The Fates of Hedwig's Siblings

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          Alert to readers: this article contains some distressing material about the holocaust

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Growing up I was aware that Hedwig and her twin brother Viktor, the two youngest of the six Weiss siblings, were the only ones to survive the holocaust. But Hedwig rarely spoke about the past and I never learned their names, or anything about them as individuals.

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It wasn’t until I listened to Hedwig’s recording that I heard the lost siblings’ names for the first time. They were - in birth order- Katharina, Elsa, Gabor and Siegfried.

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Hedwig remembered fragments of information about where they had initially fled to from Vienna, but after the war she had no way to discover their fates, as we can do today. We still only have small pieces of information about their lives before the holocaust. But we do now know where and how they lost their lives.

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In 2017, from Hedwig’s information, I was able to fairly quickly trace Elsa, Gabor and Siegfried on the Yad Vashem, and Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance (DOW) Shoah databases.

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Gabor Weiss, the eldest brother, was born on 23 September 1897. 

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Siegfried Weiss, the second eldest brother was born on 27 April 1900.

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Both were in the army during the First World War and neither married. They came back from the war ‘unsettled’ which greatly worried their father Nathan. They both caught influenza during the post war pandemic, along with their mother Hermine.

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Siegfried fled to Bratislava and then to Zilina in Czechoslovakia. Siegfried was deported from Zilina to Auschwitz and murdered on 20 January 1942 aged 42.

 

 

 

 

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Grandma says that Gabor came back from the war ‘confused’. It appears that Gabor spent many years in hospital with a mental illness (could this have been PTSD from his war-time experiences?). We have a document which shows his arrival at the Ybbs mental hospital from Am Steinhof, a psychiatric hospital in Vienna, on 29 April 1931 when he would have been 33 years old. Gabor was transported from Ybbs to Hartheim Castle, Austria on 23 August 1940, aged 42, where he was gassed under Aktion T4 the Nazis’ programme of systematic murder of institutionalized patients with mental and physical disabilities. 

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Elsa Breier, nee Weiss, the second eldest sister was born on 26 August 1895. Grandma says she was very beautiful. She married Alexander Breier and they lived with their two children, Kurt and Lily on Praterstrasse in Leopoldstadt, the Jewish district of Vienna where Grandma and Grandma also lived.

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Elsa and Alexander’s children escaped to the USA. Elsa fled to Hungary with Alexander. Grandma’s mother Hermine was originally from Hungary so maybe that provided a connection. Elsa was deported from there to Auschwitz/Birkenau. We don’t know the actual date of her death. She would have been in her 40s.

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For a long while I could find nothing for Katharina, the eldest sibling, until my husband and I visited the Jewish Records Office during a trip to Vienna in November 2017. The researcher there found Katharina’s entry in the marriage register which yielded her date of birth, date and place of marriage, and the full name of her husband – Pinkas Leib Gelb. 

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I showed the researcher a lovely photo we have of Katharina and Leo on their wedding day. We learned that the Stadttempel synagogue where Katharina married was just around the corner from the Office, which we arranged to visit on a guided tour.

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The grand and elegant Stadttempel in central Vienna, built in the 1820s was the only synagogue in the city to survive World War II. It doesn’t look much from the outside because of an imperial edict that only Roman Catholic places of worship were allowed to be built with facades fronting directly on to public streets. This, ironically, saved the synagogue from total destruction during Kristallnacht in November 1938, as the synagogue couldn’t be destroyed without setting fire to adjacent buildings.

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It was surreal and wonderful to stand with Katharina’s wedding photo in my hand in the same spot where she and Leo would have stood during their wedding ceremony on 25 December 1929, presumably with Grandma and her close family present.

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Katharina Gelb, nee Weiss, was born on 21 June 1894 and married Pinkas Leib Gelb, known as Leo, on 25 December 1929. She fled Vienna with her husband. Documents show her living in Prostejov in Czechoslovakia from where she was deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp on 30 June 1942. From there she left on a transport on 1 September 1942  arriving on 5 September 1942 at Raasiku in Nazi occupied Estonia, where she was murdered on the sand dunes there on 1 September 1942, aged 51.

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At the Bristol (UK) Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration event on 27 January 2020 the four siblings’ names were read out and their names placed next to a ceremonial candle.

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Their names have been submitted to the Wall of Names Memorial to the Jewish children, women and men of Austria who were murdered in the Shoah. This is scheduled to be opened in autumn 2021.

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May they rest in peace.

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HS October 2020