(As I Continue To Research and Write, By the Way)

 A few people in a certain Facebook group thought that jesting about a flooded gravesite was perfectly appropriate. This is what I wrote in response: 

An example of being a living relative. I don’t know if “Gustav” and Erna have descendants. What I do know is that I had to be professional enough to write on my family tree, “Grave in neglected condition. ‘Augustus’ rendered as ‘Gustáv’.” I wanted to write, “Grave in disgusting condition.”

Augustinus Samuel and Ernesztina “Erna” Steinberger Munka were a maternal uncle and an in-law aunt of my great-grandmother Mary Nagy-Triudnak Czarnecki. Great-Grandma came from hidden-Jewish families on both sides, whereas Erna’s parents (József and Netti Mayer Steinberger) possessed the psychological wherewithal to assure that Erna and her siblings could be open about their Jewish ethnicity and their practice of traditional Judaism. No such privilege regarding even ethnicity was accorded to the parents of Augustinus’ in-law brother, the “illegitimate” Mihály Nagy (only later Trudnyak, and when he needed to flee conscription and leave behind his mother and sister). The privilege was also left unaccorded to Augustinus and his siblings, no matter that all of them were “legitimate”. The survivors among them were also left as paternal orphans in 1890, and not a single one of them was an adult when their father (whom was a partial name honoree of Augustinus) died at the age of 42. 

I don’t know if Augustinus and Erna knew of Mihály, the husband of the younger Anna Munka (whom was passed off as her deceased sister to avoid forced baptism). What I do know is that Augustinus died in Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1949, and after he endured oppression from that of the Austrohungarian regime to that of the Nazis. I also don’t know if Erna, who eventually converted to Jewish Catholicism, predeceased or survived her husband of what would’ve been 28 years on the day after he died (I additionally don’t know how the Steinbergers took their daughter’s conversion if they were even alive to be aware of it, by the way). What I do know in spite of that is that the disgustingly-neglected gravesite of Augustinus and Erna Munka stands as it does because nobody in what is now the area of Hybe, Slovakia could have taken the time to tend to the gravesite of a couple whose oppressors already tore apart their families as well as caused their families to hide crucial parts of their identities in the first place. 

When Great-Grandma died, I was going to be in for a surprise to find out her real family history. Just under 20 years later and just over 150 years after her father’s “illegitimate” birth, I would look in disgust as I found that the grave of two of her mother’s family members (including Erna as an in-law relative) was entirely neglected—and all because the Korsch-Munka family was divided across the Atlantic Ocean by Antisemites whom would continue to oppress many of us in our deaths. 

The point? As I mentioned, there are living relatives (whether descendants or otherwise) of quite a few people whom are buried in damaged, neglected, and similar graves. As I also mentioned, those living relatives would likely not appreciate the jokes about the poor conditions of their deceased relatives’ gravesites. As I additionally mentioned, I’ve been in the shoes of the living relative partly through seeing the grave of Great-Grandma’s uncle Augustinus and aunt Erna. 

Ergo, you don’t need to be a Munson, a Munka, or anyone else in particular to not make cavalier quips about a person’s final resting place. You just need to be a person with empathy, and you need to be a person to remember that every gravesite has the personal and familial history of at least one decedent behind it. Robert Munson, by the way, has living descendants as well as other living relatives. By contrast and as aforementioned, I don’t know if Augustinius and Erna had the privilege of having descendants. I nonetheless know that my heart broke and my blood could’ve boiled when I saw how much their grave’s neglected. I can’t imagine that Robert Munson’s relatives would be thrilled about a “backstroke” or drowning quip.

https://www.virtualnycintorin.sk/en/hrob/146725

Shmu’el (Samuel) Munka died in 1890 at the age of 42, and he left all of the living children paternally orphaned. Augustinus at just under three years old was one of them, and he was also one of the fully-orphaned children when his mother (Rachel “Rosalia ‘Rosina’” Korschová Munková) died in 1897 at the age of 35. He would end up being separated from his sisters Helen Rosalia and Anna Amalia when both were in the United States by 1900, and Anna followed in the footsteps of her mother by being married when she was still a child. 

Again, empathy goes a long way even if one can’t trace back a decedent’s personal and familial history.