THE RETURN OF JEWISH CONCENTRATION CAMP SURVIVORS TO VIENNA IN THE IMMEDIATE POSTWAR PERIOD

On the eve of the Anschluss in 1938, the Viennese Jewish community numbered more than 185,000 members. By the end of World War II, only a few thousand remained more than 120,000 Austrian Jews had fled the Nazis to seek safety in exile and 65,000 had been murdered in the Holocaust. Despite their traumatic experiences, often at the hands of neighbors and fellow Austrians, a small percentage of the prewar Viennese Jewish population returned to reestablish their lives and families in their former home; by December 1946 community membership totaled almost 6,500. Concentration camp survivors and politically active Jewish communists and socialists comprised the first wave of Jewish returnees in 1945 and 1946. This paper probes the different concepts of "home" that motivated survivors of such diverse wartime experiences to return to Vienna. Concentration camp survivors returning immediately after liberation sought to find and regain their familial home in the only place they had ever known. Communist and socialist party members living in wartime exile also returned to Vienna as early as 1945 with idealistic intentions of taking part in the reshaping and restoring of an Austria that included them. They sought to reclaim their personal and political home.