Josephine Löwy, geb. Steiner

Josephine Steiner was born in Munich on February 17, 1912. Her father, Samuel Steiner, was a self-employed businessman. As he came from Budapest, the family had Hungarian citizenship. Samuel Steiner was wounded in the First World War and after the war ran a commission agency in underwear and linen goods at Tulbeckstr. 5. Josephine’s mother Karolina looked after her husband and made children’s clothing, ladies’ and children’s underwear and bespoke men’s shirts. Josephine Steiner attended the Luisengymnasium high school from May 1922 to March 1929. After leaving school she completed a home economics course at the Jewish children’s home in Antonienstrasse. She later worked as a shop assistant and clerk.
In Munich in 1937, Josephine Steiner married the clerk Erwin Löwy, who came from Zurich. Their son Ernst Alfons had already been born in Zurich a year previously. It is no longer comprehensible today why the family did not move to Switzerland but instead to the autocratic, anti-Semitic Slovak Republic, which was closely allied with Germany. It is possible that Josephine Löwy and her husband believed themselves protected by the fact that Erwin Löwy had been born in Switzerland. The family lived in Bratislava, at first at Wachtmeisterstrasse 639, and later at ulica Vydrica 37. Ernst Löwy worked as a merchant. Their daughter Franziska was born in 1940.
The first wave of deportations began in co-ordination with the German Reich on March 25, 1942 with great brutality and no resistance to speak of from the non-Jewish populace. On June 7, 1942, the Slovakian government had Josephine Löwy, five-year-old Erwin Alfons and two-year-old Franziska deported in Transport Number 43 from the Bratislava-Patrónka assembly camp via the Žilina assembly camp to the Sobibor extermination camp. All three were murdered in the gas chambers immediately upon the arrival of the train. Erwin Löwy had already been deported to Lublin-Majdanek concentration camp on April 12, 1942, on one of the first transports from Trnava. The date of his death is unknown. Josephine Löwy’s parents were able to emigrate to Hungary, where they survived in a ghetto. The couple returned to Munich after the end of the Second World War. (text Barbara Hutzelmann, editor C. Fritsche, translation C. Hales)