This gripping memoir by Zelman (b. 1928), a journalist and director of the Israel Department at the Austrian Travel Agency in Vienna, deals with both how he survived the Holocaust and how he carried on with life after the war in Vienna. After his father was shot by the Nazis, the author fled to Lodz from the Polish shtetl of Szczekociny with his mother and young brother, Shayek. Zelman vividly describes their struggle to survive in the ghetto, where his mother eventually starved to death. Zelman and Shayek were shipped to Auschwitz and later were evacuated to another camp, where Shayek perished. The book is most interesting, however, for what Zelman has to say about life in Austria after the war, when he decided to dedicate himself to the reestablishment of a Jewish community in Vienna. The author details how he became president of the Association of Jewish University Students and worked with the Jewish Welcome Service to encourage and help Jews who had fled Austria to return for a visit. Of particular interest is Zelman's account of how he came to recognize the virulent anti-Semitism that, he found, still exists in Austria, as well as his perspective on Kurt Waldheim, the former U.N. secretary-general whose conduct during the war came under attack when he ran for?and won?Austria's presidency.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Product Description
Even after falling in love with Vienna, his adopted city, Leon Zelman longed for his childhood home, the Polish shtetl Szcekociny. Like prewar Vienna, the shtetl was vibrant with Jewish history and culture until the Holocaust consumed it. Today, Zelman is proud of his dual identities: Jewish by birth, Viennese by a tragic twist of fate and then by choice. And although a piece of his life was lost, his memoir is less about loss than about recovery and, of course, survival. He places more emphasis on the life he made for himself after his experience in the Lodz ghetto and a series of concentration camps and after the period of painful readjustment as a teenager following Liberation.
Surrounded by many wartime enemies, Zelman has been instrumental nonetheless in rebuilding a Jewish community in Vienna. As a "public" Jew in Austria, he has walked a political tightrope for fifty years and has a unique perspective on displacement and postwar politics and here, in his memoir, he relates his experiences with the Waldheim affair, Bruno Kreisky, the World Jewish Congress, and Edgar Bronfman. In his capacity as informal diplomat and educator, Zelman has hosted thousands of Jews through the Jewish Welcome Service, and he continues to provide a bridge between the Jews (past and present) and new generations of Austrians.
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