Screenshot of the online interview with Dominique Dubois
by Dominique Dubois
A descendant reflects on his interview experience and Austria’s complex past (Pilot project in Vienna – Meet the Library)
After I had accepted to participate in the CU REMEMBER project, to contribute to a video about my late mother, with an interview by a student in the final year at school, I met Veronika Schallhart for lunch whilst on a visit to Vienna. Veronika explained that I should expect the interview to last about half an hour. Xaver and I talked for close to two hours!
Just to explain my background, my mother fled Vienna in May 1939 on her own at the age of twenty-three and came to Great Britain as a Jewish refugee. She lived in this country for the rest of her life. The Nazi regime murdered her parents and other Jewish relatives during the Shoah. My mother began to share about her Jewish background when she was eighty seven and I was fifty-four. We talked for the next nine years until her death at the age of ninety-seven. I researched the family history for ten years before writing a family memoir.
A conversation about feelings rather than facts
Xaver set the tone for our conversation by sharing his wish that our conversation should be about feelings rather than facts. The organisers of the project had given documents to the group. The students knew facts about my mother and her family but knew little about their feelings. Our lengthy conversation focused on emotions from start to finish. We were both willing to be open. Pauses occurred naturally, to absorb what the other was saying.
Xaver was well prepared. The group had drawn up a list of questions to ask after considering all the material which they had about my mother, together with their own research. Xaver only completed the interview when he had posed all the questions. The collaborative nature of this project clearly came across.
Xaver asked me questions which no-one had previously raised. One was about what age I would have liked to have first learnt that my mother was Jewish. (I had first discovered my mother was Jewish when I was fifty-four; I am now seventy-six). After careful reflection, I answered in my early thirties. I explained that I would not have had the maturity to face such trauma and loss earlier in my life.
This led on to a conversation about the impact of gradually learning from my mother about what she had had to endure and of my own research into my family history, I found myself talking about the importance of facing reality, preserving memory, trying to respect everyone, of persevering. The way my mother, and her parents, whom, so sadly I had never known, had led their lives made me try to live as positively as they had done.
I am your Austrian grandson
The conversation about successfully applying for Austrian nationality was equally concerned with feelings. I talked about reading letters my mother had written shortly after the war ended to Austrian friends. The depth of her attachment to her country of origin became clear. My decision to apply to become an Austrian citizen was not to gain an EU passport (I already hold a French passport) but to reclaim their nationality and right to vote, which had been taken away from my mother and her parents by the Nazi authorities. I shared the experience that, after collecting my Austrian passport from the Austrian consulate, I walked back through the streets of London, then crossing the River Thames to reach the railway station to go home. Whilst on the bridge, I paused to speak silently to my maternal grandparents: “I am your Austrian grandson.”
I also shared that I wanted to vote in Austrian elections because my mother and her family could no longer vote after the Anschluss. I had deliberately learnt about current Austrian politics and to think about voting in a system of proportional representation. I felt so moved that, by law, I had to vote where my family had last lived in the country – the sixth district of Vienna.
Dominique Dubois receiving his Austrian passport in London
Dominique Dubois visiting the Shoa Wall of Names in Vienna
Nothing can replace personal encounters
At one point in our conversation, I talked about the gathering addresses in Vienna where relatives were sent before being deported from Austria to ‘the East’. Xaver shared that his school had been one such gathering address. Nazi officials ordered all the schoolchildren, including two close friends, one Jewish one non-Jewish, to line up along one wall. The non-Jewish friend whispered to his friend to flee as soon as possible, which he did. About eighty years later pupils from the school researched the family backgrounds of the two friends and arranged for two descendants to meet at the school. I then realised that it is possible to challenge antisemitism in diverse ways.
At the end of our lengthy conversation Xaver asked if we could meet when I next come to Vienna. I readily agreed.
When my wife, Ruth, and I first went to Vienna in 2013, we met a friend of my mother, then in her early nineties. The first thing she said to me was “We were anti-Nazi as a family”. She had last seen me as an infant. On that trip we met the current occupants of the flat where my mother was born and grew up until she had to flee her native country. Four postgraduate students at Vienna University lived there. They could not have been more welcoming and interested in my family story.
Unfortunately, Austria’s dark history continues to this day
Five years later I became friends with an Austrian couple of my generation, who had settled in London. They recalled learning at school that Nazi Germany had conquered Austria against the will of its people in 1938. It was only after they left school that the next generation of Austrian schoolchildren were taught that thousands of Austrians had welcomed the Nazi forces in 1938, many of whom had subsequently actively participated in the persecution of the Jews and other minorities. It has taken me quite a time to begin to understand the responses of different generations of Austrians to the history of their country between 1938 and 1945. This project highlighted I must not take the understanding, empathetic approach of Xaver and the other members of his group for granted.
Moreover, on our second to visit to Austria in 2018, I remember being shocked and saddened by the shop window in Baden bei Wien which displayed old copies of Nazi newspapers alongside copies of works by David Irving, the historian convicted of Holocaust denial in 2000 following an unsuccessful libel case filed against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt.
Indeed, the Austrian ambassador to London at the time of my application for Austrian citizenship made a public statement in a London Synagogue that Austria had been slow to recognise its participation in the Nazi treatment of the Jews. Further, at a reception at the Austrian Embassy for all those granted Austrian Citizenship as descendants of survivors of victims of the Nazi rule in Austria, this same ambassador invited anyone who had written a family memoir to give a copy to the Embassy as he was building a library of such works. I had given a copy of my memoir to the Ambassador, who thanked me warmly after reading it.
The second generation of survivors has to fulfill a mission
I wrote my family memoir as a tribute to my mother and as an attempt to preserve the memory of my mother’s family. Two synagogues and two Christian groups have subsequently asked me to speak publicly about my family and my memoir. I have now gradually come to realise that as the number of first generation of survivors diminishes, it is incumbent on the second generation to continue to share what our parents and grandparents lived through during the Second World War. This CU REMEMBER Project is one such opportunity, which it has been a privilege to be part of.