This article appeared in the May 3, 2013 Jewish Advocate.
Scholar's
return to roots spawns international remembrance effort
by
Susie Davidson
Special
to the Advocate
(Italicize)
August
1, 1938
From
his mother: Dear G-d will help us and you will be happy where you
are. Just don’t despair and write us at least a post card
about your well-being and any business prospects.
From
his father: Remember not to be upset. You have to keep a clear head.
I think there are well known Viennese there, decent people. Introduce
yourself.
From
his sister: We all wonder where you will land. We count on you and
wish you the best of luck.
June
28, 1940
My
dearest child...I know very well that you must worry about us, but I
swear that we are well, thank G-d, and that we have everything we
need, only I need news from my beloved children, good news...your
loving mother (end ital.)
For
artist, author and professor Karen Frostig, reading these lines began
a new relationship with a large, extended, and deceased family she
had never known.
She
had inherited a stack of letters written between 1938 and 1941 by her
grandparents to her father, who was living in exile. Dr. Benjamin
Frostig was the victim of an early wave of arrests by the Gestapo
that targeted Austria's intelligentsia and resulted in his expulsion
from Austria in June of 1938. Through a very complicated route
of escape, he arrived in the US in November 1940 and married her
mother, an American, in 1942..
The
letters ended on November 4, 1941. Her grandparents were deported
from Vienna on December 3, 1941 to Riga, Latvia. From there, their
fate is uncertain. But if they survived the harsh living
conditions, they were likely shot in the Bikernieki Forest, murdered
among 1849 Reich Jews during the Aktion Dunamunde of March 26, 1942.
Ultimately, Frostig's grandparents, as well as sixteen other members
of her family, were victims of the Holocaust.
The
Lesley University professor and Brandeis University's Women's Studies
Research Center Resident Scholar soon found herself returning to her
father's homeland in 2006, and reclaiming Austrian citizenship in
2007. In 2009, she founded The Vienna Project, which grew out of this
journey into a new widespread social action, public memory endeavor.
This October 24, the project will mark the first public memorial in
Europe to cite multiple groups of persecuted victims of the Holocaust
on record, murdered within a given country, between 1938-1945. It
will conclude at the VII-G Flak Tower in the Augarten on V-E Day
(Victory in Europe), May 8. The inception date, which commemorates
the 75th anniversary year of the “Anschluss,” the start of racial
persecution in Austria under Nazi rule, creates a corresponding
encounter with both legacy and learning. Coincidentally, the date
will precede Austrian National Day, which recalls the start of the
second Republic of Austria.
“My
readiness to create an ambitious, international project at a distance
of 4000 miles, speaking only English and with no advance money, was
predicated on years of working as an artist, art therapist, community
activist, and organizational leader,” said Frostig, who is
President of the uniquely stirring, memorial project. “While the
project reflects my professional background in these areas, it is the
passion that I bring to the material that carries it forward. I
perceive of myself as an 'outsider with an insider's story,' but it
is my commitment to my family's history that sustains the work.”
The
project's advisory board includes Nobel Prize laureates Elie Wiesel
and Walter Kohn, Ambassadors Stuart E. Eizenstat and Wolfgang M.
Paul, and historian James Young. Project partners include The
Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien (IKG), The Jewish Welcome Service
and the Jewish Museum Wien, as well as the University of Applied
Arts, the Wien Museum and the Wiesenthal Institute. The project has
also received endorsements from the Zukunftsfond and the National
Fund.
“Mapping
1938 Vienna by The Vienna Project: Remembering Austria’s Holocaust
Victims at the Intersection of Art and History” will unfold along
the Danube Canal as a series of performance events that will include
street art, video projections, photography, videography and new
media, all to make memory visible on the streets of Vienna over the
six-month period. According to Frostig, the events will aim to
stimulate new conversations about the Holocaust and National
Socialism. “The project axiom, 'Not to Forget as We Remember,'
delivers a fresh message to the different victim and dissident
groups, while making memory visible on the streets of Vienna,” she
said.
Presentations
will include video projections of text couplets in ten languages, to
be read as rays of light, floating on the surface of the water as
they descend into its depths. The closing event, which will begin on
May 6 and run for three days, will include a moving image, with the
10,000+ names of victims and dissident groups, projected onto the
Flak-Türme VII-G Tower in the Augarten
"Originally
designed as anti-aircraft 'blockhouse' towers, these massive
structures were constructed by forced laborers between 1942-1944 to
protect cities and civilians in Berlin, Hamburg and Vienna from
Allied bombing,” Frostig explained. “Ghostly relics, the six
indestructible towers that remain standing in Vienna symbolize the
defeat of the German Army and the end of an unprecedented reign of
terror across Europe.” She said that a sound installation will be
activated in the park during the day. “Sound by day, image by
night, the park will be teeming with memory, enveloping visitors as
they wander along the paths of The Augarten,” she said.
The
project's defining element will be an interactive, digital map of the
city's urban layout, an innovative, cutting-edge methodology that
could appeal to young Viennese citizens. “Viennese artist Nikolaus
Gansterer will develop an intricate and sculptural representation,
and then, through high-quality photography, we will transform his 3-D
art piece into a dynamic and original digital map that will be housed
on our website,” explained Frostig. The map will be used to
highlight 38 Holocaust “memory zones” throughout the
city.
Historians
and University of Vienna students will help to select these sites,
which signify Nazi discrimination, exclusion, violence, and
humiliation, and thirty-eight of them will then be chosen by
community forums to become the “memory zones.” The sites will
represent multiple victim groups of the Holocaust in Austria, who
include Jews, Roma and Sinti, the mentally and physically disabled,
homosexuals, dissidents (Communists, Socialists and Christian
Democrats), Slovenian partisans, and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Frostig
said that the project will serve many groups that are connected to
the history it addresses, who include survivors of the Nazis and
their families, as well as minority groups living in Vienna today,
such as Turkish, Russian and Serbo-Croatian-Bosnians. “The project
also supports teachers and students learning about Holocaust
education, as well as government officials developing social programs
to address a variety of civic issues,” she said. “The project is
dedicated to examining racism of the past alongside present-day
expressions of prejudice, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism.”
To
help with the cost of the undertaking, Frostig has been running a
Kickstarter campaign which ends on May 4. Varied incentives are
offered to donors, which include her own original stencil artwork,
postcards, and other project memorabilia.
“The
Vienna Project will be the first public memorial in Europe to
represent seven different victim groups of genocide and murder under
National Socialism,” said Frostig. “Representing the human
capacity to care, memory is the antithesis of genocide, brutality and
indifference.”
For
more information, please visit www.theviennaproject.org
or contact Frostig at karen@theviennaproject.org.
To
donate to the Kickstarter campaign, please visit
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/130272597/mapping-1938-vienna.