Ilse Aichinger (1 November 1921 – 11 November 2016) was an Austrian writer known for her accounts of her persecution by the Nazis because of her Jewish ancestry. She wrote poems, short stories and radio plays, and won multiple European literary prizes. Early life Aichinger was born in 1921 in Vienna, along with her twin sister, , to Berta, a doctor of Jewish ethnicity, and Ludwig, a teacher. As her mother's family was assimilated, the children were raised Catholic. Aichinger spent her childhood in Linz and, after her parents divorced, she moved to Vienna with her mother and sister, attending a Catholic secondary school. After the Anschluss in 1938, her family was subjected to Nazi persecution. As a "half-Jew" she was not allowed to continue her studies and became a slave labourer in a button factory. Her sister Helga escaped from Nazism in July 1939 through a Kindertransport to England where she eventually gave birth to a daughter, who became English artist Ruth Rix. During World War II, Aichinger was able to hide her mother in her assigned room, in front of the Hotel Metropol, the Viennese Gestapo headquarters. But many relatives from her mother's side, among them her grandmother Gisela, of whom she was particularly fond, were sent to the Maly Trostenets extermination camp near Minsk, and murdered. Career In 1945, Aichinger began to study medicine at the University of Vienna, while writing in her spare time. In her first publication, (The Fourth Gate), she wrote about her experience under Nazism. In 1947 she and her mother Berta were able to travel to London and visit Aichinger's twin Helga and her daughter Ruth. The visit was the inspiration for a short story, "Dover". She gave up her studies in 1948 in order to finish her novel, ("The greater hope", translated as Herod's Children). The book went on to become one of the top German-language novels of the twentieth century. It is a surrealist account of a child's persecution by the Nazis in Vienna. In 1949, Aichinger wrote the short story "Spiegelgeschichte" (). It was published in four parts in an Austrian newspaper, and is well known in Austria because it is part of the set of books taught in schools. The story is written backwards, beginning with the end of the biography of the unnamed woman, and ending with her early childhood. In 1949, Aichinger became a reader for