Adolf lost his job in 1932 due to the Depression and remained unemployed from then on. He tried to earn money by investing in several private enterprises, particularly in collecting, and selling stamps, but he seems to have lost more than he made. His stamp collection passed into the possession of his daughter Dorli, who had not the slightest interest in stamps, never even opened the albums, but who told me that she had been told that some valuable specimens were part of the collection. When Dorli suddenly died in 1993 every item in her apartment was sold to the highest bidder. Whoever bought Dorli's bed probably had a big surprise and a real windfall when he found the stamp collection hidden in the bottom compartment. Dorli had bequeathed everything to the Bolzman Institute intending that the proceeds would be used for Leukemia research.

Because the political climate became dangerous for Jews after Nazi Germany annexed Austria (March 1938), Adolf left Vienna in 1939, and returned to Slovakia. His father once owned a distillery there, and made a lot of money before handing the business over to his oldest son Jenõ sometime during the First World War. Under Jenõ's management the business went bankrupt during the difficult times in the early 1920s. Jenõ died of cancer in 1932, and his son Franz, who already had a bad heart, promptly died as a consequence of his father's death. Adolf moved in with his sister Elsa, and aided by the protection he supposedly derived from being married to a German gentile, and no doubt by his own wits, survived the Nazis and continued to enjoy his hobby of stamp collecting and kept at it until he died of cancer in Nové Mesto nad Váhon on 10 October 1972.

An older Adof Birman after the war

Adolf Birman told his daughter Dorli after the war that eighteen members of the Birman family perished in the Holocaust. His sister Elsa (in whose house he had found refuge) died in the Ravensbrück camp. Elsa's husband Gyula Herzog committed suicide in September 1939. Adolf's niece Kató Baracs and her husband and their child died in a concentration camp. To further decimate the Birman family, Adolf's sister Ada Baracs seems to have also committed suicide during her fourth pregnancy, while her husband Lajos is also believed to have died in a concentration camp. No details are known about Jenõ's daughter Illy, except that she perished somewhere in Russia during WW2.

There were survivors. Adolf and his brother Dezsõ, both of whom were married to Aryans, survived, as did Jenõ's son Tomás, who still lives in Nové Mesto nad Váhon (Slovak Republic) and has four children. Two of Ada's children (Gyuri and Éva) got out of the country in time, wound up in Israel where they prospered, and where they are still living. ^fggdoc135

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