Ilana Fritz Offenberger - The Jews of Nazi Vienna, 1938-1945: Rescue and Destruction

Ilana Fritz Offenberger

The Jews of Nazi Vienna, 19381945 Rescue and Destruction

For the Jews of Vienna

Those who got out,

And those who were trapped behind

Your struggle to resist Nazi oppression will not be forgotten

Berta (Monias) and Heinrich Offenberger, Vienna, 1909 (Credit: Fred and Helena Altstadt, Argentina)

Edith Kurzweils experience as a Viennese migr mirrors thousands of others who managed to escape from the Greater German Reich during the Nazi period, but not without terrible loss. Seven decades later, still suffering from the absence of Heimat and looking to resolve unanswered questions about her past, Kurzweil began to analyze correspondence between her mother in New York and grandmother in Vienna from April 1940 through November 1941. nor offered a comprehensive analysis of the short- and long-term effects of Nazism on the Jewish community of Vienna at large.

The Jews of Nazi Vienna, 19381945: Rescue and Destruction is the work Kurzweil envisioned. This book explores the daily life of Jews in Nazi Vienna before, during, and after the Anschluss of March 1938 up through the mass deportations of 1942 and the disintegration of the community that followed. By examining the histories of numerous ordinary Viennese Jews (and their families) and placing them into a chronological narrative of life in Vienna under Nazi occupation, it unpacks the simultaneous rescue and destruction of this community, step by step. Like Kaplans analysis of daily life for German Jews under Nazism, this work reveals the social death from which Austrian Jews suffered prior to, during, and after the genocide.

Representations of the Holocaust, in history, literature, art, and memorials, tend to focus on the genocidal periodthe death camps, gas chambers, and mass murders. Yet as we are well aware, the destruction of Jewish communities, Jewish families, and Jewish individual lives did not begin in the death camps; it ended there. As Marion Kaplan so carefully documented in her work on German Jewish responses to Nazism between 1933 and 1939, Jews suffered from social death years before the Nazis drew up the final solution. So too, in Vienna, did they suffer from this social death. Today, a visitor in Vienna may stumble upon artist Alfred Hrdlickas dedication to the street washing Jew while walking through the citys first district or making a visit to the popular Albertina museum. Hrdlickas memorial, like Kaplans literary analysis, draws our attention to the attacks on Jewish life that occurred years prior to the Final Solution. The sculpture reminds viewers of the inhumanity and injustice that took over in the public squares and busy streets of Vienna in March 1938; of a time when neighbors turned a blind eye to the suffering of their neighbors, and the social contract between Viennas Jews and their government shattered. Like Hrdlinkas artistic composition and Kaplans careful study of German Jewry, this work spotlights the early years of the Nazi occupation in Vienna, begging its readers to scrutinize the causes and effects of hatred and question its possible outcomes.