YS: If you were to choose an object for the exhibit, which object would it be?
AH: There is a small, worn leather file folder that was in a box of family artifacts we received in 2002, from the estate of my grandfather’s last surviving sister after she passed away. It is the perfect size to fit the basics, which were also in the box: my great grandmother and great aunt’s Austrian passports, issued by the National Socialist regime, for their departure to the United States in June 1938. This file folder is just big enough to also hold any additional travel documents, like tickets, and the little bit of money they were allowed to bring, when they fled Vienna.
YS: Why did you choose this object? What do you associate with it?
AH: This object spoke to me very strongly when I was initially reviewing the contexts of the box of family artifacts to begin to prepare our petition for the Austrian authorities, after they opened a pathway in 2020 for descendants of victims of the National Socialist and Austro-fascist regimes to regain citizenship. I have traveled extensively throughout my life and have never found the perfect wallet or passport holder that I can consistently use comfortably. Even though it is starting to fall apart, I wanted to use this file folder myself, for my travel, after I saw it.
When I think about the journey that my last remaining family in Vienna undertook in 1938, fleeing their home to arrive to an unknown reality in the United States, I wonder whose job it was to care for this folder and its contents. I imagine that person would have anxiously always kept one hand on it in a pocket, since this small file folder would have held everything that they needed to complete their journey. If something had happened to it, and its contents, they would have been frozen in transit without any clear way to cross borders and board trains and ships, to arrive at the destination that became more urgently important as each day passed and the situation in Europe became ever more complicated and destructive.
I love the in-between state that travel affords, flying or riding between destinations with nobody looking for me, blending in with the crowd. I find it very relaxing. But I have never undertaken an urgent journey with no point of return. I picture my family on their 9-day odyssey crossing Europe and the Atlantic, going further distances than they ever had before, without being able to look back, knowing they were among the lucky ones. I can imagine that their liminal time in transit was racked with worry that a border would remain closed to them, or they would be pulled off a train, or something else would happen to arrest them. Knowing their documents were safe in this small, durable file folder would have offered comfort.
To me, this object represents both realities. The act of travel is neutral on its own, but the same object can be used to facilitate that travel in both positive and negative circumstances. I think my family that initially used this object would be overwhelmed and overjoyed with the positive opportunities we have had to move through this world, and I hope they would be proud of how we have used them.
YS: Where did your family live before the Holocaust and where do they live nowadays? Could you please briefly explain the most important stations in the family history?
AH: Prior to the Holocaust, my maternal grandfather’s family lived in New York, Vienna, and Czechoslovakia. My maternal grandfather’s parents were both born in what is now western Slovakia, and his uncommon Germanic surname (Waldapfel) can be traced back to the mid-1700s in that region. In the early 1900s, they moved to the Ostrava, Czechia, metropolitan area, where they had extended family connections. In 1908, they moved to Vienna for better economic opportunities, where they imported and sold liquor. My grandfather and his siblings grew up in Hernals, Vienna, in the twilight of the Dual Monarchy, during World War I, and through the chaotic 1920s.
After World War I, during the economic crisis, my grandfather’s two older siblings immigrated to New York City. His father passed away in Vienna in 1924, and my grandfather joined his siblings in New York in 1928. His mother and youngest sister did not want to leave, and remained in Vienna for the next ten years, as the situation in Europe deteriorated. The three siblings in the United States were all citizens by 1937, and they began a family sponsored visa process to bring their mother and sister over just prior to the Anschluss. My great grandmother and great aunt received permanent residence despite their strained economic reality in Vienna. They joined the family in New York in June 1938. There was significant extended family still living in Czechoslovakia at the time, and my understanding is that nobody who remained in Europe survived World War II.
Today, my family is scattered throughout Boston, New Jersey, and Washington DC in the northeast United States, and in Mexico City.
YS: How does your family’s survival story and the Holocaust continue to influence you today?
AH: My family never directly communicated any of their survival story to the generations born in the Americas. I have pieced together what I could through historical records and family documents, but there is still much I do not know, and is probably lost forever. I wrote a book about the process I undertook to regain Austrian nationality, and what I learned about this survival story during the citizenship application, because it was almost too much to think about and understand. I needed a way to process what I was uncovering and experiencing. This book, Austrian Again: Reclaiming a Lost Legacy, will be published in October 2025.
Knowing that I come from this complex past, and that today we exist because of a great deal of luck, is sobering. In global terms, I have lived my life in an extremely privileged way. I have always had food and housing. I have studied in some of the best universities in the world. I have a professional career that allows me to make a living doing fulfilling work with the goal of improving lives. My cousins, brother, and I won the birth lottery, but much pain and suffering happened to bestow us with this privilege. It gives me much more sympathy and empathy for people around the world who do not have the privileges that we have, who undertake risky and perilous journeys in the hopes that they, their children, and their grandchildren, will be provided with more opportunities and a better life as well.
At the same time, considering my own journey to Austrian citizenship, and how Europe has changed in the past 80-odd years, it also gives me hope for places where there continues to be civil strife that expels, and murders, persecuted minorities. Eventually, with time beginning to heal wounds, there can be some kind of formal process that recognizes and tries to right past wrongs. Restitution and reparations for those whose ancestors suffered under fascist or apartheid regimes can be polemic concepts, but there needs to be at least some kind of public recognition of state-sponsored persecution against its own for meaningful healing and reconciliation to happen.