Her Name Was Barbara Pelinka

She found him. He had never known her.

In December 1946, a woman named Barbara Pelinka wrote a letter to my grandfather Karl. He had never mentioned her. Neither had my grandmother. There was a reason for that. They had never known her.

Karl had escaped Vienna in 1939. His parents, Sigmund and Regine, were deported and killed in 1942. Barbara had become their neighbor after Karl was gone.

“You will be surprised to receive a letter from a woman you do not know,” she began. “First I must introduce myself: I was the neighbor of your dear parents at Glockengasse 25.”

She had found my grandfather’s address through the Jewish Community office, where his inquiry about his parents had come into her hands. She wanted him to know what she had learned. She had asked a relative to make inquiries at the police station on her behalf, and had gone herself to the Jewish Community, where she learned that his aunt, Emilie, had not returned from Theresienstadt.

And then, in the middle of all that news, she wrote one more sentence.

“As long as your dear parents were my neighbors, they did not go hungry. I provided for them well, right up to the last moment.”

I have read that sentence more times than I can count. It does not announce itself as brave. It does not ask for anything in return. It sits between an account of a police inquiry and a request that Karl please write back, almost as ordinary as a weather report.

She fed them.

That is all she says. She fed them until there was no longer anyone left to feed.

I want to stay inside that sentence for a moment before doing anything else with it, because I think the instinct to move past it quickly, to file it under there were good people too, misses something important.

Here is the part of the letter that changed how I read everything else in it.

Barbara Pelinka was not writing from comfort. She was not a woman of means describing an act of charity from a distance. In a postscript on a separate slip of paper, she wrote:

“The house at Glockengasse 25 no longer stands. We were burned out, standing there with no furniture, no clothes, no linens. Everything is gone.”

And earlier, plainly, without asking for sympathy:

“I cannot bear it any longer now, because I myself am doing very badly at present.”

She had lost her home. She had lost everything in it. She was, by her own account, barely holding on. And she still wanted my grandfather to know that when his parents had needed food, she had fed them.

“But at that time,” she wrote, “I still had something I could give.”

I do not know what it cost Barbara Pelinka to help my great-grandparents. The letter does not tell me. I do not know whether she agonized over the risk or simply saw hungry neighbors and did what she believed a neighbor should do. I do not know what she thought about Jews, politics, Hitler, the war, or much of anything else.

That matters, because it would be very easy for me to fill in the blanks and turn Barbara into exactly the person I want her to be. A rescuer. A hero. A good Austrian in a country of bad ones.

But I don’t know enough to do that.

What I know is what she did.

And I keep thinking about that distinction now.

We are living through a period when many of us seem to know what we think about someone before we know very much about them at all.

Republican. Democrat. Liberal. Conservative.

We sort. We label. We choose the box.

And increasingly, even identities that should not tell us what a person believes become shorthand for what we assume they believe: Jewish. Christian. Muslim. Israeli. Palestinian.

Then there are the words we use not to describe someone, but to dismiss them. Woke. Snowflake. Fascist. A single word can become a verdict on a person’s intelligence, motives, character, even their worth, without requiring us to ask them a single question.

The labels themselves are not meaningless. Some describe beliefs and choices that matter. Some positions deserve criticism. Some actions deserve condemnation. But almost without noticing, we begin attaching other words to them.

Good. Bad. Compassionate. Cruel. Educated. Ignorant. Safe. Dangerous. Oppressor. Victim. One of us. One of them.

That is where the category begins to become the person.

If I believe your label has already told me who you are, I have very little reason to ask what you actually think. I don’t need to know how you arrived there, what experiences shaped you, where you have doubts, what you fear, what you value, or where we might agree.

I already know you.

Except, of course, I don’t.

And Barbara makes me confront how easily I could do the same thing.

If all I knew about Barbara Pelinka was Austrian. Vienna. 1941. I could construct an entire person from those three facts. I could decide which side she belonged to and what that told me about her. I could fill in everything I don’t know with everything I think I know.

But I would be doing exactly what I have refused to do with her letter.

She fed my great-grandparents.

That is what categories can take from us: the possibility that the person in front of us might be more complicated than the story we have already written about them.

None of this happens in a vacuum. Political leaders can benefit when conflict strengthens loyalty to their side. Media built around conflict and online systems built around engagement can amplify outrage more readily than nuance. And we participate too, sharing the most provocative examples of people we disagree with until, somewhere along the way, the extreme begins to look typical.

Then political disagreement becomes something more personal. Instead of you believe something I think is wrong, it becomes your belief tells me what kind of person you are.

There is a term for part of what happens next. Social scientists call it affective polarization: not simply disagreeing with someone’s ideas, but coming to distrust and dislike the person who holds them. Barbara had no term for what she refused to do. She simply kept feeding two people the state had already decided did not belong.

Polarization doesn’t only change what we think about one another. It changes whether we remain willing to know one another and, ultimately, how we treat one another.

When curiosity disappears, conversation changes too. We listen less to understand and more to confirm what we already believe. I think you are wrong becomes there is something wrong with you. We retreat toward people who think like us, where our assumptions about everyone else rarely have to survive an actual conversation.

But I wonder if the greater danger is what happens after that, when this stops being only a conversation about political discourse and becomes a conversation about how we treat one another. Nuance starts to look like weakness. Conversation can feel like capitulation. Curiosity about people we disagree with can even feel like disloyalty to our own.

Eventually, we can become capable of something more troubling than avoiding one another.

We can become indifferent to one another.

Dehumanization does not begin only when someone openly declares another group less than human. It can happen more quietly, as individual people disappear into a collective they. Their fear becomes easier to dismiss. Their suffering moves us less. Treatment we would find intolerable if directed toward someone we love becomes easier to justify, minimize, or ignore when it happens to someone we have learned to see only as one of them.

The circle of who deserves our concern begins to shrink.

History gives us reason to take that process seriously.

That does not mean America in 2026 is Austria in 1938. It isn’t. And it does not mean every political disagreement deserves compromise, every position has equal moral value, or every person must remain in conversation regardless of what they believe or do.

It means history should make us attentive to something much more ordinary and much more human: how easily we divide the world into people whose pain we instinctively recognize and people whose pain we first need explained, justified, or qualified.

And to what it looks like when someone refuses to let that happen.

Barbara’s circle did not shrink.

Researchers Samuel and Pearl Oliner spent years studying people who rescued Jews during the Holocaust and those who did not. One of the ideas that emerged from their work was something they called extensivity: a sense of moral obligation broad enough to include people beyond one’s own group, measured not by whether someone had a moral compass but by how far its circle reached.

Whatever Barbara believed, her circle of concern included two Jewish neighbors who needed to eat, at a time when her government had spent years systematically excluding Jews from the rights and protections afforded their neighbors.

I don’t need to make her a hero to understand the importance of that. And I don’t need to pretend categories are meaningless to understand their danger when they become more important to us than the person standing in front of us.

Maybe that is what I want to carry from her letter into this moment.

Not that we should find the good people on the other side. Not that everyone is really the same. And certainly not that the differences between us don’t matter.

Something more demanding:

Do not let the category become the person.

And maybe ask ourselves some harder questions.

Whose worst representatives have I allowed to stand in for everyone who shares their label?

Whose fear do I instinctively understand, and whose do I question?

Whose suffering moves me immediately, and whose suffering comes with a but?

Nuance does not require us to abandon our convictions. Curiosity does not require agreement. Conversation does not require compromise.

They require something else: the humility to accept that another human being may be more complicated than the story we have already written about them.

And they require us to keep our circle of obligation wide enough that someone does not have to be one of us before their fear matters, their suffering matters, or what happens to them matters.

Barbara Pelinka had almost nothing.

“But at that time,” she wrote, “I still had something I could give.”

I do not know what became of her. The letters stop. I do not know if my grandfather ever wrote back, or what he would have said if he had.

Barbara Pelinka entered my family’s story because, eighty years ago, she found my grandfather and told him that when his parents needed her, she had fed them.

What I know is that she is not a symbol. She was a specific, suffering, unglamorous woman who kept two members of my family fed for as long as she could and told my grandfather about it afterward, asking for nothing.

Her name was Barbara Pelinka.

I did not want to let that be the last thing forgotten about her.

Cindy Silverman is a third-generation descendant of Holocaust survivors and executive board member of 3G Philly, Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors Philadelphia. She writes about her family’s Holocaust-era archive at the Times of Israel and on Substack. Her essay “It Didn’t End” was published in White Rose Magazine in May 2026. She was featured on Chosen For What, the podcast of the Foundation for Genocide Education, in June 2026. She is working on her first book, You Shouldn’t Know From This: Letters from Nazi Vienna.