Holocaust Education in Austria

Teaching With the Life Stories of Contemporary Witnesses

By Moritz Wein

A publicly accessible database of video interviews with victims of National Socialism - www.weitererzaehlen.at

PHOTO: ERINNERN.AT

“The Austrian government people have since World War II made a big pretence of being the first conquered country [by Nazi Germany]. That’s not true. They were very much in a ´Take me, I’m yours!’ mode. I can remember a lot of nasty things prior to the [“Anschluss”] ... you know…”

With this obviously frustrated reference to Austria, Felix Brown, a Holocaust survivor born in Vienna, started a TV interview in 1989 in Buffalo, New York. He described his experience with anti-Semitism in Austria, the murder of his family members during the Holocaust and his flight to the UK and later to the U.S. At that time, in the late 1980s, Austrian society heavily debated its National Socialist past and its active role in the Holocaust: The so-called victim theory, which claimed that Austria was the first victim of Nazi Germany, denied responsibility for Nazi crimes, for the Holocaust and tried to portrait Austria internationally as a country without a troubling past. Following the Waldheim debate, this theory was strongly questioned and Austrian society started to change aspects of its narrative and identity. Austria publicly acknowledged its responsibility for the Holocaust and founded institutions to remember and educate about the Holocaust. This process was accompanied by the loud voices of survivors of the Holocaust around the world, with Mr. Brown in Buffalo, New York, as a striking example. Today only a few Austrians still support and defend the victim theory.

As part of Austria’s new commitment to face its past and following a Memorandum of Understanding between the states of Israel and Austria, 20 years ago _erinnern.at_, the Holocaust Education Institute of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, was founded. Since then, _erinnern.at_ has been supporting educators in all nine Austrian federal states in teaching about the Holocaust and the crimes of National Socialism and in the prevention of anti-Semitism and racism through education. In doing so, the focus lies on facilitating the visits of Holocaust survivors in classrooms, the development of digital teaching materials, and the offer of teacher training seminars.

In the center of the Institute’s work is the educational use of testimonies of victims of National Socialism. Through school talks with contemporary witnesses, teaching materials with life stories of survivors or through videotaped and digitalized interviews with contemporary witnesses, students encounter the stories of victims of National Socialism that have been neglected in Austria for a long time, such as Mr. Brown’s story. Fortunately, at present there are still 14 contemporary witnesses who visit Austrian schools regularly. In 2019, they talked at 178 schools and reached 7,698 students. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the contemporary witness program was suspended from March 2020 on; nevertheless, it will soon be possible to connect students and contemporary witnesses via online tools.

Digital Memory

In order to preserve the testimonies of Holocaust survivors and other victims of National Socialism and to make them available to students and the public, _erinnern.at_ has been engaged in digitalizing video-taped testimonies of victims of National Socialism and making them accessible together with teaching materials for schools for over 15 years. In 2018, _erinnern.at_ started a unique effort to collect all video interviews with victims of National Socialism with a reference to Austria and make them accessible to the public. With the help of partner institutions around the world, in the U.S. namely the USC Shoah Foundation, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, the Holocaust Education Institute launched the website weitererzaehlen.at. Today, there are almost 200 video interviews with victims of National Socialism online. The videos are freely accessible and fully tagged with keywords, so teachers and students can search the database according to their interest and find life stories of Holocaust survivors from their area. Another important initiative is a cooperation with the USC Shoah Foundation Institute to develop a German landing page on the institute’s learning platform I Witness.

Felix Brown’s interview is also on weitererzaehlen.at, a strong symbol that Austria has changed – it is no longer hushing its past. Austria wants to face its violent past and students want to learn from life stories of Holocaust survivors. There are currently 20 video interviews with survivors from the U.S. on the website. Most of them were born in Austria and had to flee anti-Semitic persecution or fled to the U.S. after the Holocaust.

It is particularly special to have an interview online that was filmed in 2007 in West Palm Beach, Florida, with Alfred Seiler. Seiler was born into a Jewish family in Vienna and is one of only 17 survivors of the little-known extermination site Maly Trostenets. In total, 9,735 Austrian Jews were deported to Maly Trostenets, south of Minsk, Belarus, and most were murdered just after their arrival. After Auschwitz, Maly Trostenets is the place where most Austrians Jews were deported to. Probably because there were only 17 survivors, its history was long neglected by the Austrian public; also, because the voices of survivors were long not heard in Austrian society – shortly after the liberation of Minsk, in July 1944, the most important German speaking Jewish exile newspaper, Aufbau (New York), published a story about the horrors of Maly Trostenets.

Alfred Seiler’s testimony is an important historic document, as no other video interview of a survivor of this extermination site is known. He describes the inhumane living conditions, the constant fear of death and the murders he had witnessed. Seiler managed to escape with his family just before the liberation of the camp but was interned in a soviet Gulag right after his escape. Only in 1948 he returned to Vienna and moved to the USA later on. There he worked in the fashion industry and later retired in Florida, where he was interviewed in 2007 by Andreas Gruber and Robert Marchl and died shortly after.

The life stories of Americans like Felix Brown and Alfred Seiler are only two very different life stories of the 30,000 Austrians who fled from national socialist persecution to the U.S. after 1938. With weitererzaehlen.at, those stories are brought back to Austria, students learn the history of their country through the stories of refugees who have fled to the USA. _erinnern.at_ is constantly expanding its collection of testimonies and is interested in adding further video interviews with victims of National Socialism with an Austrian background.

A strong pedagogical focus on the life stories of victims of National Socialism has many benefits. Students are very much interested in their stories, they are eager to learn more about the biographies and the historical context. In Austria, a country that was responsible for Nazi crimes and the Holocaust, teachers need to discuss the questions of responsibility with students: Who was responsible for the expulsion of Felix Brown from Vienna? Who deported Alfred Seiler to Maly Trostenets? These questions of responsibility educe discussions among students and quickly demonstrate the involvement of many local actors in those crimes.

While learning about the Holocaust with life stories of survivors, students in Austria and the U.S. are faced with the same question: What relevance does this story have for me and for us today? A question that only students can answer for themselves and maybe in dialogue with their peers across the Atlantic.

Moritz Wein is the Deputy Director of _erinnern.at_, the Holocaust Education Institute of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research.

Contact for cooperation concerning video-taped testimonies of victims of National Socialism: office@erinnern.at