Theresia Löwy/Brody

Past

Theresia Löwy was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Vienna. There she married Ignaz Brody on 5 May 1912, who died in the 1920s from the late effects of injuries suffered in the First World War. They had two daughters, Herta and Alice "Lizzi" Brody. Lizzi recognised the signs of the times early on and fled to Palestine at the age of 22 in the early 1930s. In 1938 she returned to Vienna once again to save her sister and mother, but only managed to smuggle her sister Herta out of the country in an adventurous escape. Only a few months later, the family lost all contact with her mother Theresia Brody, which triggered great feelings of guilt in Lizzi and led to her remaining silent about this subject all her life and thus never attaining certainty about what had really happened to her mother.

Present

Dr Edna Magder, the daughter of Lizzi Brody, was born in the former Palestine during the Second World War and emigrated to Canada as an adult, where she met her future husband and runs a psychotherapy practice with him in Toronto. Although she knew as a child that her family originally came from Vienna, she did not learn for a long time why she was never allowed to meet her grandmother.

It was only after her mother had already passed away that Edna was able to undertake several trips to Europe in search of her family history. Through various archival researches and especially with the help of Waltraud Barton, she finally found out that her grandmother had been deported to Maly Trascjanec on 14 September 1942 and murdered there.

Future

The subject of the Holocaust still has an identity-forming effect in Edna's family today, and also an impact on her children and grandchildren:

„There was not one person in my close and important circle, that had not been touched by the holocaust.”

Her daughter Ruth Abusch-Magder also described this particularly impressively in a statement on Canadian Holocaust Remembrance Day:

„I grew up in a family, where everyday was holocaust memorial day. (…) No meal happened at my parents home, where the holocaust or Nazis were not mentioned. I don’t recall a time, when I did not know about the holocaust (…). I grew up with hording food and always having a plan of escape. I live daily in the violence of the Nazis and the many bystanders, who did not only try to kill our people but our spirit."

Sources:

Magder, Edna (2015): Searching for my grandmother. 

Magder, Edna, 29.05.2021: Interview mit Verena Radner, Marlene Berger und Sophie Wenkel.