Hermine Allina, née Rabl

“Coming directly here is unfortunately completely out of the question under the current circumstances. I’m very bitter about this, because I was hoping to have you here soon. We have done everything in our power – sadly without success. Dearest mother, despite all difficulties, I do hope that everything will turn out well. Believe me, just as you long for us, so we long for you and think of you day and night.” Trude Weiss, née Allina, to her mother Hermine, New York, December 2, 1941

Hermine was born to Bernhard Rabl and Katharina, née Löwy, in Kartasowa/Tucap (Moravia) on February 19, 1867. Through her marriage with Sigmund Allina, who was eleven years her senior, she belonged to one of the leading families of the Jewish community organization in St. Pölten. Sigmund was the head of the board from 1902 to 1904 and from 1907 served as a member of the Construction and Donation Committee for the new synagogue building. In 1889, their daughter Irma was born. The next child, Emil, was born in 1891 but only lived for five weeks. The parents were surely devastated that his brother Otto also died at the age of eight. Both are buried in the Jewish cemetery in St. Pölten. Two years after Emil’s death, on July 10, 1901, Hermine gave birth to another girl, Gertrude, who was known as Trude. A photograph taken by the St. Pölten- based studio of Gustav Simon and dated around 1904 shows the parents with their two lovely daughters.

In 1917, Hermine Allina suffered another blow of fate: Her husband died on August 19. His death notice in the newspaper Neue Freie Presse honored him as a merchant, a home owner, and a board member of the Jewish community organization who had been a “much loved husband and a noble and good father and grandfather” to his family. His gravestone in the new Jewish cemetery in St. Pölten survives to this day.

His daughter Irma, who died in Vienna in 1972, also rests in this grave. She married Robert Leicht, the son of the long-term head of the Jewish community organization board Albert Leicht. Her father had been his deputy from 1910 to 1913. The couple had three children, Käthe, Lucie (Luzy), and Liesl. In 1939, Irma fled to New York with Robert, returning to Vienna in 1953 following his death. Käthe was murdered in the Lublin Ghetto, Lucie managed to flee to Palestine/ Eretz Israel, and Liesl escaped to the United States. Hermine’s youngest daughter Trude, whose married name was Weiss, lived in Graz and managed to flee in 1939 with her husband Othmar and their son Fritz (born in 1936). They escaped first to London and later also went to the United States. Trude returned intermittently to Austria with her second husband, Walter Hafner, and died in New York in 1987.

As a widow, Hermine Allina continued to be active in the Jewish community: In 1923, she established a so-called Children’s Aid Committee together with sever­ al other women and men from the St. Pölten Jewish community organization, which together with the Vienna Jewish community organization took in Jewish children in need from Germany and housed them with private families who could put meat back on their bones. In January and February 1924, 18 boys and girls from Breslau, Hamburg, and Leipzig arrived in St. Pölten.

As the heir to a house at Kremser Gasse 5 with a value estimated at 38,500 Reichsmark, Hermine was obliged to submit a property declaration on July 16, 1938. However, the house was under mortgage, more than a third of which had been loaned by Albert Leicht, her daughter’s father-in-law. There is no documen­tation indicating what internal family agreements lay behind this transaction. The declaration does not cite any other assets or valuables. On May 4, 1939, Hermine Allina was forced to hand over a few modest items – “1 cup, 1 caster, 1 small ladle, 3 spoons, 3 silver coins weighing 390 grams” – and other small items to the Dorotheum auction house at Spiegelgasse 4 in Vienna’s first district, for which she received the paltry sum of 12 Reichsmark. It is possible that, as a widow of many years, she genuinely had hardly any possessions of her own, although her in-laws belonged to the wealthy middle-class society of St. Pölten. One might have hoped that she would have had some securities, household items, jewelry, or other objects to give her daughters when they emigrated. Yet Phyllis Weiss, Trude’s granddaughter, confirmed that both sisters arrived in the United States with nothing and had to build up a new livelihood under the most difficult conditions. It may therefore be assumed that Hermine, alone and 73 years old, was robbed of all her possessions by the Nazis. While she had still been able to send her daughter Trude a little package with “Vanillekipferln” (vanilla croissants) and chocolate in May 1939, by February 1941 she was herself dependent on care packages: Trude sent her coffee, chocolate, and “size 9 ladies’ socks.” Hermine’s greatest worry was her housemaid “Salie,” who had been in her employ for decades, as she wrote to Trude on May 25, 1939: “If I had at least taken care of Salie already. She was with me for over forty years and now, aged 78, where should she go?”

On May 6, 1940, Hermine Allina was forced to move first to Böcklinstraße 92/11 in Vienna’s second district, where her in-laws Jakob and Stefanie Winterstein from St. Pölten already lived, before having to relocate again at an unknown point in time to Haidgasse 2/13, also in the second district. On December 2, 1941, Trude still wrote with the hope that her mother could emigrate to Cuba. This loving letter, which included “many, many kisses” from Hermine’s beloved grandson Fritz, was mailed the following day from New York. It came back half a year later, on July 26, 1942, stamped “return to sender,” presumably because the address Böcklinstraße 92 was no longer correct. It was not forwarded to the collective apartment on Haidgasse. Two weeks later, on August 13, 1942, Her­ mine Allina, then 75 years old and probably already sick, was deported to There­sienstadt. Sabina Allina, the wife of her in-law Jakob, was on the same transport. A Stone of Remembrance was set for Sabina at Kremsergasse 5 in 2021. Another sixteen individuals were sent to their deaths from Haidgasse 2. Of the 1,006 people deport­ ed on Transport IV/7, only 81 survived. Hermine died within just three weeks, on September 11, 1942, in the “Arsenal” in Theresienstadt.