"A Miraculous Sign!" Vienna Through the Eyes of Hungarian-Jewish Slave Labourers

Kovács, Éva and Frojimovics, Kinga (2024) "A Miraculous Sign!" Vienna Through the Eyes of Hungarian-Jewish Slave Labourers. CONTEMPORARY JEWRY. pp. 1-20. ISSN 0147-1694 (print); 1876-5165 (online)

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Abstract

The special urban nature of the Holocaust experiences of Jewish forced laborers deported from Hungary to Vienna in the summer of 1944 (work in industrial areas and in bomb-damaged houses across the city, use of public transportation, visiting hospitals, etc.) combined with their images and knowledge of Viennese culture and history figure prominently in the survivors’ testimonies. It is also very interesting how the project of The Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (Vienna, Austria) entitled “Ungarische Zwangsarbeit in Wien” (http://ungarische-zwangsarbeit-in-wien.at/) that is built mainly on these oral history sources infuences the recent images of Vienna. The overlap and (accidental, intentional and/or historical and cultural) juxtapositions between Vienna as the imperial "Kaiserstadt" and the locus of the Holocaust experiences of Jewish forced laborers deported from Hungary act as an especially potent way to create and emphasize complex Viennese narrative identities.

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