Andre Steiner Family Papers

Andre Steiner was born in Dunajska Streda in 1908 in what is now Hungary. As a young man he studied Bauhaus architecture, an elite school of modern design and thought. He married Hetty Weiner in 1935. In 1940 Steiner, his wife Hetty and their young son Peter moved to Bratislava in Slovakia to escape the Nazi invasion in Brno. In 1941 Steiner joined The Working Group, comprised of dissident members of the Ustredz Zidovsky, the governing body of Slovak Jewry. His architectural designs were coveted by the Nazis and Steiner secretly bribed German and Slovak officials to prevent deportations. He also convinced the Nazis to establish three work camps for Jews insisting that only Jewish laborers could build his designs. He is credited with saving 7,000 Jews from deportation to death camps. When full scale deportations renewed in 1944, Andre and Hetty Steiner fled to the mountains and survived the war in hiding. After the war, Andre and his wife settled in Atlanta, Georgia. He passed away in Atlanta in 2009 at age 100.