Konderla, Anton
(Jun. 11, 1887 - Oct. 15, 1941)
MachinistFor the essence of his Polish heritage, one must go back to Anton Konderla's homeland, where the largest group of the workers in coal mines, iron and steel works in the 19th century were Polish, who came from Galicia between 1880 and 1910. Despite the growth of the Czech and German population, 61.5 percent of the population in these industrial centers in 1921 was Polish. In 1920, two years after the establishment of Czechoslovakia, and nine years after Anton Konderla left for Texas, Teschen, the German name of a large town on the Olza River, was divided between Poland and Czechoslovakia. According to a census at that time, the town had 22,489 inhabitants; 13,254 spoke German or Yiddish at home and 6,832 Polish. Poland changed the name of its share of the population to Cieszyn. More changes were to come. Anton Konderla spoke German and Polish, and one assumes that, owing to the language he spoke at home, the Konderla name was considered Polish.
Anton Konderla was born to a teacher's family in Schibitz - an important coal mining center in Austria-Hungary, then Sibice in a Polish powiat, Karwina, and now in the Czech Republic - and it still has bilingual signs. His father, John Paul Konderla, taught the children of coal miners from Galicia, half of whom were not able to read and write, and died of influenza when Anton was five years old. Seven years later his mother took him to Teschen, where she found work in a hat factory, and sent him to a German school. When he grew a little older, Elizabeth Konderla (nee Zimmer) found a blacksmith, out of the city, to teach her ambidextrous son how to work with a hammer and an anvil. He lived in a spare room of the blacksmith's home and went to see his mother on weekends. After two years in the Austrian army, he lost interest for awhile in the blacksmith's trade and took an apprenticeship in the railroad industry. Somewhere at a dance he met Filomena Sliz, the daughter of a Polish cabinet maker in the village of Pruchna, 28 miles from Teschen, and on January 24, 1910, the Reverend Josef Zidek married them in the Catholic church at Pruchna. Both were 22 years of age.
After their marriage, Anton and Filomena went to Frankfurt, Germany, where he found work in a blacksmith's shop, and when he was promoted to machinist, Filomena expected a child. She returned to Pruchna to give birth to Joseph Rudolph Konderla and returned with him to Frankfurt. But not for long. Anton gave up his job in Frankfort for another one in Hamburg and received a letter there from a friend, John Holotik, who had gone to Texas a short time before at the urging of Joe Holotik, a Czech saloon keeper in Hallettsville, equidistant between San Antonio and Houston, and painted a rosy picture of life in a new land. Instead of joining the Czech community in Hallettsville, John Holotik earned a living in Galveston, off the mainland of Texas, by repairing new furniture unloaded from ships and was damaged, scratched or broken. Promising to send for his wife and child when he found a job in Texas, Anton Konderla sailed from Bremen, Germany, March 11, 1911, on the 447-foot long SS Koln and arrived in Galveston on March 31, 1911. As it turned out, when Filomena and Joseph Konderla got off the Cassel on July 7, 1913, Holotik met them on the dock and sent them by train to Dallas, Texas, where Anton Konderla found work in the machine shop of a cotton gin manufacturer.
Imagine the babble of voices aboard the steamships at the time. The Cassel brought the first load of Jewish refugees to Galveston in 1907; 773 more in 1909, in 1911, about 1,400 arrived. In all, the steamships of the North German Lloyd Line brought about 10,000 Jewish refugees to Galveston between 1907 and 1914. No matter how they tried, the Konderlas couldn't avoid them in the holds of the Koln and Cassel. The rabbi of a Jewish synagogue in Galveston met almost all of the ships and provided the Jewish refugees with food, railroad tickets, and blessings to arrive safely in smaller communities across the United States. Never before were Jews in the United States dispersed as much as those who landed in Galveston.
Unlike Father Leopold Moczygemba in the 1850s, the first Konderla family in Texas did not start a chain migration of their bloodline. In 1920, for example, 360 of the 159,343 persons in Dallas were from Poland. Other families of the same name in the United States were not related to the Konderla family in Dallas. Exactly how many children Anton and Filomena Konderla brought into the world is uncertain. Little is known of the infant who died in Dallas on July 22, 1913, two weeks after Filomena landed at Galveston, and another infant who died October 9, 1914. The couple raised their children in a small frame house on Frank Street in the southern section of Dallas.
After working in a meat-packing plant, Filomena Konderla opened a grocery store in the front part of the house and opened a larger store in 1926. The merchandise was first delivered to the store in a large wagon, drawn by two mules, and later in a motorized vehicle. Filomena, who learned to speak English faster in the store than in a factory, managed to run the store, send the children to Catholic school and violin lessons, and visit her family in the old country in 1938. The oldest son, Joseph, dropped out of St. Joseph's High School in Dallas to pursue a trade. He began his apprenticeship at Perfection Tool and Die Company, where Anton Konderla was a long time employe.
He had a greater impact on Texas, together with his younger brother, John, who was born on March 17, 1926, than probably any other Polish family. They produced a priest, a chemical engineer, a horticulturist, an architectural engineer, a professor of philosophy, an airplane mechanic, host of a television show, as well as salesmen, carpenters, and homemakers. John, who had two sons with his wife, Zelda Sauer, whom he married on July 16, 1949, at St. Edward's Catholic Church in Dallas, served his country aboard the USS Jason in the South Pacific during the Second World War. Joseph Konderla, who married Janie Pauline Handlin in 1929, had three girls, four boys, and 48 grandchildren. During the war, while working in a Dallas war plant, he invented a metal landing mat for airplanes to land on unpaved runways, and later designed better Ford cars.
After John Konderla's death in Austin, Texas, to which he moved in 1959, the family published his history of the Anton Konderla family, Poland to America, and I couldn't reconcile many of his remembrances with some of the records I found. Nevertheless, the full force of the Konderla family on the growth and development of the United States can hardly be measured.
From: Edward Pinkowski (2009)