Ettie Steinberg & family

Ettie was born in Czechoslovakia in 1914 and moved to Ireland as a teenager. Before the war, she had married and moved to continental Europe with her husband Wojteck. As a Jewish family, Ettie, Wojteck and their son Leon were forced to live in hiding during the Nazi occupation. In 1942, Ettie and her family were discovered by the Nazis in the south of France and deported to Auschwitz.

 

Esther (Ettie) Steinberg was born in Veretski (Vericky) in Czechoslovakia on 11 January 1914. Ettie was one of seven children. Her family came to Ireland in 1925 and lived in Raymond Terrace off the South Circular Road in Dublin. Ettie attended St Catherine’s School in Donore Avenue, and afterwards, worked as a seamstress.

In 1937, she married Wojteck Gluck, a goldsmith from Belgium, in Greenville Hall Synagogue, Dublin. The couple moved to Belgium to live in Antwerp. From there, they moved to Paris where their son, Leon, was born on 28 March 1939.

The young family moved several times, ending up in Toulouse in 1942. It was there that they were arrested and detained in Drancy transit camp, north of Paris. Ettie’s family in Dublin had succeeded in getting visas for the Gluck family which would have allowed them to travel to Northern Ireland. However, when the visas arrived in Toulouse, it was too late. Ettie, Wojteck and Leon had been captured.

On 2 September 1942, they were deported by train from Drancy to Auschwitz where they were murdered in gas chambers two days later, just eighty years ago.

 

Ettie, Wojteck and Leon.

Image courtesy of Mémorial de la Shoah.

 

The final postcard

 

Ettie addressed a postcard to her family in Dublin and threw it from a moving cattle car as they were being deported to Auschwitz . Miraculously a passer-by found it and posted it to her family home in Dublin days after Ettie and her son were murdered.

 The postcard was coded in Hebrew terms. Ettie’s family understood  the tragic, cryptic message. It reads: “Uncle Lechem, we did not find, but we found Uncle Tisha B’Av”. When decoded, it is believed to mean that instead of finding good fortune, the young family had found destruction.

Lechem is the Hebrew word for bread and Tisha B’Av is a Jewish fast day commemorating the destruction of the temple. The message indicates that Ettie understood the fate that awaited her family at Auschwitz. Ettie, Wojteck and Leon were all taken to gas chambers and murdered upon arrival.

The postcard is available to view at the Irish Jewish Museum Dublin.

A letter to Ettie Steinberg from her brother, dated October 21 1940. Addressed to Bordes-sur-Lez, an Occitan town near the Spanish border, it suggests the Steinbergs had by then found refuge in the south of France.

Image courtesy of the Irish Jewish Museum.

 

The letter was subsequently returned to Dublin and is currently on display at the Irish Jewish Museum Dublin.

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