After Survival Book

Even after falling in love with Vienna, his adopted city, Leon Zelman longed for his childhood home, the Polish shtetl Szcekociny. Like prewar Vienna, the shtetl was vibrant with Jewish history and culture until the Holocaust consumed it. Today, Zelman is proud of his dual identities: Jewish by birth, Viennese by a tragic twist of fate and then by choice. And although a piece of his life was lost, his memoir is less about loss than about recovery and, of course, survival. He places more emphasis on the life he made for himself after his experience in the Lodz ghetto and a series of concentration camps and after the period of painful readjustment as a teenager following Liberation. Surrounded by many wartime enemies, Zelman has been instrumental nonetheless in rebuilding a Jewish community in Vienna. As a "public" Jew in Austria, he has walked a political tightrope for fifty years and has a unique perspective on displacement and postwar politics and here, in his memoir, he relates his experiences with the Waldheim affair, Bruno Kreisky, the World Jewish Congress, and Edgar Bronfman. In his capacity as informal diplomat and educator, Zelman has hosted thousands of Jews through the Jewish Welcome Service, and he continues to provide a bridge between the Jews (past and present) and new generations of Austrians.Read More