Jonny Moser was the leading Austrian scholar of the Holocaust until his death in 2011. Forced out of Austria, his family survived in Budapest through Moser's work as Raoul Wallenberg's “Laufbursche.” His 1966 book, Die Judenverfolgung in Österreich 1938–1945, was the first serious work on the Holocaust produced in Austria, a nation that had officially denied any responsibility for the mass murder of Jews by portraying itself as the Nazis' first victim. Moser then produced pathbreaking research on the demography and persecution of Austrian Jews, including some of the earliest work on Nisko. Moser delivered his manuscript on Nisko to Edition Steinbauer shortly before his death, and his two sons have completed the publication process.

Moser's book is remarkable for its detailed description of the first deportation of Jews from Nazi Germany in October 1939, from the initial planning by Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann, through the chaotic implementation, to the abrupt cancellation of further deportations while the Nazi hierarchy reconsidered how to deal with the millions of Polish Jews whose lives they now controlled. Because of his status as a scholarly pioneer in the study of the Holocaust, Moser was able to acquire unique and detailed records about Nisko, which are analyzed here in full for the first time.

The deportation of several thousand Jewish men from Vienna and Czechoslovakia to Nisko in Poland represents a brief stage in the convoluted process by which the Nazis shifted from a policy of forced emigration to mass deportation eastward and to genocide. Copying a plan developed by the Polish government of sending its “surplus” Jews to the French island of Madagascar, the Nazi government promoted a similar Madagascar plan beginning in 1938. In late September 1939, just as the Germans had defeated Poland, Hitler talked about “an asylum” or a “Judenreservat” in Poland, and his experts on Jewish policy in the SS quickly drew up plans for an experiment in deportation. Jews from Vienna and from the Czech city of Ostrava (Mährisch-Ostrau in German) would be sent to an area in newly conquered Poland that was presumably depopulated by the German invasion. The “Reichssicherheitshauptamt—Sonderreferat—Mährisch-Ostrau” was hastily created by Eichmann from his staff in Vienna.

Although Eichmann and his staff planned the deportation down to the smallest details, the destination remained uncertain. Just days before the first train left, Eichmann announced the destination: Nisko.

The documents that Moser collected and maintained in his private archive include both the records of the Zentralstelle in Mährisch-Ostrau and the papers of two deported Jews, Ernst Kohn, the leader of the transport from Vienna, and the artist Leo Haas, ten of whose drawings of the situation in Nisko are reproduced here. While these drawings allow the reader to visualize the difficulties facing the deported Jews in Poland, the two poorly reproduced maps offer little help in following the deportees in their flight toward the border of Soviet-occupied Poland.

Unlike later, better organized deportations, there was no preparation for the arrival of the trainloads of Austrian and Czech Jews. The stronger, younger men were ordered to begin building barracks the day they arrived, while the majority were simply chased into the woods by the SS. Repeatedly refused accommodation by Polish authorities and robbed by peasants and soldiers, hundreds straggled toward the Soviet border, hoping for safety there.

This first deportation of Jews has already been fitted by scholars into the timeline of the Nazi leadership's torturous decision-making process in late 1939. That timeline has been constructed across decades of scholarly research and argument, based especially on Nazi documents.

A closer and more personal perspective on the developing Holocaust must come from Jewish records, written, oral, and drawn, as Moser does here. Moser's thick description of what happened to Jews who were deported to Nisko offers in detail, for example, precisely how the SS and many Poles progressively used threats and promises to rob desperate Jews of all their money and belongings, how deported foreign and local Polish Jews interacted in a crisis, how the landscape of the General Gouvernement in late fall and early winter was one more obstacle to survival.

Between the decision makers in Berlin and their victims across Europe stood the SS functionaries vor Ort, such as Theodore Dannecker, who oversaw the deportation of French Jews to Auschwitz; Dr. Franz Walter Stahlecker, who less than two years later commanded Einsatzguppe A in its genocidal march toward Leningrad; and of course, their boss, Adolf Eichmann. They learned their trade sending Jews to Nisko. Eichmann's experiment in deportation taught him how to force the deportees themselves to finance the entire operation, how to rob them progressively of their belongings, and how to force Jews to take responsibility for oversight themselves.

Moser mentions Eichmann more than any other person, repeatedly offering evidence from people who talked with him and carried out his orders. We see and hear Eichmann carrying out a deportation plan that he created, well after his superiors in Berlin had cancelled it; moving freely around Nisko on horseback and in motorized vehicles; operating spontaneously as the trainloads of Jews arrived; and hiding his work from local military and civilian authorities who did not want more Jews in their territories.

Moser's detailed documents also allow him to demonstrate the courage and determination of a few leaders among the deportees, who oversaw the construction of tiny hospitals, searched for places to stay, and organized transport toward the Soviet border. This book permits us to add a few more names to the pantheon of Jews who saved other Jews. Ernst Kohn, Dr. Josef Löwenherz, Dr. Benjamin Murmelstein, and Professor Emil Eisler used positions of responsibility they had not sought to help the deportees survive and even escape.

According to the Dokumentationsarchiv des Österreichischen Widerstands, which Jonny Moser helped to found in 1963 and with which he worked closely his entire scholarly life, the private archive that Moser assembled has not at this writing been placed in a public depository. Unless that happens, this book will be the only word on what happened at Nisko.