Dislocation, Trauma and Selective Memory: Austria 1945–50. Recollections of Jewish Displaced Persons

Abstract

During the years 1933 to 1945, European Jews were persecuted, expelled, displaced and murdered. Many surviving Jews were either liberated from the concentration camps or they arrived later in the western zones of the Allies. Eastern Europe was then still not a safe place for the Jewish population. Upper Austria, Salzburg and parts of Vienna formed the US occupation zone in Austria. More than 200,000 Jews passed through this territory between 1945 and 1951 and stayed there for varying lengths of time. In the large Soviet zone of Austria no Jewish DP camps were established. The essay tries to analyse two types of ‘archives’: 1) the personal memories of Jewish displaced persons in Austria, who are seen as a kind of ‘memory archive’, and 2) the ‘archive’ that consists of documents and records found in US Army files, police reports, the files of Austrian regional and local authorities, newspapers and other sources. The results of this small survey are characterised by contradictory statements and recollections, by divergent landscapes of memory.