Liselotte Margarete Felicitas Selinko was born into a Jewish family in Vienna on February 22, 1917. Her ancestors (with the exception of one grandfather who was born in Hungary) all come from Vienna. Her family owned a business in the textile industry and was well-off until World War I. Her older sister, the 1914 born Annemarie Selinko, became a very successful writer. Her father Felix Selinko left the IKG (Israelitische Kultusgemeinde) in 1916, but she herself was still registered there in 1917 when she was born; her mother left the IKG in 1918.
On March 13, 1938, her native land Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany and anyone who assessed the danger correctly fled the country as quickly as possible. Her sister, who had acquired Danish nationality through her husband, was able to flee to Copenhagen without any problems and she also managed to bring their mother Grete Selinko-Wolf to Denmark. The husband of her sister Annemarie had come to Vienna together with his brother after the “Anschluss”. The brother offered Liselotte to marry her pro forma so that she could flee safely from Vienna to Denmark. Liselotte did not accept the offer, after all she was already engaged to Kurt Roeders, who she then married. Kurt Roeders (born in Vienna 1906), who also came from a Viennese family, was also of Jewish descent (left the IKG on April 14, 1938, thus one month after the so-called “Anschluss”) and worked in the textile industry and was perhaps a far relative: his original family name was Rosenbaum, which was also the maiden name of Liselotte's great-grandmother. The couple had fled in 1938 to Holland which was considered as safe.
All of Liselotte's male ancestors had already died naturally before 1938 (father Felix Selinko 1878 Vienna-1934 Vienna, grandfather Ignaz Selinko 1846 Hungary - 1935 Vienna; grandfather Ignaz Wolf 1856 Vienna - 1913 Vienna). However, the grandmothers were still alive and both became victims of the shoah: Irene Selinko (1862-1943) and Ida Wolf (1862-1943) died in Theresienstadt at the age of 80. (An aunt, Marguerite Kary-Selenko survived Theresienstadt and returned to Vienna where she died 1979 at the age of 92.)
Liselotte's mother Grete Selinko-Wolf probably soon knew that her sister (Clara Anninger Wolf 1886-1938) had committed suicide six months after the “Anschluss”. But she learned only after the war that her daughter Liselotte and her granddaughter had been murdered by the Nazis. Perhaps also only then she heard that her brother (Karl Wolf 1888-1944) had been murdered in Auschwitz. She committed suicide in Denmark in June 1946. It can be assumed that she is also an (indirect) victim of the Shoah.
Author Georg Deutsch