Holocaust memorial
Four members of the painter’s family were murdered at Auschwitz in 1944: his father, Dr. Rauscher Zsigmond (born Nyitra, 1865); his mother, Milch Emma (born Komárom, 1882); and, on the family’s maternal side, Kincs Izidor (born Komárom, 1873) and Schaar Szidónia (born Galánta, 1881). The painter himself had died of tuberculosis in 1930 and did not live to see it. 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 that community was deported.
Murdered at Auschwitz, 1944
- Dr. Rauscher Zsigmond (Nyitra 1865 to Auschwitz 1944), the painter’s father. A physician who had read medicine in Vienna, mining-company doctor at Dorog and then honorary chief municipal medical officer of Komárom (
/bibliography#szamado-2019, p. 5). - Milch Emma (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. - Kincs Izidor (Komárom 1873 to Auschwitz 1944), porcelain-painter of Komárom, father of Kincs Vera (
/bibliography#szamado-2019, p. 6). - Schaar Szidónia (Galánta 1881 to Auschwitz 1944), wife of Kincs Izidor and mother of Kincs Vera (
/bibliography#szamado-2019, p. 6).
The painter’s brother László guarded the studio estate; his younger brother Ferenc survived the war as a forced labourer and emigrated to Israel in 1949 (see /about).
The survivor, and the Schaar and Kincs line
Kincs Vera (Komárom 1921 to Petah Tikva 2018), daughter of Kincs Izidor and Schaar Szidónia, 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. She is the grandmother of this archive’s steward.
Kincs Vera 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 rather than recast:
“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 Schaar Szidónia. Henrietta urged the family to come to Palestine, and Vera’s half-brother Miki Kincs, who visited the first Maccabiah in 1932, pressed them to follow; their father, Kincs Izidor, would not leave the family’s Komárom ceramics business. He and Schaar Szidónia 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.