Helene Eitelberg
Personalia
Curriculum Vitae
Nothing has been preserved about Helene Eitelberg's childhood and youth, except that she came from a Jewish family from Neutra [today: Nitra]. The town belonged to Hungary until 1918 and was later incorporated into Czechoslovakia.
After Maximilian Eitelberg's divorce from Else Eitelberg, she became his second wife and thus the stepmother of Friedrich Eitelberg. The marriage takes place in Neutra. Helene Eitelberg becomes a housewife.
On March 12, 1938, Helene Eitelberg witnesses the demise of 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 Helene Eitelberg was considered a 'full Jew'.
On November 23, 1941, Helene Eitelberg, her husband Maximilian, his son Friedrich and his two twin sisters were Melanie and Gertrude were deported to the KZ Kauen and murdered there on November 29, 1941. Only her brother-in-law Cornelius survived, as he was married to a Catholic 'Aryan woman' and was not deported due to his 'mixed marriage'. Helene Eitelberg was 50 years old at the time of her death.
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
Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstands (DÖW)
www.myheritage.com
