Josefine Tachau and her daughters Edith, Lizzi, and Eveline Kolb

“After the Anschluss, I was stripped of all welfare support and in the last few days I also lost my position in the service of Ms. Schulhof. I, along with my 3 children, am therefore entirely without means. I have not been able to procure food for myself and my children for days now. We are starving! I therefore ur- gently request that my children and I be helped as quickly as possible, as I will otherwise be forced to commit an act of desperation.” (Josefine Tachau to the board of the Jewish community organization in St. Pölten, 9 June 1938) Without knowing specific circumstances, the bare facts indicate how unhappy Josefine Tachau’s life was. Born on 6 April 1910 in Asparn near Tulln (Lower Austria) to Jakob Kolb and Franziska, née Engel, she was already divorced by the age of 22. The reason was presumably the birth out of wedlock of her daughter Edith in Salzburg on 23 May 1931, whose father is not named in the birth regis­ ter and who therefore received her mother’s maiden name. Two years later, on 6 June 1933, Josefine Tachau gave birth in St. Pölten to her second daughter, Lizzi, whose father was also not named in the birth register. Her third child, Eveline, was born in St. Pölten on 2 November 1935. Her father, who was listed as residing in the same household but about whom nothing further is known, was named as Moritz Wiesenfeld, “unemployed”. In her welfare application in 1938, Josefine called herself a widow, but there is no record of a second mar­ riage, nor did she change her name. In any case, Josefine Tachau was a single mother who evidently had to care for three little children without any familial support. Until the “Anschluss”, she barely managed through her employment as a maid as well as through welfare support, including from the Jewish com­ munity organization. With the support payment she received from the Jewish community following her desperate cry for help, she was at least able to pay the rent, which amounted to a modest 17.80 Reichsmark. On 31 July 1939, she was forced to relocate to Flossgasse 3 in Vienna’s second district. We do not know when Josefine Tachau was separated from her daugh­ ters. The mother was deported from this address, while the last known address of the daughters was Böcklingasse 59 in the second district. This was the loca­ tion of the Lele Bondi girls’ home, founded in 1928, until it was shut down in November 1941. The eleven people deported from this address were indeed all girls, none of whom was over 13. These were children who had been expelled from the care of the City of Vienna after the “Anschluss” and whose guardian had henceforth been Franziska “Franzi” Löw, the Vienna Jewish community organization’s social worker. Edith, Lizzi, and Eveline Kolb were presumably housed there due to their mother’s indigence. Jewish children’s home residents were as a rule deported together with their relatives. Thus, the Kolb sisters were deported together with their mother Jo­ sefine Tachau to Opole near Lublin on 26 February 1941. This transport also included the couples Heinrich and Hermine Gelb as well as Rudolf and Emma Kohn from St. Pölten, for whom a Stone of Remembrance was placed in 2018, as well as other Jews from St. Pölten. The little girls and their mother presumably only survived the gruesome living conditions in the ghetto for a short while. No date of death is known."