Eva Williams: Family papers

Emanuel Kolm (born Kohn) was born in 1880 in Vienna to Jacob Kohn and Lina née Schwarz . He was instrumental in saving many Jews from deportation through his work as an organiser of re-training courses for the Viennese Jewish community in the early 1940s. Both he and his wife Sophie were deported to Terezin but survived and returned to Vienna after the war. They had one daughter, Eva, born Vienna, 1924.

Richard Kohn, Eva's first cousin,  was born in Vienna in 1920, to Alfred Kohn and Franziska Augusta, and later lived with his family in Döbling. His parents, sister and brother were all deported to Latvia and murdered by the Nazis. His father was a locksmith, who having become disenchanted with the Social Democrats, became a Communist. The family was very poor and Richard went to work in a Haschara camp so there would be one less mouth to feed. Under the Nazis Richard  was sent with many others to Nisko in Poland as a slave labourer to build a concentration camp. He managed to escape to Russia shortly after the outbreak of war. He stayed initially on a farm in the vicinity of Lemberg, then after a long and tortuous journey ended up in Kazakhstan, where he met his wife, Bronislava née Tischler, an Usbeki from Tashkent, who like many women of the region worked in the coal mines. Richard had his leg amputated after a terrrible work accident. He remained in Kasakhstan, working as a theatre adminstrator where he and his wife had two daughters. In 1993 the family emigrated to Israel, then with his wife to Vienna.