Preliminary Programme

Vienna-born Elly Braun Schlesinger (*1924) found refuge from Nazi persecution in Bratislava, Lucerne, Antwerp, the South of France and Switzerland. After the war, she emigrated to the USA and in 1979 moved to Israel, where she lives today. During her stay in the unoccupied zone of France from 1940 to 1942 she and her father helped to save the lives of hundreds - maybe thousands - of Jewish refugees. Of the actions she undertook encouraged by her father, their visit to the archbishop of Toulouse, Mgr. Jules-GÉRAUD Saliège, PROBABLY had the most significant consequences and MIGHT HAVE resulted in the archbishop’s famous pastoral letter of August 1942. Three hundred Jewish children were hidden with false papers in Catholic convents and boarding schools and numerous local rescue operations were initiated. Moreover, it has served as an important catalyst for a shift in opinion towards the Vichy regime in parts of the French population.
Only by chance, while watching a French television programme, Elly Braun Schlesinger became aware that her father’s plea to help the Jews, which she had translated to Mgr. Saliège in fluent French, MIGHT HAVE been life-saving for many Jewish refugees. She has told her story to her children and, later on, in several oral history interviews.
For an accurate historical overview, national and global historiography related to the pastoral letter of Mgr. Saliège and the hypotheses about its background can be compared with five oral history interviews with Elly Braun Schlesinger, recorded in different years, different places and languages, with different interviewers and on or for different media (Yad Vashem – video, Primavera Driessen Gruber – DAT, Jerome Blumberg – film, Bernd Matschedolnig – radio, and an electronic recording during a family meeting in Vienna). Thus - Elly Braun Schlesinger’s recollections are set in a local, national and transnational context, focussing on the ruptures in and the disparities between the individual interviews. In an endeavour to discover the reasons why the contribution of Elly (Braun) Schlesinger and her father has remained in the dark for such a long time, while the population of the French village where they lived has preserved their remembrance, method-related, gender-specific and generational aspects will be discussed.
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“Not to forget as we remember” is the adage for a new, temporary memorial in Vienna to remember the 75th anniversary year of the Anschluss, when racial persecution officially began in Austria. The Vienna Project, set to open on October 24, 2013, will be the first public memorial in Europe to symbolically represent multiple groups of persecuted victims of National Socialism, while also naming individual victims and dissidents on record within a given country, murdered between 1938-1945. “Not to forget as we remember” refers to the different victim groups as well as differences between the victim groups.
The memorial project has many inter-related facets dealing with testimony, evidence and public response to memory, 75 years after the Anschluss. “Ruptured Memory, Traumatic Memory and Repressed Memory” begins with silences in my family, regarding my father’s arrest by the Gestapo in the spring of 1938, his subsequent expulsion from Vienna, and the murder of 16 members of my family unable to escape the genocide that soon followed. The paper traces my own process of recovering memory, followed by the plan for a memorial project to mark the 75th anniversary of the Anschluss. This date signals a transition in terms of who carries memory--second, third and fourth generation children of survivors and perpetrators--and in changing practices of memorialization.
The paper will focus on a discussion of the different components of the project and innovative methodologies developed to engage the Austrian public in activities of remembrance. Special attention will be directed to the Sidewalk Installation Project, audio interviews conducted in the Memory Zones, and the design of a naming memorial to include representation of seven victim groups, sited for the Flak Tower in Augarten, in 2014.
The project represents an international initiative regarding memory and memorialization in a post-memorial era. Characterized as a “performance of memory,” discussion will also address how The Vienna Project has been received and supported by the Republic of Austria, by the citizens of Vienna, and by current minority populations living in Vienna. The presentation will also include visual documentation of the memorial project as it unfolds in Vienna, and the international response to this call to remember. (Show less)

Memories are highly shaped by the moment of their production. A face-to-face-interview is an intimate situation which is not just influenced by the personal characteristics on both sides, the interviewee as well as the interviewer, but also by the wider social and political context (Halbmayr 2008, 2009; Stögner 2008, von Plato 2000). Recently, especially the role of emotions was highlighted (Rossi 2008, Halbmayr 2008, Lichtblau 2010).
This paper wants to follow the traces of political events in personal memories. Based on the experiences of two oral history projects with National Socialist concentration camp survivors – 1998/99 with survivors of Ravensbrück, 2002/03 with survivors of Mauthausen (MSDP) – we want to highlight how the interviewees refer to the Kosovo War in 1998/99 and the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York in 2001. We will investigate in as far political crises shape the narratives themselves with regards to the issues raised and the emotions accompanying the memories. We assume that such political ruptures revoke specific memories about one’s own experiences of flight, exile, persecution and discrimination, hopelessness and the will to survive. Another question will be how these references influence the course of the interview.
Our Ravensbrück sample consists of 42 life story interviews, from the about 800 MSDP-interviews we will analyze only the ones conducted with survivors living in the USA and which have been transcribed (in total 11). At first, we will divide each sample in two – the ones who address the respective political circumstance and the ones who do not. From each of these four groups we will select two interviews for an in-depth analysis. This methodological approach enables us to identify the differences and commonalities among these samples in respect to the content, the course of the interviews, and the emotions shown as well as the possible reasons for them.
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The paper focuses on the memory of Jewish survivors in post-war Greece and explores the gender, ethnic and class dimensions of the reconstruction of Jewish life after the Shoah. The memory of the Shoah plays a central role in the post-war formation of identity of Greek Jews and creates dividing lines within the community in the political and social milieu. The associations of hostages that were created after the war made claims on social and political rights in the name of their experiences in the concentration camps and in the inability of members of the community to assess the danger for the Jews of Greece. The oral testimonies of Greek survivors illustrate the social and gender dimensions of post-war identities. In the testimonies of working-class Jews, memory creates a biographical continuum that connects pre-war experiences to the Shoah and extends further to post-war experiences. Furthermore, the paper investigates marital strategies as a form of rehabilitation of community life by focusing on the survivors’ perspective in order to illuminate the gendered and class aspects of decision making. Based on the exploration of oral testimonies, the paper examines the construction of memory of Jewish survivors pointing to the class and gender aspects that formed post-war identities. (Show less)