Holocaust memorial
Four members of the painter’s family were murdered at Auschwitz, the Nazi German extermination camp in occupied Poland, in 1944: his father and mother, and, on the maternal side, the parents of Vera Kincs, who married his brother Ferenc. They are named below.
The painter himself had died of tuberculosis in 1930, and so did not live to see the fate that overtook his family. This page records them, and the family’s losses in the wider Schaar and Kincs line, plainly and without elaboration.
Rauscher came from the Hungarian-Jewish professional bourgeoisie of Komárom. He was buried in the Komárom Jewish cemetery in 1930, the whole town accompanying him (/bibliography#magyarorszag-1930-10-07). Fourteen years later, in 1944, that community was deported to Auschwitz.
Murdered at Auschwitz, 1944
- Dr. Zsigmond Rauscher (Nyitra 1865 to Auschwitz 1944), the painter’s father. A physician who had studied medicine in Vienna, mining-company doctor at Dorog and then honorary chief municipal medical officer of Komárom (
/bibliography#szamado-2019, p. 5). - Emma Milch (Komárom 1882 to Auschwitz 1944), the painter’s mother. She ran a cosmetics salon in the family house at Deák Ferenc utca 5, Komárom (
/bibliography#szamado-2019, p. 5). It was she who brought her dying son home from the Tátra in 1930. - Izidor Kincs (Komárom 1873 to Auschwitz 1944), porcelain-painter of Komárom, father of Vera Kincs (
/bibliography#szamado-2019, p. 6). - Szidónia Schaar (Galánta 1881 to Auschwitz 1944), wife of Izidor Kincs and mother of Vera Kincs (
/bibliography#szamado-2019, p. 6).
The painter’s two younger brothers survived the war: László, who then guarded the studio estate for the rest of his life, and Ferenc, who came through it as a forced labourer and emigrated to Israel in 1949 (see /about).
The survivor, and the Schaar and Kincs line
Vera Kincs (Komárom 1921 to Petah Tikva 2018), daughter of Izidor Kincs and Szidónia Schaar, married the painter’s brother Ferenc in 1946. She survived Auschwitz, where she was one of Mengele’s experimental subjects, and later taught English in Israel. Her sister Magda survived as well. Vera is the grandmother of this archive’s steward.
Vera Kincs left a short memoir of her mother’s family, the Schaar line. It is the family’s own account, and it is given here in her words:
“My grandparents had eight children: Sidonia (my mother), Marishka, Tereze, Tini, Hugo, Ignatz, Alfred, and Emil. … Aunt Marishka lived in Budapest. She was married to Szabo Karoly, a high-school teacher. She died in 1944 before the deportation of the Hungarian Jews. … Tini was married to Mr. Rosental, a prison doctor in Ilava, Slovakia. They had two sons, Vilmos, Joska, and a daughter. Vilmos perished in a concentration camp. Joska survived.”
A further detail is carried in the same family memory and recorded here as such: the Schaar household’s German tutor, Dr. Benjamin Szold, married a sister of Dr. Heinrich Schaar, and their daughter was Henrietta Szold, the founder of Hadassah, a first cousin of Szidónia Schaar. At the first Maccabiah, in 1932, Vera’s half-brother Miki Kincs met Henrietta Szold, who urged him to persuade the family to move to Palestine; back home he held a slide show for the family and relayed her message. Their father, Izidor Kincs, would not leave the family’s Komárom ceramics business. He and Szidónia Schaar were among those murdered at Auschwitz in 1944.
The Komárom Jewish community
Rauscher’s Komárom was a centre of Hungarian-Jewish life; the deportation of 1944 ended it. In June 2024 the Menház (the Jewish Community Centre) in Komárom held a chamber exhibition, co-organised with the Duna Menti Múzeum of Komárno, on the eightieth anniversary of the deportation, showing thirteen works by local Jewish artists including Rauscher György and his teacher Harmos Károly. The exhibition is recorded at /exhibitions/2024-menhaz-komarom-holocaust.
The family’s own account of the maternal line, and the stewardship that carried it to Israel, is on /about.