X-FACTORED

Part 9 of “Uncle Len, Wife-Killer”

Lisbeth Frank was born in Vienna in 1922 and, at 16, sent away to England when the Nazis annexed Austria. In her story, I write how she found and lost a husband, and then found another who killed her. You can read „L is for Lisbeth“ here.

At the time of writing „L is for Lisbeth“, I surmised that she came from a Jewish family, but I wasn’t sure. With the help of Sadie Nelson, a professional genealogist, I was able to track down her parents, Adelheid and Jenö Frank. This is their story.

Transport 2 left from the Aspang station in Vienna on 19 Feb 1941. There were 1,010 Jews on board. Jenö Frank und his wife Adelheid (nee Popper) were two of them1. The train from the Deutsche Reichsbahn was headed for Kielce in Poland and was the second deportation in a series that was intended to clear Vienna of Jews, so that the Nazis could take over their property. Only 18 Jews on that train survived the Holocaust. Adelheid and Jenö were not among the survivors.

Jenö Frank was born on 28 Feb 18832, in the village Hidvég-Ardó in Northern Hungary, on the border to Slovakia3. The name Jenö is Hungarian and is synonomous with Eugen in German. Adelheid Popper was born on September 3rd, 1886 in Prague, Czechoslovakia. They met and married in 1914 in the Synagogue in Tempelgasse in Vienna, Austria4, known as the Leopoldstädter Tempel, a beautiful building in Oriental style which served as a model for other synagogues in Zagreb, Prag, Sofia, Budapest, Kraków and Kyiv. The building was destroyed as a result of Kristallnacht, the night of 9-10 November, 19385.

1938 was also the year that the Nazis annexed Austria, and the year Adelheid and Jenö sent their 16 year-old daughter to England6, thus saving her life.

In order to confiscate Jewish property, most Jews were forced by the Nazis to relocate and to move into overcrowded „Judenhäuser“, or to share their flat with several other families. Before Adelheid and Jenö were deported, they lived in Alser Straße 40 in Alsergrund, a district with a large Jewish population. Whether this was their original flat or they had moved there, we do not know. We do know that 6,910 Jews were deported and murdered from the district of Alsergrund. Today, we find „Steine der Erinnerung“ (memorial stones) outside of two houses in Alserstr. and many more in the district7.

Reichsleiter Baldur von Schirach applied to Hitler for approval for a mass deportation of Jews on October 2nd, 19408, and approval was granted on December 3rd, as notified by Hans Heinrich Lammers, head of the Reichskanzlei. Altogether 47,035 Jews were deported in 47 transports from Aspang Railway Station, Vienna9.

Memorial at Aspangbahnhof, image: Christian Michelides/CC 4.0

The website Yad Vashem gives details of how the transports were organised:

Several days before each such transport, the Jewish community would receive a list from the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna, containing the names of deportees. It was the Jewish community’s responsibility to inform the people on the list of the departure date and to ensure that they were rounded up and brought to the Jewish-owned school building at Castellezgasse 35. The responsibility for supplying the deportees with bare essentials and food while they were being held at the school and during the transports was imposed on the Jewish community. During the deportees’ stay at the school, officials of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna forced them to sign a document confirming that they were leaving Vienna of their own free will and were relinquishing their property to the state10.

Adolf Eichmann was responsible for the deportation, among others. The names of all 65,000 murdered Viennese Jews have been recorded on the Shoah Wall of Names in Ostarrachi Park, Vienna.

Shoah Wall of Names Memorial. Image: Ninaraas, CC 4.0
Shoah Wall of Names Memorial. Image: Ninaraas, CC 4.0

February 19th, 1941, was bitterly cold, around -12° C. It is unlikely that they knew where they were being taken or why. The distance they travelled was nearly 600 km to a place called Kielce, about 100 km north of Kraków. Many of the older and weaker deportees got sick on the way.

After Transport 2 arrived in Kielce, the deportees were first housed with local families. But the numbers were growing exponentially, because the plan was to deport all the Jews into ghettos and then to murder them. The plan was codenamed „Aktion Reinhard“ and the deportations were the first step in the systematic murder of all Jews and Roma in Poland11. Already, before the Viennese Jews even arrived, the Kielce population had grown from 18,000 to 25,400, swollen by deportations from other parts of Poland. The typhus epidemic of 1940 was one of the results of overcrowding.

A Judenrat (Jewish Council) was set up to represent the Jewish community in dealing with the Nazi authorities. Moshe Pelc led this and had the job of making all Jews wear a Star of David on their outer garments. All Jewish-owned factories, shops and other property were taken from them. Pelc did his best to get provisions supplied but in August 1940 he refused to execute the Germans’ orders and was deported to Auschwitz. Before he left, he asked the industrialist Herman Levy to take over the leadership of the Judenrat12.

A map of the Kielce Ghetto. Image: public domain

Not long afterwards, on March 31st, barbed wire and high fences were put up and guards were posted. A ghetto was established by the SS and there was no way to get out. Non-Jews moved out and Jews were forced to relocate to the ghetto within one week. The ghetto gates closed on April 5th, 1941. One woman, Alice Schleifer described it in a letter:

„We’ve been in a closed ghetto since Saturday. I’ll explain to you in a few words what it’s like: excluded from the outside world, only on limited special roads that are surrounded by wire. No contact with other people. Paula, if you could see us. – It’s a true picture of despair. There is already the 100th case of typhus among us…“13

The deportations continued until August 1942 when there were around 27,000 Jews living in the ghetto, from Vienna, Poznan and Lódz. The winter of 1941 to 1942 was very harsh. 4,000 died from cold, hunger, typhus and other sicknesses caused by overcrowded living conditions14. But now the real horror was to begin.

The ghetto was liquidated in August 1942. The “Final Solution” for Kielce began on August 20th with round-ups. Jews unable to move, sick or elderly were shot on the spot. These numbered around 1,200.

By August 24th, 1942, there were only 2,000 people left in Kielce ghetto: skilled workers, the Judenrat and their families, and the Jewish Police. However, these were also sent to work camps in Stolarskastr. and Jasna St. On May 23rd, 1943, these people were sent to Starachowice, Skarzysko-Kamienna, Pionki or Blizyn.

On the Virtual Shtetl homepage, a particularly disturbing atrocity is described:

“In the local Jewish cemetery, 45 Jewish children between the age of 15 months and 15 years were shot; they were the offspring of doctors, members of the Judenrat, and Jewish policemen, who survived the ghetto and the camp in Jasna and Stolarska Streets.”15

Altogether, between 20,000 and 21,000 Jews were transported from Kielce to Treblinka II, the killing camp, and murdered in gas chambers there16. Under „Aktion Reinhardt“ 250,000 Jews were taken from the Warsaw Ghetto and murdered in Treblinka.

Rudolf Hoess describes how he was not satisfied with the efficiency of the mass extermination programme of Jews at Treblinka:

“The Camp Commandant at Treblinka told me that he had liquidated 80,000 in the course of one­ half year. He was principally concerned with liquidating all the Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto. He used monoxide gas and I did not think that his methods were very efficient. So when I set up the extermination building at Auschwitz, l used Cyclon B, which was a crystallized Prussic Acid which we dropped into the death chamber from a small opening. It took from 3 to 15 minutes to kill the people in the death chamber depending upon climatic conditions. We knew when the people were dead because their screaming stopped. (…) Another improvement we made over Treblinka was that we built our gas chambers to accommodate 2,000 people at one time, whereas at Treblinka their 10 gas chambers only accommodated 200 people each. The way we selected our victims was as follows: we had two SS doctors on duty at Auschwitz to examine the incoming transports of prisoners. The prisoners would be marched by one of the doctors who would make spot decisions as they walked by. Those who were fit for work were sent into the Camp. Others were sent immediately to the extermination plants. Children of tender years were invariably exterminated since by reason of their youth they were unable to work.”17

Those who were fit enough to work were spared the gas chambers at Treblinka for two more years and sent to work in forced labour camps, both men and women were sent to the Hasag Granatwerke (Hugo Schneider AG, arms manufacturer), or to Ludwigshütte metal factory (making bicycles or transportation), women to Henrykow (wood work). A group of Jews at Treblinka managed to organise an uprising by secretly producing arms in the metal workshops. Still, about 200 managed to escape and much of the death camp was destroyed in the fighting. The Germans no longer saw any point in rebuilding it, as the job was more or less finished. By September 1943, the Soviets were making headway into Poland and the slave labour camps were being abandoned. But this was not the end of the trail for those who had escaped being exterminated at Treblinka. These people were sent to Auschwitz or Buchenwald and murdered there18.

By the time Treblinka was dismantled in the Autumn of 1943, in just over one year, between 870,000 and 925,000 Jews19 had been murdered there, as well as other Poles, Roma and Soviet prisoners of war. It is highly likely, that Adelheid and Jenö were among those killed. Their names are not in the memorial book of Treblinka which only numbers about 131,000, but the project is ongoing20. Adelheid and Jenö are, however, listed as being on Transport 2 to Kielce on February 19th, 1941. After that, we don’t know how they died, we only know they did die.

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Afterword

Whether Lisbeth was able to get any information about what had happened to her parents is not known. But the writer of the article in the Maidenhead Advertiser on October 21, 1960, who was the only journalist who bothered to do the work of finding out about Lisbeth’s life, knew that her parents had been murdered by the Nazis. So either Lisbeth also knew and told someone else in her circle of friends, or the journalist was an excellent researcher. The only point he or she wrote about Lisbeth’s parents that I have not yet been able to verify is the claim that Adelheid was a concert pianist.

Sources

  1. Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichen Widerstands, doew.at: Frank Adelheid, born 3 Sep 1886 in Prague, living at Alser Straße 40, Wien 9. Deported 19 Feb 1941 from Vienna to Kielce, did not survive. More information:
    ”Am 19. Februar 1941 verließ ein Deportationstransport mit 1.004 jüdischen Männern, Frauen und Kindern den Wiener Aspangbahnhof mit dem Ziel Kielce, einer Stadt nördlich von Krakau. Kielce hatte einen beträchtlichen jüdischen Bevölkerungsanteil, der sich seit Kriegsbeginn durch Zwangsumsiedler aus anderen Teilen Polens weiter erhöht hatte. Die deportierten Wiener Juden wurden anfänglich bei jüdischen Familien privat einquartiert. Am 31. März 1941 wurde in Kielce das Ghetto errichtet. Es war mit Stacheldraht umzäunt und durfte bei Androhung der Todesstrafe nicht verlassen werden. Ende 1941 lebten ca. 27.000 Juden im Ghetto. Die arbeitsfähigen Männer wurden in Steinbrüchen zur Zwangsarbeit eingesetzt. Im Ghetto selbst konnten Schuster, Schneider und andere Handwerker ihrem Gewerbe nachgehen.
    Ca. 6.000 Personen starben im Zeitraum vom April 1941 bis April 1942 im Ghetto an Typhus; viele wurden erschossen, erhängt oder verhungerten.
    Innerhalb weniger Tage (20.–24. August 1942) wurde das Ghetto liquidiert, und ca. 21.000 Juden wurden in das Vernichtungslager Treblinka deportiert und dort ermordet. Die 2.000 im Ghetto Verbliebenen kamen in die nahe gelegenen Arbeitslager Pionki, Blizyn und Skarzysko Kamienna. Die letzte Deportation aus Kielce im August 1944 führte die wenigen jüdischen Häftlinge nach Auschwitz und Buchenwald.
    Von den 1.004 deportierten Wiener Juden überlebten 18.” ↩︎
  2. Arolsen Archives: 1.2.1.1 Transport 2: Deportation von Wien nach Kielce, 19.02.1941: 636. FRANK Eugen Israel 28.2.1883. Accessed on 31 Dec 2025 https://collections.arolsen-archives.org/de/document/130500875 ↩︎
  3. Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichen Widerstands, doew.at: Frank Eugen, born 28 Feb 1883 in Hidveg Ardo, living at Alser Straße 40, Wien 9. Deported 19 Feb 1941 from Vienna to Kielce, did not survive. ↩︎
  4. Index of the Jewish Records of Vienna and Lower Austria: Marriage record 113799, Frank Jenö, Popper, Adelheid, Tempelgasse, 1914. ↩︎
  5. Wien Geschichte Wiki: Leopoldstädter Tempel, last updated 3 Dec 2025 accessed on 31 Dec 2025 https://www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at/Leopoldst%C3%A4dter_Tempel ↩︎
  6. Maidenhead Advertiser, 21 Oct 1960: “Woman found dead was strangled, inquest told”.
    She was born in Austria, taken out of the country just before Hitler took over, and came to England when she was 16 to train as a nurse. Her mother (…) and her father were killed by the Germans. ↩︎
  7. Steine der Erinnerung: Stationen der Erinnerung im Alsergrund, 2025. Accessed 31 Dec 2025 https://steinedererinnerung.net/projekte-2/9-bezirk/ ↩︎
  8. Raggam-Blesch M: Beginn der Deportationen vor 80 Jahren, science.orf.at, 15 Feb 2021, accessed 31 Dec 2025 https://science.orf.at/stories/3204659/ ↩︎
  9. Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften (ÖAW): Der Aspangbahnhof als Deportationsort. Last updated 31 Oct 2017, accessed on 31 Dec 2025 https://www.oeaw.ac.at/ikw/forschung/abgeschlossene-projekte/abgeschlossene-projekte-orte-des-gedaechtnisses-erinnerungsraeume/der-aspangbahnhof-als-deportationsort ↩︎
  10. Yad Vashem: Transport 2 from Wien, Vienna, Austria to Kielce, Poland on 19/02/1941. Historical background. No date given, accessed on 31 Dec 2025 https://collections.yadvashem.org/en/deportations/6991603 ↩︎
  11. deathcamps.org: Aktion Reinhard Timeline 1941, last updated 27 May 2006: 31 March: The Kielce Ghetto was established. 2006. Accessed 31 Dec 2025 http://www.deathcamps.org/reinhard/timeline/timelinetab1941.html ↩︎
  12. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM): A dedication, written and signed by the members of the Kielce ghetto Judenrat (Jewish Council), to their chairman, Hermann Levy. 1 Jan 1942, accessed on 31 Dec 2025 https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa30945 ↩︎
  13. Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichen Widerstands, doew.at: Eduard Schleifer, Anna Schleifer, Alice Schleifer: “Bild der Verzweiflung”, 6 Apr 1941. Accessed on 31 Dec 2025 https://www.doew.at/erinnern/fotos-und-dokumente/1938-1945/nachrichten-aus-dem-ghetto/kielce/eduard-schleifer-anna-schleifer-alice-schleifer-bild-der-verzweiflung ↩︎
  14. POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Virtual Shtetl: Memorial dedicated to Poles executed by Nazis for helping Jews. No date given. Accessed on 31 Dec 2025 https://sztetl.org.pl/en/towns/k/399-kielce/116-sites-of-martyrdom/46795-memorial-dedicated-poles-executed-nazis-helping-jews ↩︎
  15. POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Virtual Shtetl: Kielce, History. https://sztetl.org.pl/en/towns/k/399-kielce/99-history/137460-history-of-community ↩︎
  16. Ibid. ↩︎
  17. Hoess R, Commandant of Auschwitz, Affidavit, 5 April 1946, in Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Tribunal, Nuremberg, 14 November 1945­; 1 October 1946 (Nuremberg: Secretariat of the International Military Tribunal, 1949), Doc. 3868­PS, vol. 33, 275­79. Internet Modern History Sourcebook. Fordham University, New York. Accessed on 31 Dec 2025 https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1946hoess.asp ↩︎
  18. Arad Y: Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, 1987, Bloomington. Available on the Internet Archive, accessed on 31 Dec 2025 https://archive.org/details/belzecsobibortre00arad ↩︎
  19. Estimate from United States Holocaust Museum (1); Yad Vashem (2) and Simon Wiesenthal Center estimate around 870,000.
    (1) United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Holocaust Encyclopedia (10 June 2013). “Treblinka: Chronology”. Available on Internet Archive, accessed on 31 Dec 2025 https://web.archive.org/web/20120605123023/http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007257
    (2) Yad Vashem: Treblinka in This Month in Holocaust History, 2014. Available on Internet Archive, accessed on 31 Dec 2025 https://web.archive.org/web/20141008222515/http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/this_month/resources/treblinka.asp
    (3) Grossman V, Beevor A, Vinogradova L (eds.): A Writer At War. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-0-307-42458-7 ↩︎
  20. Memory of Treblinka: Book of Names, Treblinka Victims Database, accessed on 31 Dec 2025 https://memoryoftreblinka.org/the-names-of-the-victims/ ↩︎