For some time, we had been searching for Salomon Beer. We knew when and where he was born, but after he left his hometown, his trail went cold. We eventually found his grave in Vienna's Zentralfriedhof.
The Beer family we followed came from Czernowitz, today Chernivtsi in Ukraine, but in the late 19th century a thriving Jewish center in the Bukovina province of Austria-Hungary. After going through all the Czernowitz Jewish birth registers, we found three brothers, and no other siblings. Chaim died as an infant. Leib, born in 1870, later settled in Vienna, from where he was deported and murdered in the Holocaust.
Salomon was the third brother. Born in Czernowitz in 1867, he graduated from the Imperial Gymnasium in his hometown in 1889 and set out for Vienna to study medicine. He never got the chance to become a doctor. Shortly after arriving, he died of myelitis at just 22, in the old General Hospital at Alserstraße 4, the very kind of place where he had hoped to train.
On a late autumn day, after all that searching, we stood at his grave.
May his memory be a blessing.
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