In February 2000, Daniel Leithinger (20, born in Eberstalzell,
Upper Austria) and I (Martin Doblhammer, 29, born in Linz,
Upper Austria) joined the staff of the Holocaust Memorial
Center in West Bloomfield, Detroit, as full-time interns
under the auspices of Austria's Remembrance Service. This
is an alternative to Austria's compulsory national military
service. Daniel and I are involved in a variety of activities
at the HMC, including maintaining the museum's website,
creating written summaries of videotaped interviews with
survivors of the Holocaust and other witnesses, helping
to schedule tours, and coordinating the process of digitizing
the Center's oral history videos. Like the other Austrian
interns all over the world we have to serve for fourteen
months and receive a stipend for our support directly from
the Austrian government. This stipend will cover about 40%
of our total costs for this period. Thus it happens to be,
that we spend quite some hours of our spare time also together
with survivors and other volunteers of the Holocaust Memorial
Center, or more precise, we work in their gardens. Most
of the volunteers know that we are barely able to afford
our stay here and so they came up with the idea that we
should help them in return for money and food. In the beginning,
we hardly knew anything about gardening but since we were
willing to learn, we are almost professionals now. And our
satisfied customers spread the word and thus we have a relatively
big clientele, not only from the Jewish community. But to
be honest, sometimes I get the feeling that especially the
Center's volunteers do not need us as gardeners, but in
order to help us without ruining our 'dignity' they offer
this opportunity. And we are really thankful for this kind
of support. So it happened that one Sunday, after beautifying
another garden, we were invited to a real good friend who
lives in Windsor, Canada, which is located just on the other
side of the Detroit River. This man, Harry, was born in
Romania in the late 1920s and grew up in an orthodox Jewish
home. He was the only one of his immediate family who survived
the Holocaust. Harry himself had many bad experiences with
Austrian Nazis since he was an inmate in Auschwitz, in the
Mauthausen concentration camp, and later on in the Gunzkirchen
camp in Upper Austria, where he was liberated. He mentions
every time that the treatment in the small Gunzkirchen camp
was far worse than in Auschwitz or Mauthausen. One would
think that survivors of the Holocaust might be prejudiced
against us as Austrians. But I am happy to report that this
has not been the case at all. Later this Sunday evening,
after dinner, Harry told me to give him this card game,
he had asked for. This is a typical Austrian card game,
called 'Schnappskarten'. On the first hand I was wondering
why Harry requested this type of cards but then I realized
that he knew how to play this game. He learned it while
being a prisoner at the Mauthausen concentration camp. So
we started to play, and actually we played for hours. And
almost each time he drew a 'hearts card' he whispered the
German phrase "rot ist tot" ("red is dead").
He did not want to tell me where exactly he got this phrase
from; he only answered "Mauthausen". Now we are
playing cards together with Harry almost once a week. And
I hope and I am sure, that the next time Harry hears or
reads about Austria he will not only think of the Holocaust
and the recent political development in my home country,
he will also think of the first Austrians he had contact
with after his immigration to Canada more than 50 years
ago.
Martin Doblhammer
Holocaust Memorial Center, West Bloomfield
