Yad Vashem exhibit at Austrian parliament rolls out fate of Jews in post-Anschluss Vienna

With antisemitism rearing its ugly head around the world, it is particularly gratifying and encouraging to see an enriching Holocaust-related offering on display at the Austrian parliament in Vienna. 

The exhibition goes by the self-explanatory and emotive title of Torn from Life – The Fate of the Austrian Jews after the Anschluss in 1938 and was curated by Yad Vashem Museum Division Artifacts Department director Michael Tal. The collection was unveiled to the public on October 15 and will remain on show in Vienna through November 10, the 86th anniversary of Kristallnacht.

The seed for the current project was sown last year when a similarly-themed exposition was given pride of place at the Bundestag, the German parliament building in Berlin.

“That was to mark the 70th anniversary of Yad Vashem,” Tal notes. “The idea was to show artifacts and possessions of Holocaust victims and survivors, kept in Yad Vashem, that originated from each of the 16 states that make up Germany.”

That was a poignant line of thought which, inter alia, produced a commensurate representation of the spread of the German Jewish population prior to the rise of Nazism in the early 1930s. 

However, it quickly transpired that the Austrian edition could not follow the same geographic purview, as the vast majority of Austrian Jewry prior to World War II lived in Vienna. 

“Almost all the interesting artifacts that could serve as the basis for an exhibition belonged to people from Vienna,” Tal recalls. That was a purely professional call. “If we were to take things from across the nine states of Austria that would necessitate taking artifacts of minor value and dispensing with important articles.”

The aesthetic and evocative properties of the dozens of items in the Torn from Life exhibition prove Tal’s qualitative point. Take, for example, some of the albums and diaries which convey the impact of developments in Nazi-controlled Austria, and elsewhere, as some tried to escape to some safe haven or other. These are vivid firsthand accounts that relate the feelings, experiences and sensibilities of the events in real time, and some of the emotional turmoil that Jews endured there at the time.

A different, non-geographic, approach was in order. 

“As I examined the materials I began to collate, I devised an idea whereby the exhibition would focus on five different themes based on the things we have at Yad Vashem,” Tal explains. 

“The first focus was the action the Austrian Jewish community took in order to help people to emigrate. The others were the four destinations the Jews chose to go to – America, Shanghai, Palestine, and [England via] the Kindertransport.” 

Most of the participants in the latter rescue operation which, all told, encompassed close to 10,000 mostly Jewish children up to 17 years of age, predominantly from Germany and Austria, went to the United Kingdom. That included my mother and her two sisters. Her parents and younger brother and sister were all murdered at Auschwitz in 1942.

Even with the exhibition concept in place, Tal was faced with a challengingly extensive domain to roam in putting the project into corporeal form. He needed tangible pointers. One duly emerged which shed some light on how Austrian Jews worked, against seemingly insurmountable odds, to somehow save themselves as the walls of the barbaric Nazi regime closed in around them. They were not, as some have suggested, just waiting around “like lambs being led to the slaughterhouse.”

“A historian who works at Yad Vashem told me that there was in our archives a photograph album that represents projects people ran, training courses for new professions. In other words, the Jewish community organized training courses for adults so they would have a profession to take with them when they left the country. Many of the Jews were traders, they had stores. They were not things they could take with them to another place.”

In 1938-39 some 1,600 courses opened in around 100 different fields and professions, which were attended by approximately 24,000 people, mainly adults. The subject spread took in a range of practical pursuits which could be relocated, including shoemaking, tailoring, millinery, and photography. Thankfully, some of the instructional processes were documented along with the end result. “The album contains photos of the course – there were a lot of them – and the exhibitions of what the trainees produced, which were presented at the end of the courses,” says Tal.

More than anything, however, Tal was looking to impart the street level dynamics of life for Jews in Vienna after Hitler strolled into Vienna welcomed by thousands of jubilant Austrians, a traumatic game-changer witnessed by my own, then six-year-old, mother from the Schiffmann family apartment on Hollandstrasse, in Vienna’s Second District. 

“Something which has remained with me ever since I began working as the curator of the artifacts collection is that every single object comes with a personal story,” Tal continues. “I know what happened to the person in question, and their family, for the majority of the objects I select.”

Visual documentation gives light to history 

That, naturally, is even more palpable when it comes to visual documentation. This time Tal’s path to the background details proved to be a long and winding odyssey. “You see the pictures of these people, and this initiative to retain them, to help them survive, and you don’t know who did it, who created the album. And who initiated all these courses? Which members of the community? And what happened to him. Who are the trainees? Who are the teachers? What happened to them all? I didn’t know anything about any of them. Nothing at all.”

This time, Tal turned to his researcher who somehow, found his way to the National Library where, it transpired, items are held – or copies thereof from the Austrian Jewish community’s archives. The mystery began to unravel. 

“The researcher found names of teachers and students. He also found the name of the person who initiated the whole training framework, the head of the Jewish community – Josef Lowenherz – who kept the album until the end of the war.” That sounds nothing short of miraculous. “It is not entirely clear how the album ended up at Yad Vashem, but it was Lowenherz’s project.”

There was more in the way of exciting discoveries to come. “The wonderful researchers noticed in one of the photos the words: ‘The photography teacher Finaly.’ Gradually, information about him began to trickle through. He was murdered in the Holocaust but his daughters managed to escape to England, not on a Kindertransport. The surviving family members sent us things, including photographs of him.” Tal was eventually able to put a face to the recently unearthed name. “His first name was Richard.”

Finaly’s descendants also contributed a family photograph album which includes a picture of Finaly as a child, in a family setting. They also sent Tal a poem Finaly wrote for his daughters as an impassioned homage to the country of his birth which had betrayed him so brutally. “The poem opens the exhibition,” Tal notes.

The curator reprises the individual human theme, with something of a darkly risible streak. “One of the most evocative items in the exhibition is a small folding bench which belonged to a woman who had just given birth, in 1938. Jews were forbidden from sitting on park benches, so she’d go to the park and sit on her own bench together with her baby,” Tal smiles.

Tal references another exhibit currently on show at the Austrian parliament, with a multilayered local connection. “That is from the St. Louis!” Tal exclaims.  

“There is a penknife which belonged to a woman who was on the St. Louis who bought it as a souvenir. That is a tremendous memento,” he says. 

The St. Louis was a ship which set sail from Hamburg in May 1939, with over 900 mostly Jewish passengers, for Havana, Cuba. Almost all the refugees were denied permission to disembark in Cuba, the United States, and Canada, despite the best efforts of German captain Gustav Schröder, and most ultimately landed at Antwerp, Belgium. Some were taken in by Britain and many settled in Belgium, France, and the Netherlands. Around a third of those who were forced to stay in continental Europe perished in the Holocaust. 

The sorry saga was subsequently portrayed in a bestselling book and movie called Voyage of the Damned. In 1993 Schröder was posthumously recognized by Yad Vashem as a Righteous Among the Nations.

Every item, every face, every picture tells a story, a different personal facet of a Jewish community that numbered 190,000 before WWII and was decimated. One hopes, especially now, that Austrian politicians and men and women on the street will have taken the trouble to view Torn from Life by the time it closes and take on board the human tale of rude and brutal upheaval.

For more information: https://www.yadvashem.org/exhibitions/austrian-jews-after-the-anschluss.html