27/01/2026
International Holocaust Remembrance Day: This is Ettie (Esther) Steinberg on her wedding day, an Irish Jew who grew up on South Circular Road and went to school near Donore Avenue in Dublin. Ettie fell in love and married Vogtjeck Gluck in Greenville Hall Synagogue in 1937. She gave birth to their son Leon in Paris, but despite their best efforts found they could not escape what was to come.
They were arrested by the Gestapo and put on the dreaded cattle carts and sent to their deaths in Auschwitz. On the train, Ettie, who knew what was coming, managed to scribble a postcard to her family and throw it out of the train window - their papers to get to Northern Ireland from Paris arrived to their empty apartment the next day in the post.
Ettie, Vogtjeck and Leon were gassed in Auschwitz on September 4th 1942. We remember them today, along with Isaac Shishi, Ephraim Saks and Lena Saks, other Irish Jews whose lives were cruelly taken in the Shoah. The Shoah must not be minimised, nor inverted. In terms of scale it remains the worst genocide in modern human history and was a killing programme with a singular goal, the eradication of Jews, on an industrial scale. It is still within living memory. We remember also the Roma and Sinti, and the many minorities who were mercilessly hunted by the N**i regime. Dear Ettie, we will never forget your name.
