BEHIND THE HEADLINES Young Austrians choose work on Holocaust instead of army

VILNIUS, Lithuania, Dec. 31 (JTA) — A young Austrian volunteer at this country’s Jewish museum has confronted his own family’s past while educating Lithuanians about the Holocaust. Markus Ebenhoch’s grandfather on his father’s side and his mother’s uncle, now both 82, served in Lithuania as Nazi Germany’s soldiers during World War II. My uncle “recently told me that he saw executions of Jews when he was in Lithuania. Grandfather doesn’t want to talk about his wartime experience,” he says. Ebenhoch was not aware of this part of his family history when he came to Lithuania in 1996 as a volunteer for the Memory Service project. Sponsored by the Austrian government, the project has allowed dozens of young Austrians to serve as volunteers at Holocaust-related institutions around the world as an alternative to obligatory military service since the program began in 1992. The government-funded program is the brainchild of Andreas Maislinger, a lecturer of political science at the University of Innsbruck. About 10 percent of the 34,000 men drafted annually opt for alternative civil service even though, at 14 months, it is longer than the 9-month army service. The Austrian government provides monthly stipends to cover basic living expenses. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and the Leo Baeck Institute in New York will soon welcome their third Austrian volunteers. The Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center is about to get its first. Participating institutions also include Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum in Poland. “I think it’s more important to help institutions that are less rich with knowledge and funds,” says Ebenhoch, who was the first program participant to work as an intern at the Jewish State Museum in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius. Ebenhoch, who just completed his internship, plans to pursue a degree in comparative religion at Vienna University. Before working at a Holocaust institution, young Austrians spend months taking courses in Holocaust and Jewish history. Ebenhoch also spent several months of intensive Russian- language training. The project seems to reflect a new spirit in Austria, a willingness among younger Austrians to confront their country’s past — to admit the nation’s share of guilt in the crimes of the Third Reich. This is not an easy task, Ebenhoch, 20, said citing his own family’s example. “When I took this job, my parents didn’t even know about the Holocaust,” he says. Ebenhoch’s father is a farmer-turned-textile worker, and his mother is a schoolteacher. I “first told them about the Jewish tragedy,” Ebenhoch says. Indeed, when Ebenhoch joined the project in spring 1996, some family members were not supportive. The older generation did not like “the fact that I’m working for Jews” instead of going to the army, he says. Ebenhoch was not surprised that a part of his family holds anti-Semitic views. He says that anti-Semitism has a long-standing tradition in his family’s western Austrian province of Voralberg. Such views are not limited to the older generation. Ebenhoch said some of his friends in Vienna — where he studied before choosing alternative service — do not understand “why I’m working for a Jewish institution.” The young Austrian did a variety of tasks at the museum, but his main work was visiting Lithuanian schools to talk about Jewish Lithuanian history and the Holocaust. “It’s the most important part of what I’ve been doing here, because they don’t know anything about this,” Ebenhoch said of his teaching experience. The Jewish Museum in Vilnius includes an extensive permanent exhibition on the Holocaust, which took the lives of approximately 94 percent of the country’s prewar Jewish population of 240,000. Historians say the scale of the tragedy could have been smaller if it were not for the collaboration of local residents with the Nazis. Ebenhoch said he was surprised by the degree of ignorance among Lithuanians about this page of the Baltic nation’s history — Christian Lithuanians make up just 1 percent of approximately 3,000 people who annually visit the Holocaust exhibition at the museum, he said. It was only in 1988, after decades of Austria’s dubious claim to being the “first victim” of Nazi aggression — Hitler took over the country in 1938 — that many Austrians did start to admit their country’s share of guilt for the Nazi crimes. A change came in the wake of the controversy surrounding Kurt Waldheim, the former U.N. secretary-general who was elected president of Austria amid worldwide accusations about his wartime service in a Nazi unit. Ebenhoch believes that Lithuanians, too, will have to confront the issue of wartime collaboration. Soon after Lithuania gained its independence from the Soviet Union six years ago, nationalism flourished along with a desire to settle historical accounts for the 50 years of Soviet occupation. As part of that process, Jews were often scapegoated. One particularly convenient accusation was that Jews had collaborated with the communists, especially during the 1940-1941 Soviet campaign to exile thousands of locals to Siberia — a thinly veiled justification of Lithuanians’ wartime collaboration with the Nazis. Now, many in Lithuania share the view that the Nazi occupation and the wartime Jewish tragedy were a lesser evil compared to the Soviet occupation and what is called here the Soviet genocide of Lithuanians. In this atmosphere, the Lithuanian government has demonstrated a reluctance to prosecute alleged war criminals — Lithuanians who collaborated with the Nazis to murder Jews. “Austria had the strength to cope with its own history,” says Ebenhoch. “We would like to help Lithuanians cope with theirs.”