Twenty historical witnesses talk about the suburban Jewish community of their childhood in today’s 15th district of Vienna. The interviews were conducted in 2007 and 2008 in Israel, some in Vienna. They are full biographical interviews not confined to the period of Nazi persecution. They dig into the intact Jewish community before 1938, its places, culture and forms of living, follow the refugees to the places where they started new lives and investigate the relationships they and their families sustained to their former home country.
The interviews are edited in chapters according to the main topics, regathering the voices of a dispersed community, for instance when 14 people speak about the former community building in Herklotzgasse, but also recollecting a great variety of experiences and responses to the Holocaust and its aftermath. Last but not least, they reconstruct an important aspect of Vienna’s local socio-historical fabric that had been totally forgotten until the project’s activities.
The DVD production is the concluding part of the larger project “Herklotzgasse 21. The Spaces of a Suburban Jewish Community” (www.herklotzgasse21.at), which has been supported by ERSTE Foundation throughout.
This publication is available at ERSTE Foundation Library.
