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The City Without Jews

Life and Death in Nazi Vienna
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The City Without Jews

By: Douglas Smith
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About this listen

‘A truly major work, both deeply moving and incredibly powerful. It is a masterpiece of research, structure and writing . . . unforgettable’ Sir Antony Beevor, bestselling author of Stalingrad

In 1938, Vienna was the second largest Jewish city in Europe, home to nearly 200,000 Jewish people.

By 1946, only a few thousand had survived.

In this heart-wrenching story of loss, fear, courage and hope, acclaimed historian Douglas Smith chronicles the Nazi destruction of Jewish Vienna. Drawing on hundreds of long-forgotten voices, from Jews to Nazis to Gentile collaborators and bystanders, The City Without Jews centres on one remarkable person: Mignon Langnas.

Watching as nearly every Jew she knew was expropriated, forced to migrate, or deported to the killing fields and death camps in the East, Mignon vividly recorded her world in diaries and letters, creating an indispensably detailed and poignant account of life under Nazi rule. What emerges from the wreckage of a city bent on Jewish eradication is a story like no other – one of betrayal, sacrifice, impossible choices and survivor guilt.

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Critic Reviews

This is a truly major work, both deeply moving and incredibly powerful. It is a masterpiece of research, structure and writing. Never before has anyone so brilliantly integrated the history of the Nazi onslaught on the Jews of Vienna – a more vicious explosion even than in Germany – with the intimate experience of their victims. It is an unforgettable story of greed, betrayal and hypocrisy, self-sacrifice, impossible moral choices and survivor guilt (Antony Beevor, author of Stalingrad)
Shocking and profoundly moving, this meticulously researched history of the Nazi destruction of Jewish Vienna is a fierce and important work (Clare Mulley, Women’s Prize shortlisted author of Agent Zo)
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