Memorial stones honour the Beer family outside Vienna villa

Two memorial stones commemorating the Jewish Beer family have been unveiled outside Villa Beer in Hietzing, Vienna, 88 years after the November pogroms, when the Nazis set fire to synagogues and murdered Jewish people in the city. ORF reported the unveiling on Monday.

The villa, considered an architectural landmark of Vienna’s interwar period, was built in 1929 and 1930 for Margarethe and Julius Beer. The family’s exact plans for the house are unknown, but Lothar Trierenberg, managing director of the Villa Beer Foundation, said its open rooms suggest it was intended in large part for social events, soirées and house concerts.

The couple had three children. Their eldest daughter, Helene, was married and never lived in the villa. Elisabeth, known as Liesl, and Hans moved in with their parents, but the family stayed for only about a year and a half. Julius lost his job and could no longer make payments on the loan used to build the house. The family moved out in 1932 and had to rent the villa, though they retained the right to live there until 1938 and returned at times. That year, the insurance company that had provided the loan seized the property.

After the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938, the family was forced to flee. Hans first went to Scotland to stay with his sister, then escaped to the United States. Margarethe and Julius also obtained US visas but delayed their departure while trying to secure one for Elisabeth. She had a slight mobility impairment after contracting polio as a child, and the United States issued visas selectively, Trierenberg said. Her parents emigrated to New York in 1940. Elisabeth was murdered in the Maly Trostinez extermination camp in 1942, aged 29.

The villa’s architects, Josef Frank and Oskar Wlach, were also Jewish and had to flee. The memorial stones were installed by the Steine des Gedenkens association, which has arranged about 200 such stones, including around 80 across Vienna outside the third district. In Hietzing, there are fewer than 10, said association member Doris Schneider-Wagenbichler.

The association says the stones make victims and their fates visible as those of former neighbours, and highlight the consequences of exclusion and stigmatisation. It also seeks volunteers to care for the stones by leaving candles or flowers on commemorative dates and reporting when a stone is dirty.