Patrick Comerford
A series of memorials in a variety of languages in Auschwitz and Birkenau commemorate the victims of the Holocaust who were murdered in the two concentration camps. Over twenty languages appear on separate plaques, representing the languages and nationalities of the victims. Although there is no plaque in Irish, it would be wrong to think that the Holocaust was something that did not affect Ireland, and I was chilled by one exhibit in Auschwitz that shows how the Nazi plan to exterminate 11 million Jews in Europe included 4,000 Jews in Ireland.
When I was growing up, the area close to Donore Avenue was still Dublin’s ‘Little Jerusalem’. When I was about eleven or twelve, friends introduced me to a schoolboys’ soccer club called Port Vale. The clubhouse was in the Donore Avenue area, but home games were played in Bushy Park in Terenure. Later, at sixteen, I had a school summer holiday placement on Donore Avenue, working as a copyholder or proofreader’s assistant at Irish Printers. Dolphin’s Barn Synagogue was around the corner on the South Circular Road, though it finally closed in 1984.
So, I was moved when the first Stolpersteine or ‘stumbling stones’ in Dublin were put in place in 2022 outside Saint Catherine’s Church of Ireland National School on Donore Avenue. The ‘Stumbling Stones’ by the German artist Gunter Demnig are memorials to victims of the Nazis, including Jews, homosexuals, Romani and the disabled. His project has spread across Europe, with more than 90,000 Stolpersteine in 1,000 or more cities in almost thirty countries.
The six stones on Donore Avenue commemorate six victims of the Holocaust, including four who were born in Dublin or spent their childhood in the city: Ettie Steinberg Gluck, who grew up in Dublin, her husband Wojteck Gluck, and their baby son Leon; and Isaac Shishi, Ephraim Saks and his sister Jeanne (Lena) Saks.
Esther or Ettie Steinberg was one of seven children of Aaron Hirsh Steinberg and his wife Bertha Roth. Ettie was born in the former Czechoslovakia in 1914 and her family moved to Dublin in 1925 when she was 11. The family lived at 28 Raymond Terrace, off South Circular Road, and the children went to school at Saint Catherine’s on Donore Avenue.
Ettie married Vogtjeck Gluck, originally from Belgium, in the Greenville Hall Synagogue on South Circular Road on 22 July 1937. She was twenty-two, he was twenty-four, and they later moved to Antwerp. As the Second World War was looming, they moved to Paris, where their son Leon was born on 28 March 1939. By 1942, they were living in an hotel in Toulouse.
When the Vichy regime began rounding up Jews in southern France, Ettie’s family back in Dublin secured visas that allowed them to travel to Northern Ireland. But when the visas arrived in Toulouse, it was too late: Ettie, Vogtjeck and Leon had been arrested the day before. As they were being transported to the death camps, Ettie wrote a final postcard to her family and threw it out a train window. A passer-by found it and eventually it reached Dublin. Ettie, her husband and their son were taken first to Drancy, a transit camp outside Paris. They were then deported on 2 September 1942 and arrived in Auschwitz two days later. It is assumed they were murdered immediately.
Isaac Shishi, whose family came to Ireland from Lithuania, was bon Isaac Seesee born on 29 January 1891 in the family home at 36 St Alban’s Road, off South Circular Road, and spent his childhood there. He was murdered along with his wife Chana and their daughter Sheine by the Nazis in Vieksniai in Lithuania in 1941.
Ephraim Saks was born Ephraim Jackson on 19 April 1915 in Greenville House on South Circular Road, later the site of the Greenville Hall synagogue. His sister Jeanne (Lena) Saks was born on 2 February 1918. They too spent their childhood on St Alban’s Road. The family remained in Dublin throughout the First World War, but then moved to Antwerp. Ephraim was arrested in Paris in 1939 and was murdered in Auschwitz on 24 August 1942. Lena was taken captive in Antwerp and was murdered in Auschwits in 1942 or 1943. Their brother Jakob, who was born in Leeds in 1906, also spent his childhood in Dublin; he too perished in the Holocaust.
Many Holocaust refugees and survivors came as children to live in Ireland. Tomi Reichental, who was born in Bratislava, Slovakia, in 1935 and Suzi Diamond, who was born near Debrecen in Hungary in 1942, have both addressed Holocaust Memorial Day services in Dublin.
Geoffrey (Günther) Phillips was born in Germany in 1925, and was 13 when he escaped on the Kindertransports to England in 1938. He moved to Ireland in 1951 with his wife Phyllis (Moore) and their three sons. He set up a textiles factory in Dublin, and died in 2011.
Rosel Siev was twelve when Hitler came to power. She escaped from Germany to England, but almost all her family died in the Holocaust. When she was a widow, Rosel married a widowed Irish solicitor, Stanley Siev, and they lived in Rathgar, Dublin, until 2012 when they moved to Manchester. Stanley died in 2014. Rosel’s sister Laura was saved by Oskar Schindler and is included on the scroll of names at the end of the film Schindler’s List.
Inge Radford (1936-2016), who was born in Vienna, escaped to England on the Kindertransports in 1939 at the age of three, and later moved to Belfast. Her widowed mother and five of her brothers were murdered in the Holocaust. Inge was a social worker, a probation officer, and worked in the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast. Her husband, Professor Colin Buchanan Radford, was dean of the Faculty of Arts at the Queen’s University of Belfast. Inge lived in Northern Ireland until she died in 2016.
Edith Zinn-Collis was brought to Ireland as a child in 1946 with her brother Zoltan by Dr Bob Collis. She lived in Wicklow and died in 2012. Her brother, Zoltan Zinn-Collis was born around 1940 in Czechoslovakia and was sent to Ravensbruck and Bergen Belsen with his sister and brothers. He died in 2012.
Doris Segal was born Dorathea (Dorli) Klepperova in Czechoslovakia in 1932 and escaped to Ireland with her parents in 1939 when she was seven. She later lived in Dublin and married Jack Segal in 1958. They lived in Terenure and she died in 2018.
Jan Kaminski was born in Poland in 1932. At the age of ten, he escaped a round-up of local Jews, fled into the forests and spent the war on the run. He survived but his entire family perished. He lived most of his life in Dublin and died in 2019.
Dr Ernst Scheyer (1890-1958) brought his son and daughter to Dublin from Germany in the late 1930s. He was rounded up after Krtistallnacht and spent almost a month in Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp near Berlin. He arrived in Dublin on 14 January 1939, and the Scheyer family made their home at 67 Kenilworth Square. He later taught German at Saint Columba’s College, Rathfarnham, and in Trinity College Dublin.
His daughter Renate married another refugee, Robert Weil (1924-1989), in 1948. It was the first wedding in the newly-established Progressive Jewish Synagogue in Dublin. Robert Weil had arrived in Ireland in 1939 as a young Jewish refugee. He went to school at Newtown in Waterford, studied at TCD, and became a teacher of modern languages, especially German, in Belfast.
The Holocaust touched every family in Europe. We should remember that there was a hardly a family that did not lose cousins, neighbours, friends, work colleagues or school friends.
Sources and further reading:
‘Ireland and the Holocaust’, Holocaust Education Ireland, available at https://www.holocausteducationireland.org/ireland-and-the-holocaust (accessed 1 June 2025).
‘Stumbling stones’ in memory of Irish Holocaust victims unveiled, RTÉ News, 1 June 2022, available at https://www.rte.ie/news/2022/0601/1302393-stumbling-stones/ (accessed 1 June 2025)
Ronan McGreevy, Bryan O’Brien, ‘Stumbling stones’ unveiled in Dublin to remember Irish Holocaust victims, The Irish Times, 1 June 2022 , available at: https://www.irishtimes.com/history/2022/06/01/stumbling-stones-unveiled-in-dublin-to-remember-irish-holocaust-victims/ (accessed 1 June 2025).
Biographical note (p 340)
Patrick Comerford is an Anglican priest and a former professor in Trinity College Dublin and the Church of Ireland Theological Institute. He lives in retirement in Milton Keynes
This essay was published as ‘The children of the Holocaust who called Ireland home, pp 166-170, Chapter 39 in Childhood and the Irish, A miscellany, ed Salvador Ryan (Dublin: Wordwell, 2025), xviii + 344 pp, ISBN: 978-1-916742-19-2, lauched at the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin, earlier this month week (1 December 2025)
pp chaptee 39, pp 166-170
No comments:
Post a Comment