Bearing Witness Across Generations: The Austrian Heritage Collection at 30

“Something happened that none of us can come to terms with,” said Hannah Arendt—who had co-founded the Leo Baeck Institute in 1955—still twenty years after the end of the Shoah, in a television interview with the German journalist Günter Gaus. This civilizational rupture—the industrially organized extermination of over six million European Jews—something previously unimaginable, brought profound moral and political fractures to the modern world. While Arendt, like so many survivors and émigrés, could hardly process what had happened, were long barely heard, and often remained traumatized, far too many perpetrators lived on, often untroubled, for far too long. Reckoning with this past was also delayed in Austria. Only in 1991 did the Republic acknowledge its responsibility for the first time. In his speech, Chancellor Vranitzky not only relativized the victim thesis—long upheld officially, claiming Austria had been the first victim of the expansion of the German Reich under Adolf Hitler—but also admitted Austria’s complicity in World War II and the Shoah. To address this responsibility—particularly toward the victims, the more than 65,000 murdered Austrian Jews, the many people from other victim groups, and survivors of the Nazi regime—the National Fund of the Republic of Austria for Victims of National Socialism was established four years later. From the collaboration of the National Fund, the Austrian Cultural Forum New York (ACFNY), the GEDENKDIENST Association, and the New York Leo Baeck Institute, the Austrian Heritage Collection (AHC) eventually emerged. Since 1996, Austrian volunteers—sent by the GEDENKDIENST Association—have traveled to New York each year. The Austrian Heritage Collection, housed at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, has since aimed to document the history of Austrian-Jewish émigrés who fled to North America during the years of National Socialist rule over Europe.

Thirty years after its founding, 57 different Gedenkdienst volunteers have conducted over 1,000 oral history interviews. More than 4,000 questionnaires have been returned, and numerous contemporary documents collected. The voices of many people, who for so long—especially in their country of origin, Austria—were barely or not at all heard, reach a wide audience through the project. Their stories speak of persecution and displacement, of disenfranchisement and expropriation, of a homeland often stolen and a new regained, of their relationship to Austria and Austrians. As many commonalities as these interviews may share, each person and each story is unique. Their voices are also carried forward by the volunteers—in the spirit of Elie Wiesel, “Whoever listens to a witness becomes a witness themselves.” This personal connection between young Austrians and émigrés is what makes the Austrian Heritage Collection especially distinctive. Over the 30 years of its existence, contacts and friendships have formed, and mutual visits have frequently taken place.

With the passing of the last émigrés, with the “end of the eyewitness generation,” the AHC also faces a challenge. Since 2025, it has already become a reality for the volunteers to interview primarily children, nephews, and nieces of survivors and émigrés—the so-called second generation. While this will sustainably change the project in the future, these individuals bring new perspectives and new insights. What is their relationship to Austria like? Have they become Austrian citizens? How do they define their identity? What does it mean to grow up as a child of survivors and emigrants? Their stories and voices, their views on the AHC and the significance of testimony, and the evolving nature of this storytelling will shape the project in the future. The 30th anniversary of the Austrian Heritage Collection is therefore by no means just a reason to celebrate, but also a moment of reflection.

The following interviews, conducted in 2026 by the volunteers Zoé Prauhart and Max Volgger, with important individuals who have accompanied the Collection for years and decades—in New York as well as Vienna—including three members of the second generation and four former volunteers, represent a first expression of this reflection.