Salzburg — a frosty morning and more Stolpersteine — Day 11

We seem to be stumbling over Stolperstein everywhere we go in Salzburg. We saw more on our way into town this cold frosty morning.

This morning we stopped at the St Andra Church not far from our hotel. Outside the entrance were 2 Stolpersteine for 2 of the church leaders who helped the Jews. Pfarrer Franz Zeiss and Franz Wesenauer. Zeiss was a Jew who became a Catholic. He was abducted in 1940, imprisoned in 1941, Let out under watch, then freed. He survived. Wesenauer was in the Christian resistance. He survived too. Both are buried in St Peter’s Abbey. Brave good men. Their pictures and stories were in the church, which now houses a Slovic congregation.

More Stumbling Blocks:

The Stolpersteine above honors Dr. Eduard Portheim, b. 1910, who was murdered at Schloss Hartheim (see the next post),

after being taken to Dachau. Each stone we see has a story, for example, here is Eduard’s:

Eduard Portheim

Dr. Eduard PORTHEIM, born on October 15, 1910 in Vienna, was the first child of the Jewish couple Elisabeth and Leopold PORTHEIM. His father, from the prominent Prague family Eduard Ritter von PORTHEIM, was a botanist and co-founder of the Vivarium Botanical Research Institute in Vienna.

In 1938, Eduard PORTHEIM’s parents and his sister Susanne managed to escape to England. His uncle Viktor and his aunt Leontine 1 committed suicide before they were deported. His two uncles Friedrich and Emil were murdered in concentration camps.

The motive of the Viennese lawyer Dr. Eduard PORTHEIM for staying in Salzburg under the Nazi regime is still unclear.

It is plausible that he was an acquaintance of the liberal Junger family, who lived at Makartplatz 6 2 . Josefine Junger was a sociable woman and a close friend of Stefan Zweig’s wife Friderike.

Mathilde, Mrs. Junger’s older daughter, was the first wife of the diplomat Egon Ranshofen-Wertheimer, whose daughter Luciana lived in Salzburg under the Nazi regime.

Roswitha, Mrs. Junger’s younger daughter, was the wife of the art critic Ignaz George Pollak, a son of the Jewish Albert Pollak family from Salzburg. Roswitha’s twin sister Ida Karoline Junger, who studied singing in Vienna, returned to her parents’ house in 1938 and went to Italy, is said to have been friends with Dr. Eduard PORTHEIM. In any case, Makartplatz 6 was his last known residential address according to the Shoah databases.

On October 16, 1940, Dr. Eduard PORTHEIM was registered in the Dachau concentration camp as a Jew and “protective custody prisoner” number 20544.

Further details are known: his arrival on January 23, 1941 in the Neuengamme concentration camp and his transfer back to Dachau on September 14, 1941 with the number 27520.

The 31-year-old Dr. Eduard PORTHEIM was one of those Dachau prisoners who were deported to Hartheim on February 23, 1942 under the code name “Invalid Transport” or “Special Treatment 14f13” 3 and gassed there.

His academic degree of Dr. jur., which he had acquired in 1936 at the Faculty of Law of the University of Vienna, was revoked in 1941 for racist reasons.

It took 67 years until his revoked doctorate was posthumously awarded back to him by the University of Vienna.

On our way, we stopped by the Mozart Haus again, and peeked inside. He lived here after he was 17 years old. We didn’t pay to go in, instead we walked across the bridge, into the old town’s main street where his big yellow birth home is. We decided we’d spend our time there.

On the way to Mozart’s birth house, we passed by the Evagelische Christuskirche, another beautiful gem of a church by the river. Sadly, it was locked.