Although I am an avid reader, I packed only one book for my family vacation to Austria — Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi’s 1947 memoir “If This Is a Man.” My choice turned out to be bitterly ironic, considering I was about to spend a week in a country where around 65,000 Jews were murdered during the Holocaust.
There’s nothing wrong with reading an autobiography about a Holocaust survivor, yet I found myself hiding the book’s cover and never reading it in public places for fear of (possibly antisemitic) questions. Sadly, this sense of needing to hide anything to do with Jews only grew as I learned more about Austria’s World War II history and contemporary antisemitism.
Unfortunately, the situation may be getting even worse since we got back home. In late September, a far-right party founded by actual Nazis won nearly one-third of the vote in Austria’s national elections. It beat out all other parties, though it is still unclear if the party can form a governing coalition.
When my family was planning our trip — aware of Austria’s treatment of Jews both during the Holocaust and in the centuries beforehand — we knew we wanted to visit a Jewish museum while we were there. This is when we encountered the first red flag: Vienna, the capital of Austria, does not have a Holocaust museum. Yes, there are memorials and museums dedicated to Jewish life (which barely mention the Holocaust, if at all). However, I found it shocking — and scary — that this country, which played such a significant role in the murder of so many Jews, seemed unwilling to take responsibility for its actions, or at the very least to dedicate a space for public education.
My unease only grew when I stepped foot into one of the two locations of the Jewish museum in the city, only seven minutes apart by foot but lifetimes apart in terms of content.
The main museum location is called Dorotheergasse and is located in Palais Eskeles, a beautiful building that used to belong to a Jewish family. One half of Dorotheergasse focuses on the Jewish community before WWII, and the other mainly examines the rebuilding of Jewish life after the war, with the Nazis mentioned just a handful of times.
To me, it seemed that the museum was trying to exude hope, but I felt that there was one key problem: How can a Jewish museum highlight “hope” and Jewish “resistance” when it fails to mention why the Jews of Vienna were forced to resist and completely downplays the horrors of the Holocaust?
Unfortunately, not only did the second location, the Judenplatz, not answer this question, but it failed to mention anything about the Holocaust at all. Instead, it focused on basic Jewish customs (Shabbat, b’nai mitzvah, etc.), medieval Jewish history and the history of the museum itself. Although this museum did briefly mention medieval Jewish suffering, it still seemed to be painting the wrong picture: Jews faced some bumps but were generally OK until WWII, when something bad happened — and then they recovered! (The reality is that only about 10,000 Jews lived in Austria as of 2020, according to the World Jewish Congress. So even “recovered” is stretching it.)
That night, with the city enveloped by a heat wave, I lay in a scorching Viennese apartment, going down a rabbit hole as I tried to better understand Austria’s relationship with Jews. I soon learned that this extreme whitewashing of Jewish suffering wasn’t really a surprise. After all, for most of its post-WWII history, Austria did everything possible to not take blame for the Holocaust.
Only in 1988 did the country acknowledge that it was responsible for Nazi crimes during WWII, instead of labeling itself a mere victim of Nazi Germany. But what is most shocking is that, although the Austrian government has made Holocaust-denial illegal, a 2019 survey by the Anti-Defamation League showed that 30% of Austrians believe antisemitism happens because of the way Jews behave.
Obviously, we need more quality Holocaust education worldwide, but perhaps the problem isn’t just the lack of Holocaust education in schools. It’s also the fact that the current way we present Holocaust education does not seem to be working.
As Dara Horn writes in her 2021 nonfiction book, “People Love Dead Jews,” current Holocaust education is made in the following model: “We tell a story about dead Jews that makes everyone feel better about themselves, because, compared to the Nazis, we all look like good people.”
Oftentimes, this story is uplifting, with a minimal amount of death, some sort of love story woven in, and a “savior” (usually non-Jewish) who tried to help the “helpless” Jews. After all, this connects to the most convenient mentality: Why marinate in something that happened 80 years ago when you can take the easy way out and act as if everything was/is OK?
This was exactly my experience at the Jewish museums in Vienna. They don’t seem interested in focusing on angst and death. Instead, they want to ignite hope and show the humanity of everyone. But by doing so, they neglect the true horror of the Holocaust. Even worse, I see them as sending the message that you can only address the Holocaust if you act like it wasn’t that bad.
But this presents a huge problem in society: Why does the world only want to interact with Jews when we are silent or downplaying our suffering?
I was saddened and shocked by this trip, but my spirits suddenly lifted when I stepped foot into the JFK Airport in New York and saw an Orthodox Jewish family rushing to their gate. I was finally back in America — the place that, for hundreds of years, has been a safe haven for Jews.
Or so I thought. The same problems with Holocaust education and antisemitism that I saw in Vienna suddenly seemed to appear everywhere around me.
Sure, Jews have had it easier here than in Europe, but why did I still decide to hide the cover of Primo Levi’s memoir and tuck my Magen David under my shirt? Why did I worry about telling my non-Jewish friends that I had visited a “Holocaust” museum? Am I being totally paranoid in thinking that I will be targeted for expressing my Judaisim?
Perhaps, but I can’t help it. Seeing the amount of hatred in the Bay Area alone, I no longer have the courage to play with “what-if” scenarios. Instead, I, along with many other Jews, have started to see the worst in people in order to protect myself.
This is because the reality is that antisemitism is a problem here, too.
In the aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre in Israel, Jews around the world have been targeted by those seeking to deny our right to exist as individuals and as a nation.
But we must all make it our duty to properly educate ourselves and to fight antisemitism.
If we don’t and if we continue allowing even Jewish museums to idolize our “saviors” while hiding the horrors of antisemitism, then we will only play into the idea that the only acceptable Jew is a silent one.