gotta write a book about Paul, because Paul's like the main character, like honestly, like my entire family doesn't exist without this guy Paul Patek that, you know, he wasn't, he's not my decendant in any way, but. But he, he, without him, there's, there's no way, because my family ends up, And my grandma ends up in Peking because she takes a trans and railroad as her father was like a diplomat in the German government and knew some people over in Peking. So she ends up in Peking. You know, because she wants to get outta Europe. She's like 17, she had polio, and her hands were, you know, it was really obvious. So she wanted outta Germany in the whole situation. She was a German national, they were in Switzerland when, when she fled. So she jumps on the Trans-Siberian railroad, and that's where my grandparents, me, my grandpa doesn't end up in japan, let alone Peking without Paul Patek. 

Heather Murphy: Mm-hmm. 

Christopher Bock: It's like Paul didn't plan it. It's not like he's like, oh, let's do this. But I don't know, it's just amazing to me. Obviously I'm... you read about really hap horrible times and whatnot and there's one family member that stays behind. I won't say anything cuz if you read the book, you'll find out what happens to him, but he stays behind. Doesn't accept Paul's help. 

Heather Murphy: Yeah. And that's one of the things that when, uh, I encourage people to do is not just research their direct line ancestors. Because those siblings or other relatives of your ancestors had a direct influence on their lives, and this story is a very dramatic example of how those siblings of your ancestors really did affect your ancestors. 

Christopher Bock: Yeah. I mean, it, it became very obvious. I mean, the first time I read it, it stuck out obvi, it's like, wow, this guy. This guy's amazing. You know, this guy's cool. But you know, my grandpa lived this amazing life too. Cause she was just dumbfounded by too and I was just, the whole thing was, but yeah, no, it's, it's interesting.

Like, I mean, I don't have any kids and my got, you know, ne nieces and nephews and it's, it's definitely, it's an interesting thing cuz I have a lot of freedom and I can see that Paul had a lot of freedom in his lifetime to do whatever he wanted to. Luckily he played a lottery too, cuz without that, you know. And it's like the way he lived his life was so, I don't know. It was like, it's hard to say perfect for anything. It's not really a good way to describe anything. But, you know, it's like he's a protagonist without a fault. Like, the only fault that he has, it's one that you're gonna put on him. You're gonna be like, oh, I'm, I'm anti-Semitic, or I'm homophobic, so I don't like this guy. But other than that, it's 

like he cooked, he played the piano, he played the cello, he loved dogs. He was a total goofball, apparently. and it's like he just, he was really good at making things he can, like envision things. And it really made, did make me understand my my family a lot more in a lot of ways, cuz my dad's a very, very, gifted woodworker, like, kind of like savant like in a way. And I could see it like when I was looking at the family and like seeing like, oh look at this guy. Like, he just like, he just very much could make anything. And like they took, you know, write about how his dad was making all these intricate little boxes for shipping and whatnot. And that would totally be something that, you know, My whole, my dad's side of the family, all of them would be very good at it, you know?

Heather Murphy: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's neat. As you learn about different ancestors that you can see those traits or those characteristics that, 

Christopher Bock: Yeah. 

Heather Murphy: Are common within the family. 

Christopher Bock: Yeah, it's interesting cuz I don't think you notice it, like when you're just stumbling around in life with your family and like what you're really actually super good at it. But there's something, but you know, everyone's like really like gifted at in a way. I don't know. It's, it's interesting. it was shocking. I mean, that's definitely the word and it was all kind of right there for me to find. It was a bunch of stuff I'd found through like looking in records that are in Vienna and stored in like the Holocaust Museum. Cuz this guy, you know, it's like getting this, there was a, cables and Harbin, you know, like Manchuco at the time, whatever, Manchuria now, or China, I don't know what it's like in, it's that whole area. And you know, there's all these cables that went back and forth and they're all recorded and like they archived and you know, like the originals I guess are in Jerusalem and then the Holocaust Museum in DC. Yeah, apparently they microfiched it and you can get it if you can like say, yeah, this is my family, which is cool. It's good that they do that It's really cool. All that stuff is out there and it's like, we live in this time where if you get curious, you you can have a lot of fun going a little nuts, which is good. 

Heather Murphy: Yeah, there's so much online and then there's so much also that are in archives, like you mentioned, that you can write to an archive in the area in which your family lived and make connections with somebody that can get you those access to those records that aren't digitized yet or aren't online. 

So there's, there's so much available and we don't have to wait months to write a hand letter to someone and hope they write us back. 

Christopher Bock: Yeah. Yeah, I'd be curious to see what other stuff I end up finding, cuz I'm like publishing a book on this guy and it's like, obviously everything's set on this exact time and date and everything. I found it all out from not, not going anywhere. So if I go somewhere, I'm gonna find something else. I'm sure something's gonna happen. I highly recommend looking into your past the time and interest. 

I feel very fortunate that the figures that I've found in my past were people that I'm like, wow. Like these are really interesting people and they dealt with some just crazy historical stuff, you know, like anyone born in that time, you know, like before the turn of the century, lived in insane life, particularly if you were in the central Europe. And that's where my entire dad's side of the family was. You know, like both my grandparents were immigrants. Like I knew that they had met in China. That was pretty much it. That's kind of all I knew about the family. They met in China and my grandma was German, grandpa was Austrian, and they're very different. They got divorced like right when I was born. They both spoke Chinese and my grandma better than my grandpa. 

I think it's a very common thing to kind of not talk a lot in families, but you really see it when all of a sudden you're like, hey. It's a huge story that affected our family that like, I'm so, so thankful that my grandpa wrote down the way he did and got his brother to write things down and like got his like he did a lot in terms of having this story get to where it is. 

Heather Murphy: Yeah, especially if he didn't talk about it much, but he still thought it was important enough to write it down that he did want it to be remembered. 

Christopher Bock: Yeah. I mean and in both of their essays actually, they both in their own ways say that like, I don't really know, what I'm doing this for, But I feel like somebody, I feel like I, we should write about this man. You know what I mean?

Heather Murphy: Mm-hmm. 

Christopher Bock: And they both had their reasons for not necessarily wanted to do it, but they both did it, Both Kurt and, and Rudy, my grandpa Rudy, so it was something that they knew that he had done. You know, they helped him out financially in his life and towards the end. And they felt indebted to him, obviously, and I don't, and, and he was very, a lot of pride about that. Apparently didn't wanna, which is, it's so interesting. I mean, the man was just like, he's just tailor-written to be like, he oozes stories cuz apparently he wrote short stories too and all this stuff too. So I'm just like, what did he write? You know? And I'm sure there was a bunch of stuff in his flat that ended up somewhere. Who knows? But he ended up getting cheated out of the apartment apparently at the end. 

Heather Murphy: What are the benefits that you felt that you've had by learning in that story and learning the stories of, of your ancestors, other than just the, the interest factor, but what has it done for you personally to really get to know those people? 

Christopher Bock: I mean, I would say I really felt like I got to know my grandpa in a different way. I was almost ashamed of the way that we were around him as a family and a little bit. Cause I was almost like, we used to tease grandpa all the time, but he was the coolest. Like you guys realized all his stuff that he did and how coolest uncle was and like, Like, he should have been telling us campfire stories if we could have, but that's not how the way time ever plays out in a lot of things. And then, you know, with Paul it was like, I really had no way to feel connected to him. And, and other than like the story and then like pictures. So anyways, yeah, I mean, I don't know with Paul it was, it is like getting to know a, this ghost or something in a weird way, I went and bought a cello and I don't, you know, know how to play cello at all, but I just wanted to like make the sounds that he was, you know, and kind of like get to know how he was in the positions.

And I remember, you know, like my grandpa really wanted me to play cello when I was a kid, and it all makes sense more when I understood the story more. Like how my grandpa was with us cuz he was, you know, he was really supportive but he was just kind of off to the side, he, you know, he wanted us to go to school and he, you know, it was very important to him and, but he wasn't super pushy about anything.

So it really is interesting because, You start to really realize, like there, there's two huge people in my family. I was born right between both of them dying. My grandma's father who was a diplomat and he married a Jewish woman. has a very interesting life too, that I would like to write about. He ends up like in Switzerland working with the World Council of Churches and Dietrich Bon Hoffer and like all these different big theologians.

And he died January in the year I was born. And then Paul Patek died the next year in March after I was born. And I had no idea, you know, honestly, for a long time how important these people were. you know, I knew about my grandma's father more than, than Paul in any way, obviously, you know, cuz I, I, I knew who he was and, in terms of the family, had pictures of him and talked about him and stuff. But Paul was just popped out of my grandpa's book as this uncle that somehow pulled off escaping the Nazis and then bringing the family to Japan and like just lives this amazing life. He ends up going back to Austria. I don't know. For me, it's definitely the stories that got me interested in it, Obviously, I, I really like the whole process of genealogy though, just sitting there trying to find stuff and finding it, putting it all together and you know, it's really, really fun in the beginning. And then you start to kind of run into, you know, walls that obviously get frustrating. But, you know, I had this kind of really rich, like I could get to know the people if I wanted to. My grandpa made it possible, and then you find stuff out there that's just kind of laying there, honestly, on the internet. You don't really realize it, that it's, it's connected to your family in a certain way until you connect the dots and you're like, oh, this publication wrote about my relative or whatever, you know?

Heather Murphy: Yeah, it's amazing what you can come across with technology. Because you think about it your great-grandfather, they had opportunity to interact with so many other people that you don't even realize, I mean, descendants wise or just outward, that they made an impact And other people recognize that outside your family too, sometimes. 

Christopher Bock: Yeah, no, exactly. They were living a life and they had contemporaries and they were doing their own thing. it's weird. History falls in this like, it's almost like a number of a million. It's like it doesn't make sense anymore. It's like it's in the past though. But then if we start to like, just think about what the present's like, like how it takes weeks for things to play out a lot of times, years even, and you really see how families become connected more and more through children being born and what that means to the family. you know, There were only three kids in the family, which is pretty small for that time. and then there was only two, from Paul Patek and his sister, that was really small for that time. That was the generation before, you know. 

So it was, they were a pretty small family, but you know, just, trying to do their thing. They were part of the assimilated Jewish population. My grandpa really identified with the religious aspect of anything really, actually. When I read all of his writings, he was like curious about any religion he got close to, which is fun. Honestly I feel like there's a lot of stuff in personal family archives that younger people don't know about too, because like, once I started really getting into it, my mom was really good at keeping stuff, which is great. You know, I was like, oh, here you go. And then I knew that I had some relatives over in Berkeley. I just never got to know em, the families didn't talk much. So then I reached out and, you know, she was over in Oakland and she had a bunch of box family stuff and they had just all kinds of stuff in there. So, you, know, I was surprised to find as much as I did, obviously. 

Heather Murphy: You just never know when you just start asking around what people may have. 

Christopher Bock: I mean, everyone's interested in it. When like important discoveries happen, like especially within the family, everyone's just like, wow. sometimes you feel like you're pestering people with them. I do feel like that occasionally, but for the most part, everyone's pretty thankful that I'm, got so interested in it. 

Heather Murphy: Yeah. can you tell me about your book that you wrote about him? Are you, is it still the process or are you 

Christopher Bock: Yeah, it's, they're formatting it right now and then hopefully pre-order on the 25th of March, and then be able to actually order it on the 25th of May. Which would've been Paul Patek's 130th birthday, apparently. And that was a, you know, another really weird thing about the whole thing is that I didn't even, I didn't realize it, until, I don't know when, but at certain point I realized that like I was the same exact age as Paul Patek was when I was writing this book about him and having it all happen I was the same exact age as Paul was when he was like, getting the job in Japan and like going over to Japan. 

Heather Murphy: Yeah, it is interesting when you think about, okay, at my age now this ancestor was doing this, and kind of it shifts your perspective over what they were accomplishing. 

Christopher Bock: Yeah. And with Paul, it's like, I was writing about these times, it was like, here come the Nazis and mean it's terrifying honestly, when I think about it. Like I've al always felt pretty jumpy a lot of my life. Like, something's coming to get me, you know? My dad's had this very deep kind of weird attraction kind of, despise of war and whatnot. Like, it kind of runs through a lot of his childhood stuff. And even now, and it all makes sense, like this, this just came right to the doorstep of, their parents and like really, really to their grandparents, just destroyed their whole families as they were, you know, they were the kids of the family. I really realized I was part of a really lucky few people that got out. And then got out in a really just extremely interesting way too. But just that they got out, you know? 

 So I wanted to, a book about Paul, like mostly for the family, but I knew that it it's a story that it's got this really intense appeal to connecting the world. I don't know what it is, it's just something about the way that Paul lived his life that you're just like, Hmm, this man seemed to understand everything, he just knew how to live life. and on about this times.

Heather Murphy: thank you so much for sharing your story about your family. What is the name of your book and where can people find it when it comes up available for being ordered? 

Christopher Bock: It's called An Ordinary Man. The subtitle is from Vienna to Japan and Back During World War II. 

Heather Murphy: Okay. Well, thank you again.

Christopher Bock: Yeah, you're welcome. It's so much fun.