"Return Home: Holocaust Survivors Reestablishing Lives in Postwar Vienna"
Professional Background
Elizabeth Anthony is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Clark University in Massachusetts. She received a Master of Social Work at the University of Maryland. For her Barbara and Richard Rosenberg Fellowship, Ms. Anthony conducted research for her project, “Return Home: Holocaust Survivors Reestablishing Lives in Postwar Vienna.”
Ms. Anthony wrote, with Dirk Rupnow, “DPs in Wien: Das jüdische Altersheim in der Seegasse,” [DPs in Vienna: The Jewish Nursing Home on Seegasse] in editors Jim G. Tobias and Peter Zinke’s, Nurinst 2010, Beiträge zur deutschen und jüdischen Geschichte, Schwerpunktthema: Leben danach – Jüdischer Neubeginn im Land der Täter, Jahrbuch ded Nürnberger Instituts für NS-Forschung und jüdische Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts (2010), as well as, “Sie bringen den Überlebenden Frieden,” [They bring the Survivors Peace] in Andreas Kuba’s, A Letter to the Stars: Holocaust, die Überlebenden (2005) and the foreword in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Echoes of Memory Volume 1 (2003) and Volume 2 (2004). She has presented her work at conferences throughout the United States, in Canada, Israel, and Europe. Ms. Anthony is the recipient of a 2010-2011 Fulbright Fellowship, a Claims Conference Graduate Studies Fellowship, a Fromson Graduate Fellowship from Clark University, and a Holocaust Educational Foundation Research Fellowship. She participated in the Reading Yiddish for Holocaust Research program, co-organized by Indiana University and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She has language skills in German and Yiddish.
Fellowship Research
During her tenure at the Center, Ms. Anthony researched the experiences of Austrian Holocaust survivors who returned to and made permanent homes in Vienna after World War II. She studied both private and professional experiences, as well as the postwar situation of the Austrian Jewish community. Her research explored Holocaust survivors’ rationale for returning to a country that had expelled them and did not expect them to return, and investigated the issues and problems they confronted in doing so. To complete her research, Ms. Anthony utilized the Museum’s archives of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien (IKG), the International Tracing Service, and the Oral History archives, as well as private family collections and testimony.
Ms. Anthony was in residence at the Mandel Center from August 1 to 31, 2010 to July 1 to September 30, 2011.