This can be explained by the fact that they were not at all welcome in post-war Austria. The overall number of those who came back to settle in Austria again was embarrassingly small: only 6 per cent. This article furthermore deals with the way restitution worked for the victims of Nazi persecution after the war, focussing on the non-elite who had survived Nazi concentration camps and the ordinary Viennese citizens of Jewish descent who returned from exile. Ignaz and Rudolfine Sobotka with their granddaughter Herta (and with Lola and Toni) on the balcony of the bigger rented flat in Lerchenfeldergürtel 45, which was allocated to Ignaz and his family after their liberation from the KZ Theresienstadt Ignaz and Rudolfine Sobotka with their daughter Lola (left) and their granddaughter Herta (right) after their return from the KZ Theresienstadt in the small flat of Lola and Toni in Mariahilferstrasse 41 My great-grandparents, Ignaz and Rudolfine Sobotka, in the photo below with Lola, their daughter and Herta, their granddaughter, returned from the Nazi concentration camp Theresienstadt to Vienna in the summer of 1945, but they never talked about their experiences during their imprisonment. The experiences of my grandparents, Lola and Toni Kainz, and their daughter, Herta, my mother, are an important source of information about life in Vienna during the last months of the 2 nd World War and the time after liberation. During the war he worked in the restaurant business of his parents and was called back to diplomatic service after the end of the war. Schöner was an Austrian diplomat who had been dispatched to the United States and was forcibly retired by the Nazis in 1939 after the “Anschluss” (the Nazi takeover of Austria). The “Viennese Diary of 1944/1945” by Josef Schöner (1904-1978) offers a personal impression of the life in the city of Vienna during the last days of the war and the months after the liberation of the city by the Soviet Red Army. These “Flak Towers” were also used as bomb shelters in 1944/45 and my grandmother Lola and my mother Herta only once sought refuge in this tower in Esterházypark near their flat in Mariahilferstrasse 41, but the crowded atmosphere there so much frightened Herta, who was 11 years old then, that they never returned and hid in the cellar of their house instead. Only two of them have found a new purpose nowadays, one as a depot for art and the one below as a climbing wall and aquarium (“Haus des Meeres”). They were erected to attack Allied bombers, but were rather inefficient. Between 19 the Nazis constructed three pairs of “Flak Towers” in the 2 nd, 3 rd and in the area of the 6 th/7 th district in Vienna, which are still present in the city scape today as an ugly warning against war.
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