Melanie Eitelberg
Personalia
Curriculum Vitae
Melanie Eitelberg was born in Vienna as the legitimate daughter of the well-known ear specialist Abraham Josef Eitelberg and Jetty, née Pordes. A Jewish doctor from Tarnopol in Galicia [today: Tarnopil in Ukraine], Abraham Eitelberg graduated in medicine from the University of Vienna [today: Medical University of Vienna] in 1878 and, together with his wife Jetty, who was also Jewish, had four children, Maximilian, Cornelius and the twins Gertrude and Melanie.
Nothing has survived about Melanie Eitelberg's childhood and youth. Together with her twin sister, she worked at the Creditanstalt-Bankverein (CA). Both she and her sister Gertrude remain unmarried and live together in an apartment in Vienna's 1st district.
On March 12, 1938, Melanie Eitelberg witnesses the demise of a free and independent Austria with the invasion of the German Wehrmacht. With the occupation of Austria, German legislation was adopted and with it the 'Nuremberg Race Laws', according to which Melanie Eitelberg was considered a 'full Jew'. She and her sister were immediately dismissed from the Creditanstalt-Bankverein (CA) and their assets were confiscated.
On November 23, 1941, Melanie Eitelberg was deported to the KZ Kauen
On November 23, 1941, a deportation transport with 1,000 Jewish men, women and children left Vienna's Aspang train station. However, this transport never arrived at its originally planned destination of Riga.
The transport from Vienna, like several deportation transports from the "Altreich" planned for Riga, was diverted to Kaunas in Lithuania for reasons that have not yet been clarified and handed over to Einsatzkommando (EK) 3. This unit of Einsatzgruppe A had been working since June 1941 with the massive participation of local forces to "make Lithuania free of Jews" and had murdered more than 130,000 people in total. Immediately after their arrival, the deported Viennese Jews were shot in Fort IX, part of the old Tsarist fortifications in Kaunas, which had become the site of regular massacres, by Lithuanian "helpers" under the command of members of EK 3.
Citations
Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv (WStLA)
Dokumentationsarchiv des Österreichischen Widerstands (DÖW)
Medizinische Universität Wien (MU)
Archiv der Israelitischen Kultusgemeinde (IKG)
