These are photographs given as part of the Centropa documentation of Lilli Tauber'’ life. The photographs were sent by Lilli’s parents Wilhelm and Johanna Schischa, together with letters to family members in Vienna depicting their life in the Opole ghetto. One photograph is a group photograph, with many of the people wearing the required white armband with a Magen David. Lilli’s father is the fourth on the right, and her mother is standing in the second row behind the little girl. Another photograph shows a meal in the ghetto. The daily serving of soup wasn’t enough to survive and the 12,000 people in the Opole ghetto had to find other ways of getting food. Lilli’s parents received parcels from their relatives in Austria, and in his letters Wilhelm expressed his thanks for the parcels alongside his fear for the future. On the back of a photograph depicting the cramped living conditions in the ghetto Wilhelm wrote:
"If you could only see our [?] chicken coop? ... 8 people sleep on the first floor, so to speak, and 7 on the second. And believe it or not, but we are comfortable enough and have enough space. 2,700 people, who still have to sleep on the floor or on a wooden board, or, in the best case scenario on a deckchair, envy us."
Lilli Tauber was born in Vienna in 1927 and grew up in Wiener Neustadt, a city south of Vienna. Lilli’s family kept Jewish traditions and a kosher household and observed the festivals. Most of their friends were Jewish, although most of the girls at Lilli’s school were not Jewish. Lilli led a happy life and recalls that until the Anschluss, there was very little anti-Semitism. This changed with the Anschluss, and suddenly her non-Jewish friends ignored her and she was thrown out of her school. During the Kristallnacht pogrom Lilli’s father was arrested; he returned a little later and the family moved to Vienna. Together with the other Viennese Jews, they were forced to move to Leopoldstadt, which was historically the city’s Jewish quarter. In July 1939, Lilli escaped Austria on the Kindertransport. In England, Lilli maintained written correspondence with her parents, but this ceased in 1940, and she had no way of knowing what had happened to them. In 1945, Lilli heard of Auschwitz for the first time, and she understood that she might not ever see her parents again. Lilli’s parents were deported in 1941 to the ghetto in Opole, Poland. During their time in Opole, they sent letters and photographs to Lilli’s aunt in Vienna, who was safe since she had married a non-Jew. In 1942 the ghetto was liquidated, and its inhabitants were sent to the death camps of Belzec or Sobibor. Lilli doesn’t know where camp her parents were sent. After the war, Lilly returned to Austria and received a small suitcase with her parents’ letters and photograph from the Opole ghetto. Lilli married a Jewish man named Max Tauber and they had two children who were raised, in Lilli’s words, as “conscious Jews,” who were very connected to and aware of their Jewish origins.
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Kinderstransport – Kindertransport, the German word for “children’s transport,” is the name given to the rescue operation of 12,000 Jewish children from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia between December 1938 and the outbreak of World War II on September 1, 1939. Following the Kristallnacht pogrom, pressure was put on the British government to provide a safe haven for Jewish children. Jews and non-Jews, such as Wilfrid Israel, Bertha Bracey, and Nicholas Winton, were the driving forces behind the Kindertransport operation. The Jewish community in Britain provided funds to assist with the absorption of the children. The children were accompanied by their parents to local railway stations and, in many cases, never saw their parents again. Once in England, the children were placed in foster homes, hostels, schools, and farms. In many cases the children were welcomed and cared for, however they inevitably suffered extreme trauma due to parting from their parents, adjusting to a foreign country, and worrying constantly for their parents in Nazi-occupied Europe.
Jewish Community of Opole – Opole (known in Polish as Opole Lubelskie) was a town in Eastern Poland in the province of Lublin. Jews first arrived in the town in the sixteenth century. During the Cossack riots of the seventeenth century, many Jews of Opole were murdered and their property looted. Jews later returned to the town, and in the eighteenth century the town had a synagogue, a cemetery, and an entire Hasidic dynasty. The twentieth century brought change to the community. In addition to the Agudat Israel ultra-orthodox movement and a Beit Ya’akov school for orthodox girls, Zionist groups and secular youth movements, such as Hashomer Hatzair and Beitar, were founded in town. Before the German occupation 4,300 Jews lived in Opole, comprising more than two thirds of the population. In September 1939 Opole was occupied by the Germans and the Polish population of the city immediately looted Jewish property. Jews from all over the region were rounded up in Opole and forced to live in a ghetto. Subsequently, large groups of Jews were deported from Vienna and brought to the Opole ghetto. Conditions in the ghetto deteriorated and people suffered from disease and starvation. On March 31, 1942 the deportations began and the Jews in the Opole ghetto were sent to Belsec or Sobibor death camps. The Jewish community of Opole was never revived.
Holocaust – The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide and persecution of European Jewry by the German Nazi regime and its collaborators in Europe and North Africa during World War II. The Holocaust was implemented in stages from Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party’s first rise to power. From 1933 anti-Jewish laws were passed in Germany which excluded the Jews from German society. The Nazis also began to create a network of concentration camps where Jews and other “undesirable elements” of society were imprisoned in inhumane conditions. With the Nazi occupation of Europe during World War II, which started in 1939, the formal persecution of Jews was implemented in all the occupied countries. Jews were sent to ghettos, made to work in forced labour, and lived in appalling conditions. In 1942 the Nazis held the Wannsee Conference where they decided on the Final Solution which detailed the extermination all the Jews of Europe. Initially, more than one million Jews were exterminated by death squads named Einsatzgruppen, who were assisted by local collaborators. As of 1942 Jews were deported from the ghettos to death camps in Poland, including Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, where millions were murdered in gas chambers on arrival. Jews who were not immediately murdered were sent to force labour, and many died as a result of the harsh conditions, starvation, and disease. Jewish resistance was extremely difficult, but attempts to fight the Nazis were made by Jewish partisans and fighters in uprisings such as, most famously, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Sobibor Uprising. In 1944, as it became clear that the Nazis were losing the war, Nazi camp commanders began to close the camps and forced the survivors to march towards Germany. Already sick and weak from the years of violence, more than 250,000 Jews died on these death marches. The Holocaust came to an end with the defeat of the Nazis in May 1945. Six million Jews, two thirds of the Jewish population of Europe, were murdered with millions more experiencing tremendous suffering, violence, and loss. In addition to the Jews, millions of Roma (gypsies), homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, disabled people, and Soviet and Polish prisoners of war were also murdered during the Holocaust.
Jewish community of Austria – Jews have lived in Austria since the times of the Roman Empire. In the early Middle Ages Jews were permitted to participate in commerce, but in the fifteenth century all of the community were arrested, murdered, or expelled. Around the beginning of the eighteenth century Jews slowly returned to Austria, and by 1781, when Emperor Joseph II issued the Edict of Tolerance, more than one and a half million Jews were living in the Habsburg Empire. The situation for the Jews improved significantly in the nineteenth century: a chief rabbi served in Vienna, a synagogue was consecrated in 1826, and Emperor Franz Josef granted equal rights to the Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This was also a time of many prominent Austrian Jews including Sigmund Freud, Arnold Schoenberg, Gustav Mahler (who converted to Christianity), and Stefan Zweig. Two Jewish politicians, Victor Adler and Otto Bauer, served as foreign ministers after World War I. The prosperity of Austrian Jews also attracted many Jewish immigrants from eastern parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and by the mid 1930s more than 200,000 Jews lived in Austria. However, anti-Semitism also intensified during this time, and young people, such as Adolph Hitler himself, grew up under this anti-Jewish atmosphere. Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938, and around 65,000 Austrian Jews were murdered in death camps during the Holocaust. After the war, the Jewish community was slowly rebuilt. In 2015 approximately 9000 Jews lived in Austria, primarily Vienna; most are of Austrian origin with some originally from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The community has a number of synagogues, schools, and other organisations.
