For many years it was believed Esther “Ettie” Steinberg was the only Irish victim of the Holocaust.
Steinberg was born in Czechoslovakia in 1911 and moved with her family to Dublin in 1925. The South Circular Road area in Dublin where she grew up was known as “Little Jerusalem” given the preponderance of Jewish people who lived there.
She married a man from Antwerp and fled to the south of France when the Germans invaded their country in 1940.
Her Irish family secured visas for her safe passage to Ireland, but it was too late. She was rounded up with other Jewish families in Toulouse and died at Auschwitz in September 1942.
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Eighty years on from her death six Stolpersteines - brass-topped cobblestones, or “stumbling blocks” - were embedded in the pavement outside St Catherine’s National School in Donore Avenue which she attended as a child. The initiative was supported by Holocaust Education Ireland in association with Dublin City Council and the German Embassy in Dublin.
The six stones represent her and what we now know are the five other Irish victims of the Holocaust. They are their husband Wojtech Gluck, their son Gluck who was only three when he perished at Auschwitz, brother and sister Ephraim and Jeanne Saks who also died at Auschwitz, and Isaac Shishi, who was born in Dublin in 1890 and died in Lithuania in 1941.
Their names are now part of the world’s largest decentralised memorial with 90,000 such stones in 27 countries. These are a first for Ireland.
Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth Roderic O’Connor, several ambassadors, members of the Jewish community and teachers and pupils from the school attended the ceremony. The stones were laid in place by Gunter Demnig, the creator of the Stolpersteine Project.
Miss Steinberg’s niece Joe Schleider said she and her family owed a debt of gratitude to Ireland for allowing them to flee the pogroms in eastern Europe in the 1920s.
They had originally intended to settle in Britain, but the borders to them were closed.
Mr Schleider, whose mother was Ms Steinberg’s sister, said all the family were educated at St Catherine’s School.
When the Germans invaded Belgium in 1940, his aunt’s family had no choice but to flee south. “Within a year the Vichy regime began rounding up Jews on behalf of Nazi Germany. They were caught.”
The Steinberg family in Ireland worked tirelessly to bring them back home, but without success.
Ethel and her family were transported by cattle trucks to Auschwitz in September 1942 and gassed two days later. “It goes without saying that there was no memorial to any of them,” he said.
Nevertheless, Ethel managed to write a final postcard and throw it out of the cattle truck. It was picked up by a passer-by and posted to Dublin.
“Ethel’s parents never came to terms with their deaths. That’s where the story should end – another tiny loss forgotten by all expect the history records preserved by the immediate family. That is where it would have ended without the help of Stolpersteine Project.
“They are far more than plaques. They carry a vital message and convey the tragedy of millions in a way no book or statistics ever could. The baton must be passed on and accepted. Those who cannot remember the past are destined to repeat it. That lesson must never cease to be taught.”
