YOUNG PEOPLE DOCUMENT THE LIFE STORY OF DISPLACED AUSTRIANS IN THE USA
BY PHILIPP ROHRBACH
George Czuczka was born in Vienna on July 3, 1925. In the early 1930s, his family moved to the Karl-Marx-Hof tenement complex in Vienna's Heiligenstadt District and in 1934 witnessed the February Uprising. George was nine years old when the Austrian army and fascist paramilitary Heimwehr bombarded the buildings with heavy artillery. Due to their socialist leanings, Czuczka's parents participated in the relief operations supported by the Quakers and also took part in the resistance against the Austrofascist dictatorship from 1934 to 1938.
After the Anschluss, George's father was arrested during a police operation directed against political Jews and was first imprisoned at Dachau concentration camp and then at Buchenwald for nearly a year. When an American friend sent the family an affidavit, they managed to get the father released. The family emigrated to the USA in 1939.
Following World War II, George returned to Europe, where he worked for various denazification commissions and participated in the war crimes trials in Dachau. From 1951 to 1975 he was an editor for Voice of America and subsequently joined the US Foreign Service, among other things as the director of the Amerika Haus and as the American press attaché in Vienna.
George Czuczka's life story is recorded in one of the 300 oral history interviews in the collection of the New York Leo Baeck Institute. Founded in 1955 by German-speaking Jewish emigrants, the Institute is the world's leading research institution on the history of German-speaking Jewry. Since 1996, Verein Gedenkdienst, a Vienna-based organization dedicated to Holocaust education, sends two volunteers to the Leo Baeck Institute each year to document the persecution, displacement, and emigration of Austrian Jews under the National Socialist regime. They collect information by means of questionnaires, documents, and biographical interviews. Verein Gedenkdienst is a politically independent, non-denominational organization that studies the causes and effects of National Socialism and its crimes. Since 1996, dozens of young Gedenkdienst aides, who volunteer for the organization in place of compulsory military service with the Austrian army, have already evaluated 4,000 questionnaires and conducted 300 interviews. Even though there is no compulsory military service for women in Austria, it is now also possible for women to serve in New York on behalf of Gedenkdienst.
www.gedenkdienst.at
www.lbi.org
