After the War
Return home
In 1947/48 the families Allina, Kohn and Morgenstern returned to St. Pölten. They had not managed to settle in Palestine, neither professionally nor climate-wise; after some applications and contacts with official channels they were returned their former property as far as it was still extant and set up a new existence. All of them had lost close family members.
Family Morgenstern
"I felt like the last one, and then I felt a certain responsibility, I have to document it all." (Hans Morgenstern)
Hans Morgenstern was the last child entered into the birth matricles of the Religious Community. His father, the lawyer Dr. Egon Morgenstern, only found employment in Palestine two years later, badly paid, at a library. In 1947, the family took an UNRRA ship through the Suez Canal to Venice to move back to their old home country.
After their return, Egon Morgenstern immediately took up his activities as a lawyer and represented some Jews from St. Pölten in restitution proceedings. The family moved into a hotel as their flat had been destroyed by air raids. Egon Morgenstern only received a financial settlement for his parental home in 1956. As German property, it had been confiscated by the Soviet Army and was only released after the Austrian State Treaty.
His son Hans and Hans‘ cousins Hans, Heinz, Herbert and Renée Kohn were the only Jewish children in St. Pölten. Hans Morgenstern became increasingly aware of his being "different". He studied medicine in Vienna and settled as dermatologist in St. Pölten. As the "last one", he felt obliged to somehow keep records of the destroyed Jewish community; in 1985 he initiated a collection of photographs as a memory book for the murdered Jews in St. Pölten.
Family Kohn
"Where have you taken me?" (Hans Kohn 1948)
The brothers Max, Siegfried and Jakob Kohn returned to Austria with their families in March 1948. They had established themselves in Palestine with much dedication but had not been able to – in the most literal sense of the word – acclimatise. The son of Max and Valerie, Hans, who had been three years old at their flight, had however settled in the new environment very easily and remembers how sad and depressed he was at their arrival in cold, destroyed Vienna. "Where have you taken me?" he reproachfully asked his parents
Until their relative Dr. Egon Morgenstern pushed through the process proceedings on the restitution of their house in St. Pölten, the family lived in a hotel in Vienna. The shoe store on Linzer Straße was returned to the brothers. Between 1939 and 1944 the "ariseur" had made a profit of 200.000 RM per year. As he was meanwhile impoverished, the family Kohn waived the right to claim loss of earnings and only received a financial settlement of 10.000 Schilling. In February 1958, ten years after their initial request, the saving book that had been blocked by the Gestapo in 1938, was released to them.
The children of the brothers Kohn left St. Pölten and moved to Vienna or abroad. Hans Kohn felt comfortable in St. Pölten, he did, however, miss the "Jewish surroundings". He was the last of a big family to take over the shoe store on Linzer Straße that had been founded by his grandfather Julius in 1883. Meanwhile, he is retired and has liquidated the business.
Family Allina
Former concentration camp prisoners could apply for victim welfare. A co-prisoner had to confirm the application as a witness; Artur Allina found Max Haber who had returned to Vienna. The concentration camp imprisonment, which resulted in lifelong physical and mental impairment, was satisfied with an equivalent of 431,20 Austrian Schilling (ATS) for each month. Artur Allina received ATS 5174,40 as compensation for the one year of imprisonment in Dachau and Buchenwald. His brothers Max and Richard had perished.
Artur Allina successfully managed to set up a (second) business in his old hometown. His son Michael was the first Jewish child born in St. Pölten after the war. While Michael’s parents are buried in the Jewish cemetery, he himself moved to Switzerland with his family.