The Pliszka family coat of arms (erb)

In our family we always called it the erb, which is the Czech word for a coat of arms. Ours was painted on heavy paper and framed like a picture: a shield divided in two, red on the left with a gold arrow laid across it, blue on the right with a gold curved sword; above the shield there was a helmet, with red-and-gold and blue mantling, and an arm holding a sword and an arrow. On top, in German, it carried the name of the family and on the bottom, a reference to a heraldic-genealogical archive in Vienna, at Krügerstrasse number 1009, and my father always pointed to that line as the proof that the erb, and our noble origin, were filed and recorded in Vienna.

The erb always followed the oldest son in the family, and my father believed in it completely; he kept it displayed prominently in our apartment in Prague, even during the communist years, when that kind of thing was not exactly an advantage. I grew up believing in it too, and for most of my life I never had any reason to doubt that it was exactly what we had always been told it was.

The Family Story

The story my father told was that the Pliszkas had come out of Poland during or after some war with Russia in the seventeenth century, and had settled in Moravia, in a small settlement called Plicky near Žďár nad Sázavou; somewhere along the way the spelling of the name was changed from Pliszka to Pliczka.

The erb shaped my father’s life more than I understood at the time. Because of it, during the First World War he was sent to the military intelligence school for officers, instead of serving only as an ordinary soldier. After the war he wanted to study medicine and become a doctor, but his own father made him go to law school instead; my grandfather believed that the Pliszkas had once owned a large area of land near Kraków in Poland, and he wanted my father to become a lawyer so that he could try to get it back legally. That was how seriously the family took the erb, and the standing it was supposed to give us.

The Search

Many years later, settled in California, I set out to trace the family properly. My wife Wendy and I taught ourselves to read the old Schwabach script in the parish books, which we found digitized online, and slowly we built the family tree backward, generation by generation. We followed the records through Žďár nad Sázavou, all the way into the 1600s; but for all our searching, we never found the Polish nobles the family story spoke of, and we never found the land near Kraków. The deeper we went, the less the old story seemed to hold together.

The one solid clue I had was the line in German on the erb itself, pointing to a heraldic-genealogical archive in Vienna at Krügerstrasse 1009, so I went looking for the address. To my surprise, there was no Krügerstrasse 1009 in Vienna at all; the number simply did not exist. When I dug further, I learned why. It turned out to be one of the old Viennese house numbers from a system that had long ago been replaced, and the building that once carried it was gone. But I found references to that old house, and two things about it stopped me. The first was that Beethoven himself had once lived there. The second was that the very same address had been the studio of a man named Carl Krahl, a Vienna coat-of-arms maker. That was the first crack in the family story, and it was enough to make me write to the Austrian State Archive and ask them to look properly.

The Answer from Vienna

What came back was not what my father had led us to expect. The archive could find no record of any Pliszka in their files, and the address on our erb, Krügerstrasse 1009, turned out to have been the Stein, and later the Krahl, studio — a coat-of-arms business that, all through the nineteenth century, painted arms to order for paying families and dressed them up with invented pedigrees and false source references, such as the “Book 300” line written on ours. The very reference my father had pointed out as proof was, in fact, the studio’s stock way of making a freshly painted erb look ancient.

There was an irony in it that I have come to appreciate. Carl Krahl did not stay a forger; in 1869 he was made an official court coat-of-arms painter, a k.k. Hofwappenmaler, and a co-founder of Vienna’s respected heraldic society, and from then on he gave up the forgery trade and worked as a recognized heraldist. The catalogue of coats of arms that he had compiled ended up in the Austrian State Archive, the very place I had written to; and when they searched it, there was no Pliszka in it at all, which was part of how they could tell me that our erb had most likely come out of his earlier, dishonest years rather than from any real nobility.

I found a whole book about these studios and how they operated, and it described the Krahl shop and its methods exactly. To be completely sure, I cut a four-millimeter strip from the bottom of the paper and sent it to a laboratory in America for dating; they found the paper to be most consistent with the early 1800s, which fit the time of that Vienna studio. There was no longer any doubt.

Our erb was a beautiful nineteenth-century fabrication, made to order in Vienna, and not an inheritance from any Polish nobility.

What My Father Knew

Once I knew the truth, I began to look back differently at my father. He was a well-educated man, and he had access to Vienna; the more I thought about it, the more I came to suspect that he had known all along that the erb was not genuine. By his time it would not have mattered in any practical way, since after Czechoslovakia was established following the First World War, the old aristocratic privileges were no longer legally allowed, and the erb gave only some standing in social circles. I think he simply did not want to take that feeling of being special away from his family, and from his uncles.

He liked his uncles in Bohdalov very much and spent much of his free time with them there, and I believe he even had a painter make a copy of the erb for them; I later found documentation that my father owned an art gallery in Prague, so arranging something like that would not have been a problem for him. Even with us he kept the family lore alive. Under communism nobody believed the regime would ever end, so there was no harm in letting us feel that we had come from something.

Finding Lenka

By the time all of this came out, I had help I never expected. A second cousin I had never known I had, Lenka, a doctor in Brno, found me through the MyHeritage website; independently, and well before any of this, she had built her own family tree together with her grandfather, Leopold Pliczka, and it was MyHeritage that matched her tree to mine. I was surprised to find her and that whole side of the family, and I never did find out why we had not been aware of each other; I suppose life had been too hectic for everyone.

It turned out that the two of us, separately and in parallel — Lenka with her grandfather, and most likely her before me — had both gone searching through the old birth records for the Polish forefathers, and we had both ended in the same place, back through Žďár nad Sázavou into the 1600s, and no further. When I told her what I had concluded about the erb being a fake, she was surprised. Then she came up with an appraisal from 2001, made by a Dr. Bílý, which her sister had researched and which had also concluded that the erb was most likely made to order; I never asked her about it directly, but my feeling was that her sister had not told the family about that 2001 appraisal until I came to them with my own findings, but I could be wrong about that.

After that, Lenka took up a further search together with her uncle Radovan in Brno. The two of them went into the Moravian Land Archive there and searched the land tables and the registers of the nobility, page by page, but they never found the name Pliczka or Pliszka among the Moravian nobility either. From every direction, the answer came back the same.

What Became of the Erb

The erb itself had its own journey to me. When my cousin Tona Valach came to Vienna, where I was then living as a refugee, and I met him there, my mother gave him the erb to bring to me, since by the family tradition it was mine; but he was afraid to carry it and did not bring it. Later, when my mother came to the United States, she brought it with her herself. It was very important to her, so I left it in her keeping until she died.

At one point my sister Jana took the erb to an art appraiser, and he told her that it was a fake. Jana and my mother decided that it must be a fake because my cousin Tona had made a copy and kept the original, returning only the copy to her; it never occurred to them that it had been a fake from the very beginning. After my father died, my uncle Leopold Pliczka wanted the erb from my mother, but she refused to give it to him, since I was the next one in line. That is how strongly the family still felt about its importance.

One time, visiting the Czech Republic, I stopped briefly at Radovan’s apartment, and there was his erb, in a gilded frame with the family name lettered across the top in gold, displayed prominently on the wall and flanked by two swords.

Radovan’s erb, flanked by two swords

Plicky

My children have always been interested in this Czech side of their history, and in 2012 I took them to see where the family had really come from. Near Žďár nad Sázavou we found Plicky itself — not a town, and not even a village, but a tiny settlement of only three houses, sitting at 605 meters above sea level, with an old wooden trail sign still carrying the name. We stood there together at that sign, on the ground the Pliszkas had settled all those centuries ago.

Whatever the truth about the erb turned out to be, this much was real, and it meant a great deal to me that my children could stand where our family had truly begun.

At the Plicky trail sign near Žďár nad Sázavou, 2012