Dou­glas Smith’s The City With­out Jews: Life and Death in Nazi Vien­na is, in many ways, two books at once. On one lev­el, it is an expan­sive his­to­ry of Vien­na between the Anschluss and the end of World War II, draw­ing on an extra­or­di­nary breadth of archival mate­r­i­al to chron­i­cle the sys­tem­at­ic destruc­tion of one of Europe’s most vibrant Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ties. On anoth­er lev­el, it is the very per­son­al sto­ry of one woman whose let­ters and diaries reveal what it was like to be Jew in Vien­na dur­ing that time period.

That woman is Mignon Lang­nas, a Jew­ish nurse whose sto­ry seems almost impos­si­ble: she lived open­ly dur­ing the Nazi occu­pa­tion. While her hus­band, Leon, and their chil­dren escaped ear­ly in the Nazi occu­pa­tion, Mignon stayed behind to care for her aging par­ents, con­vinced that they, too, might even­tu­al­ly be allowed to emi­grate. Leon, who, inter­est­ing­ly, was aboard the infa­mous M.S. St. Louis—the ship full of Jew­ish refugees who were denied entry into Cuba and Amer­i­ca — before mak­ing it to Eng­land. Both par­ents were sep­a­rat­ed from their chil­dren, who were sent to America.

Left behind, Mignon con­tin­ued liv­ing and work­ing in Vien­na through­out the entire sev­en-year Nazi occu­pa­tion, first in a nurs­ing home and lat­er at a Jew­ish children’s hos­pi­tal. Even after Vien­na was declared Juden­rein in 1942, Mignon remained — nav­i­gat­ing a city where every Jew­ish life hung in the bal­ance. Smith traces her increas­ing­ly des­per­ate yet futile attempts to secure visas for her­self and her par­ents while chron­i­cling the dai­ly real­i­ty of watch­ing neigh­bors dis­ap­pear, insti­tu­tions col­lapse, and hope erode.

The let­ters Mignon left behind reveal a woman whose resilience wavered. She cycled through crush­ing despair, exhaus­tion, and moments of remark­able ten­der­ness toward the chil­dren under her care. As ear­ly as 1942, she wrote of feel­ing ​“despon­dent.” She told a friend ​“I have been so worn down by hop­ing that it has become tor­ture. I no longer want to live on eter­nal ​‘mir­a­cles’ + ​‘mer­cies’! I want peace at last … I want to have my chil­dren again + a home + a feel­ing of secu­ri­ty … Will I expe­ri­ence it?” Lit­tle did she know then that she would have three more years to endure before peace would be pos­si­ble. As the war dragged on, sur­vival seemed increas­ing­ly unlike­ly: both the children’s hos­pi­tal where she worked and her apart­ment suf­fered direct hits dur­ing Allied bomb­ing raids as the Nazis ramped up depor­ta­tions of the city’s remain­ing Jews.

Smith’s recon­struc­tion of Nazi Vien­na is sweep­ing in scope and rich in detail, sit­u­at­ing Mignon’s expe­ri­ence with­in the wider sto­ry of a com­mu­ni­ty under siege. As a result, read­ers encounter her life in con­ver­sa­tion with the many polit­i­cal, social, and his­tor­i­cal forces that shaped it. Through Mignon, Smith offers a win­dow into a unique existence.