Selma Steinmetz (1 September 1907 - 16 June 1979) was an Austrian educator and author who emigrated to France after the cancellation of democracy in Austria.
At the end of 1945 she was able to return to Vienna (where she had spent her student years) and was one of the first researchers to study the histories of victims of National Socialism.
[3] Both Steinsmetz's parents were active in the Social Democratic Party[1] which during the early 1930s was increasingly constrained and then, in 1934, banned by the government.
As part of her university-level education she produced a 246-page dissertation in 1931 on the nineteenth century writer-polymath Bettina von Arnim.
[3][5] The short-lived February uprising in 1934 failed in its immediate objective of restoring democratic government and it seems to have coincided with an intensification of the antisemitism that had been bubbling away on the streets of Vienna for several decades.
[5] On account both of her Jewish ethnicity and her left-wing politics, she was unable to find teaching work in Chancellor Schuschnigg's Austria, and in 1937 she emigrated to Paris.
Selma's younger sisters had both left Vienna by this time, but her father was still living with his new wife at the apartment in Gaußplatz where the family had grown up.
The armistice concluded on 22 June 1940 imposed military occupation on the northern half and a western coastal strip of the country, while creating in the southern half of France a so-called "free zone", administered from Vichy by a puppet government under a widely respected octogenarian French war hero.
She was helped by the remarkable Archbishop of Toulouse to disappear into a convent operated by the Sisters of Maria Reparatricis, a religious order which in more normal times concentrated on organising missionary work in Africa and further afield.
She remained hidden in the convent till she was able to obtain false identity documents through the party, after which, like many other of the comrades in Toulouse, she made her way to Lyon where she was subsequently joined by Oskar Grossmann.
[2] Production of a newspaper entitled "Soldat am Mittelmeer" ("Soldier on the Mediterranean") was a core activity on which Steinmetz and Grossmann worked together.
A few weeks later, in June 1944, she and other members of the Austrian left-wing resistance group were again arrested by the Gestapo and taken in for interrogation, which involved a five day intensive torture session.
Because they were living illegally in France the activists were obliged to adhere rigidly to a cellular organisation structure, as a result of which Steinmetz would have been unable to provide Tucek with the real names and addresses of her resistance comrades even if she had wished to, however.
Each time she was able to surface the shower was directed on her face she that she found it very hard to breath and was frequently on the verge of suffocating.
From Fresnes she was moved, on 7 August 1944, to the nearby Drancy internment camp which was a collection point for the Auschwitz deportations.
Selma Steinmetz remained in Paris till 1945: much of her time was dedicated to caring for concentration camp survivors.
In 1950 a one day absence from work was interpreted as participation in the October strike which had been organised by the Communist Party and enjoyed at least half-hearted support from the Soviet military occupation authorities.
This was the political context when Selma Steinmetz was dismissed by the Vienna libraries service with effect from 1 January 1951.
[2] Of particular note was her widely respected monograph on Austria's Roma under National Socialism ("Österreichs Zigeuner im NS-Staat"), a pioneering piece of work on a topic previously overlooked by scholars and commentators.
[2][8] Other topics on which she published research included the continuing difficulties and discrimination encountered by women at Austrian universities, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach and the Slavic peoples, and about Jura Soyfer.
[2] Selma Steinmetz was a recipient of the Decoration for Services to the Liberation of Austria ("Ehrenzeichen für Verdienste um die Befreiung Österreichs").
[6] On 20 April 2007 a group made up of artists and local residents organised a street festival in the Stuwer Quarter ("Stuwerviertel") which is the part of Vienna-Leopoldstadt in which Steinmetz lived for much of her life.
The proposed change was particularly appropriate because, according to some of those advocating it, Johann Ignaz Arnezhofer (1640-1679) was an antisemitic hate-preacher whom many people felt shared in the responsibility for the expulsion of Jews from Leopoldstadt in the seventeenth century.