The Jewish Trail of Tears The Evian Conference of ... - Haruth.com

Privileges in 1624 as a ghetto and later known as District II, was situated within the heart
of the capital, and formed, together with Brigittenau (20 th District), a large island
bounded by the Danube River and the Danube Canal. Jews comprised 38.5 percent of the
population in 1923 and consequently the region was nicknamed Mazzesinsel or “Matzoh
Island.” 29
By March 14, 1938 approximately 191,000 Jews (ten percent of the city’s
population) lived within Vienna, making it, after Warsaw and Budapest, the third largest
community of Jews in Continental Europe. 30
Following the Anschluss all Austrian Jews were ordered to relocate to Vienna and
eventually into Leopoldstadt itself. The “relentless tramp of Nazi storm troopers’ boots
on the stairs and the knocks of rifle butts” on the doors of Jewish residences signaled
impending arrest or the plundering of their businesses. Members of the Hitler Youth
(Hitler Jugend) rousted Jewish merchants living in the Jew’s Alley (Jüdengasse) and
compelled them to open their stores from which goods were plundered. Jewish coffee
houses were forcibly closed or turned over to new Aryan managers. 31 Jews were forced to
their knees to scrub Schuschnigg crosses (placed by the Fatherland Front, two weeks
earlier in support of an anti-Anschluss plebiscite) from the pavement and were serenaded
by the gathering crowd with the shouts of “Perish Jewry”, “Out with the Jews” and “Who
29 “Leopoldstadt, Vienna” available from http://www.fact-index.com/l/le/leopoldstadt__vienna.html;
Internet; accessed March 13, 2010.
30 Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan Pelt, Flight from the Reich: Refugee Jews, 1933-1945 (New York:
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2009), 97.
31 Washington Post, March 15, 1938, 4
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