Elisabeth Lang, née Hirschler, and her daughter Lucy Herta

“540. LANG Elisabeth S. [Sara], 1. 2. 1912, housekeeping; 541. LANG Lucy S. [Sara], 14. 9. 1938, child”. These are the entries in the transport list headed to Theresien­stadt on 1 October 1942. No photographs or other personal testimonials are known to exist from the Lang family. Elisabeth Lang was born in Vienna on 1 February 1912 to Wilhelm Hirschler from Prague and Rosalia Fuchs from Vienna. After marrying Josef Lang, they lived together in St. Pölten in Johann Gasser­Straße 8. No details of her profession or life are known. A curious detail is that Elisabeth and Josef were assigned the Nazi­decreed additional names “Sara” and “Israel” at different points in time: First Elisabeth on 5 December 1939 and then both Josef and Elisabeth again on 13 November 1941. This suggests that the two were living at different addres­ ses – whether by choice or coercion cannot be ascertained. In any case, both of them – Elisabeth was pregnant at the time – were deregistered from St. Pölten on 3 May 1938, when they relocated to Vienna. Josef’s place of residence re­ mains unknown, while Elisabeth was assigned to a collective apartment in Berg­ gasse 8/8 in Vienna’s ninth district, where her parents Wilhelm (born 1884) and Rosalie (born 1885) as well as two other people also lived. Her daughter Lucy Herta was born on 14 September 1938. Altogether 86 Jews were sent to their deaths from the building in Berggasse 8. Elisabeth Lang was deported to Theresienstadt along with her parents and her four­year­old daughter on 1 October 1942. Together with her mother and daughter, she was sent to Auschwitz on 12 October 1944, where they were murdered. Wilhelm Hirschler had already perished five months previously, on 2 May 1944, due to the hard living conditions in Theresienstadt. Between 28 September and 28 October 1944, 18,402 people were deported in eleven transports from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz­-Birkenau, of whom only 1574 survived. The exact dates of death of Elisabeth und Lucy Lang and of Rosalia Hirschler remain unknown.

Josef Lang, his parents, and his sister

Josef Lang, Elisabeth’s husband, was born in St. Pölten on 17 April 1907 and lived at least some of the time with his family in Johann Gasser­ Straße 8. As mentioned above, nothing is known about his profession or his place of residence in Vienna, nor about how he managed to flee. He died in London in 1988. His brother Hans, who was born in 1903 and lived in Wiener Straße 26 in St. Pölten, also survived. He died in Vienna in 1974. Yet their parents Michael and Sabina Lang as well as their sister Margarete Wolf fell victim to the Shoah. Michael Lang, born in Szegedin in 1870, was a merchant by profession and was registered in the St. Pölten Jewish community organization’s (JCO) member­ ship register as living in the Wiener Straße in 1920. He died on 16 December 1940 in the hospital of the JCO of Vienna in Odeongasse 9 in Vienna’s second district. His wife Sabina, née Mandl, was born in St. Pölten in 1865. She was deported to Theresienstadt from the JCO’s retirement home in Seegasse 9 in Vienna’s ninth district on 13 August 1942, where she died on 23 November 1942. Margarete, who was born in 1905 and married to Max Wolf, lived in Kir­chengasse 1 in Wilhelmsburg. Her valiant struggle against the Nazi regime should be honored at this point: After being forced to relocate to Vienna, where she lived in Ferdinandstrasse 29 in the second district, she managed to flee to Zagreb, where she joined the partisans. She was arrested by the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) and deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp on 16 November 1939. On 2 December 1944, she was deployed for forced labor at HASAG Leipzig. Originally a metal pro­ ducts factory called “Hugo und Alfred Schneider AG”, it was turned into a mu­ nitions factory from 1933 onwards that solicited tens of thousands of prisoners for forced labor, mostly women, from concentration camps during World War Two. The prisoners lived in their own camp and were marked for “extermination through labor”. The survival rate was correspondingly low, particularly at the HASAG sites in Poland. On 2 February 1945, Margarete Wolf, who like so many others had become incapable of performing labor under those conditions, was sent to Bergen­ Belsen, where she was murdered."