Strangers at home and abroad

In March 1938, Hitler's troops invaded Austria, wildly cheered by thousands of spectators. Following the consequent annexation, a Greater Germany plebiscite recorded a 99 percent support for Austro-German unification under Hitler. By 1942, however, Allied leaders at Yalta had declared the annexed country the first victim of Nazi aggression, laying the groundwork for the suppression of Austria's collaboration in the Holocaust and establishing a grossly deficient culture of memory. Among the forgotten were the 130,000 Austrian Jews who escaped the work camps and gas chambers only to find themselves in unfamiliar lands among unsympathetic people. This book, rising out of Austria's Year of Recollection in 1988, contains the narratives of 27 ex-Austrian Jews who were forced into exile following the Anschlusz. Translated from the German by poet Ewald Osers, the book includes accounts of anti-Semitism before Hitler, the annexation, flight from the homeland, and life in exile.