‘You can’t understand this time if you didn’t live through it,’ said an Austrian boy who survived the Holocaust. In his new history of Vienna’s Jewish population, Douglas Smith paints a picture that is both scholarly and vivid. Told through the life of a young woman, Mignon Langnas, who kept a diary from the beginning until the end of the Second World War and left some 2,500 pages of letters, photographs and papers, it is a fascinating and terrible story.

Vienna, home to some 200,000 Jews, many of them artists, writers, philosophers and scientists, enjoyed, as Stefan Zweig put it, a ‘golden age of security’ under Emperor Franz Joseph (r 1848–1916). However, the end of the First World War saw Austria become part of the new Republic of German-Austria, rife with warring political factions. The Depression demanded scapegoats. The Viennese found them in the largest community of Jews in Europe after Warsaw.

With the Anschluss in 1938 came Himmler and Heydrich to coordinate the arrest of ‘enemies of the state’, many of them Jews. Göring promised the ‘de-Jewing’ of Vienna within four years. What followed was plunder, public humiliation and ‘wild Aryanisation’: Jewish businesses were confiscated, banks robbed and art collections looted.