According to the ‘Irish Times’ Ettie Steinberg is Ireland’s only victim during the so-called ‘Holocaust’ between 1942 and 1945. To quote their narrative of her life and the reason why she is believed to have been gassed by the Third Reich as part of a genocidal program to exterminate the jews:
‘Ettie Steinberg was the only Irish citizen killed at Auschwitz in the second World War. She was born to Czechoslovakian parents on January 11th, 1914, and lived with them and six siblings at 28 Raymond Terrace, near the South Circular Road in Dublin.
Smashing Times theatre group is reviving Steinberg’s story, which is equal parts fascinating and tragic, in The Woman is Present: Women’s Stories of WWII. It is one of 20 accounts of powerful women in wartime to be performed by the Dublin-based group as part of their year-long project Women, War and Peace. The recorded details of Steinberg’s life have been reworked into Ode to Ettie Steinberg, a play that reimagines moments from her short life.
Her story begins in Dublin. She was a Jewish seamstress who married a Belgian man, Vogtjeck Gluck, on July 22nd, 1937, in Greenville Hall synagogue in Dublin. The newlyweds soon moved to Antwerp to be closer to Gluck’s family business.
Antwerp was not to be their home for long. Tensions grew around a Nazi invasion of the Low Countries, and the couple fled to Paris, where their son Leon was born. But the new family were still under threat. They were forced to continue to the south of France, moving every day, before they were captured and arrested while staying in a hotel.
Steinberg’s family sent visas to allow them to return to Northern Ireland, but they arrived a day too late. The trio were transported to Auschwitz. On their final journey, Steinberg wrote a postcard to her family in Ireland and threw it from the moving train. By chance, it was found by a stranger and posted to the correct address.
The postcard, written in coded Hebrew to avoid detection, read: “Uncle Lechem, we did not find, but we found Uncle Tisha B’av” – meaning “we did not find plenty, but we found destruction”.’ (1)
The interesting thing about Steinberg’s story is how banal the ‘evidence’ for her death is.
Put it another a way: Steinberg lived in Antwerp in Belgium with her jewish husband Vogtjeck Gluck, fled to Paris after the German invasion and then fled again to France in the wake of the fall of France to the forces of the Third Reich in the summer of 1940. Where they were arrested by the German authorities.
They were then allegedly transported on a train to Auschwitz sometime between 1940 and 1945 but threw out a postcard that was allegedly written in Hebrew that was then posted to the ‘correct address’.
Now there are three major issues with this claim:
Firstly there is no mention of Auschwitz on said postcard so how do we know that Gluck and Steinberg were being sent there? Also how do we know that it was thrown from a train and then found and posted by someone else?
Secondly there is no mention of any corroborating evidence of Gluck and Steinberg being sent to any concentration camp – let alone Auschwitz – so how do we know that they were?
Thirdly there is the postcard story itself. While it is perfectly possible in theory that they threw the postcard out of the train and it was found and posted by an unknown individual. It is improbable in the extreme given that one wonders how the postcard was found by someone as well as how it avoided the wind, rain and snow making it viable to send in the post. Then also extremely improbably was picked up by someone who not only didn’t throw it away but also added postage to it to send it on to its (unknown but presumably international) destination.
Add to that the fact that postcard was written in Hebrew – which was a dead language at the end – with modern Hebrew only in use in Palestine having been successfully reconstructed and revived by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda with the support of Edmond James de Rothschild by 1922 and almost exclusively limited to jews in Palestine. (2) Then wonders how this improbable series of events occurred to send a postcard ‘from a train to Auschwitz’ written in a language that was not in wide use and which neither Gluck nor Steinberg likely spoke.
Then you come to the inescapable conclusion that the postcard and the attendant narrative is almost certainly fake. The question is how fake are they?
Were Gluck and Steinberg deported to a camp before their deaths and before doing so manage to send a blank postcard to which someone later added the Hebrew message?
Did Gluck and Steinberg survive the war and send a blank postcard after the Second World War to which someone later added the Hebrew message?
Did Gluck and Steinberg survive the war and send the postcard after the Second World War with the Hebrew message and it was merely thought to be from the war?
Or is the postcard completely unrelated to Gluck and Steinberg and either a wholesale forgery or a postcard from some other jew that is claimed as being from Gluck and Steinberg?
You see whatever way you look at it the facts – as far as they are available - tell us that the story of Ettie Steinberg as related by the ‘Irish Times’ is completely and utterly fake.
References
(1) https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/the-dubliner-who-died-at-auschwitz-now-centre-stage-1.2776084
(2) Benjamin Harshav, 1999, ‘Language in Time of Revolution’, 2nd Edition, Stanford University Press: Stanford, p. 85