Remembering Vienna: Mapping Oral Histories of Holocaust Survivors from Austria

This digital mapping project is based on ten oral history interviews from the Leo Baeck Institute’s Austrian Heritage Collection with Holocaust survivors from Austria who escaped the country on the Kindertransports in 1938/39 and later moved to the United States. As all of these ten narrators refer to concrete places in the city of Vienna within their testimonies, such as the former homes of the interviewees or the schools they attended, contextualized excerpts of the interviews are represented at these locations on a digital map of Vienna. Within the chosen excerpts, the narrators give personal accounts of the pervasive anti-Semitic persecution in Vienna after the “Anschluss,” their escape of the country, their later lives in the United States and their experiences during visits back to Austria. The project seeks to contribute to the remembrance of the persecution of Austria’s Jewish population during the National Socialist period and at the same time to give insights into the lives, after their escape, of some of those who survived. The accompanying white paper contextualizes the digital project by providing information about the Austrian Heritage Collection, the historical events the interviewees refer to and major developments in Austrian memory culture since 1945