June 19, 2007
Offenberger Given Unique Access to the Archive of the Jewish Community in Vienna
"I was 19 years old. I still wasn't sure what I wanted to do with my life, but I knew then that I had to learn more about the past."Ilana Fritz Offenberger
 Worcester, Mass. - Ilana F. Offenberger, a student in the Ph.D. program of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University, has been given unique access to the Archive of the Jewish Community in Vienna, a massive collection of official papers, correspondence, and other materials, the discovery of which stunned historians in 2000.
According to the recent New York Times report, A Nation's Lost Holocaust History, Now on Display (2 June 2007) "The Vienna cache makes up one of the largest Holocaust archives of any Jewish community, some two million pages. With it, historians will be better able to understand how the Holocaust unfolded and provide a window into the daily life of Vienna's Jews."Offenberger, of Beverly Farms, MA, has been researching, studying, and translating portions of the collection for her doctoral dissertation, "The Nazification of Vienna and the Response of the Viennese Jews."
"The archival collection contains materials that had never been researched before and I was one of the very first scholars to dig through them,"Offenberger said. Although they have not been available to the public, she was given special permission to research the archives by the Jewish community in Vienna. She was then granted a nine-month fellowship (April 2006) at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), in Washington, D.C., to conduct this work.
Offenberger was very close to her grandmother, who fled Vienna in 1938, and she is named after her grandfather, Fritz, who died when she was very young. He was also from Vienna, was arrested and survived incarceration at Dachau and Buchenwald. Her grandfather was as silent about the war years as her grandmother was effusive. "I definitely grew up with two dimensions regarding the Holocaust,"she says. "My grandfather didn't talk about it much with anybody. My very Viennese grandmother was an excellent cook, who loved to entertain. She carried a lot of nostalgic Austrian-ness with her and a deep longing for the past."Ilana and she often talked of visiting Vienna together one day.
In 1996, while an undergraduate at Skidmore College, Offenberger's grandmother died. "That was a turning point for me."She seized a study abroad opportunity in Austria and spent her junior year there, primarily in Salzburg. While there, she went on a school trip to Vienna. "I went to archives of the Austrian Republic, gave the name ‘Offenberger' and was told to come back the next day. Lo, and behold, they gave me a huge pile of original papers documenting the persecution, expropriation, and deportation of my grandfather and his family."The extensive collection was official, stamped with "swastikas and other Nazi insignia, and many papers included my great-grandfather's signature."Offenberger recalls her emotions while looking at those papers for the first time. "I was 19 years old. I still wasn't sure what I wanted to do with my life, but I knew then that I had to learn more about the past."
From Vienna, Offenberger embarked on the academic journey that has led her to pursue a Ph.D. at Clark University, where she is in her fifth year. She has served as a teaching assistant, received many honors including a Claims Conference Fellowship, spoken at area schools and colleges, and presented papers at various conferences. She is fluent in German— constantly reading and translating, as it is the primary language of her research—and she passed the proficiency exam in Spanish as well.
Offenberger hopes to travel to Vienna this summer to view the new exhibition at the Jewish Museum Vienna, which will feature a selection of items from the archival cache discovered in 2000. In the meantime she is writing and exploring her career options for the future. She plans to defend her dissertation in May 2008.
"The discovery of this archive is hugely significant, and I am delighted that it will be made available to scholars through the agreement between the Jewish Community of Vienna and the USHMM,"said Debórah Dwork, Rose Professor of Holocaust History and the Director of the Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. "I am thrilled that my doctoral student, Ilana Offenberger, was granted access to these documents even before they have been made public."
Offenberger has been supported by a fellowship from the Claims Conference, and went on to be honored with the award of a fellowship from the USHMM to work on these papers, Dwork added. "A top-notch student, her fine-grained study of the Jewish community in Vienna breaks new ground: she scrutinizes a community under siege to understand how people understand threat and respond to it -- the pregenocidal period. How does one recognize social deterioration? How does one come to realize that the situation is out of control? And then: what does one do? And finally: what can we learn from this in order to respond pro-actively in pregenocidal situations today?"
Offenberger received her BA in German Studies at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY. She is a graduate of Hamilton Wenham High School, in Hamilton, MA, and is the daughter of Robert and Suzanne Offenberger, of Beverly Farms.
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