Back home Austria had been integrated into a newly enlarged Germany following the annexation of March 1938. Selma's younger sisters had both left Vienna by this time, but her father was still living with his new wife at the apartment in Gaußplatz where the family had grown up. (Chaim Steinmetz had married Eugenie Piskaty in 1936.) During 1939 they were thrown out of their apartment and moved to multi-occupancy accommodation at Ferdinandstraße 19 in Vienna-Leopoldstadt ("2. Stadtbezirk"). On 23 or 31 October 1941 they were deported to the Łódź Ghetto and murdered.