Vienna: Walking the Past Fearing Its Return

Vienna is a city that wears its history on its sleeve. Grand buildings line the boulevards, and it’s easy to get swept up in the old-world charm of imperial palaces and bustling coffeehouses. But beneath the surface, in the cracks of ancient alleyways and the names carved into city stones, another story lingers, a story of a Jewish presence repeatedly welcomed, rejected, and at times, all but erased.

We came to Vienna not just as tourists, but as witnesses. Our goal was to trace the outlines of antisemitism that have scarred this city for over eight centuries, to walk the streets where Jewish life once flourished and then was forced out, again and again. I am the child of a Holocaust survivor, and so these journeys are never just academic for me. The weight of history is always personal, always present.

Our guide that day was Claudia, a woman whose command of Vienna’s Jewish history was matched only by her empathy. She met us early in the morning, her eyes bright, her voice clear, and immediately led us through the city’s tangled past. We walked the Juden Strasse and paused at Juden Platz, places whose very names recall the Jewish communities that once shaped Vienna. Claudia spoke with authority about the cycles of hatred that have targeted Jews here, from the time of Duke Leopold V in the late twelfth century, through the forced conversions and expulsions of the Middle Ages, to the raw terror unleashed by the Nazis.

What struck me most was how Claudia wove these events into a single, heartbreaking narrative, a story of hope and devastation, resilience and erasure. She described the Jewish quarter that stood in the shadow of St. Stephen’s Cathedral, the lives uprooted in 1421 when the entire community was expelled and many were killed. She showed us the excavations beneath Juden Platz, where the foundations of the old synagogue tell their own silent story. And she made clear that, for centuries, Jewish life in Vienna was precarious, always subject to the whims of rulers and the tides of popular hatred.

But Claudia’s insight went beyond history books. Standing in the middle of Juden Platz, she looked around and lowered her voice. “The situation now is… not so good,” she said quietly. “Every synagogue in Vienna is guarded by police and by soldiers. Since October 2023, there is a new anxiety. People are more cautious, more wary, less open than they were even a year ago.”

The armed presence increasingly common all over is an especially jarring sight in a city that prides itself on civility. And it’s not unique to Vienna; across Europe, and the Americas, the same pattern is playing out. In Jewish life everyone learns to move with a certain vigilance.

For a moment, I assumed Claudia herself must be Jewish, the depth of her feeling, her careful attention to every detail. But she shook her head. “No, I’m Catholic,” she told us. “But I believe in telling the truth. I believe in remembering.”

That night, after seven hours tracing the fragile threads of Jewish life through Vienna, I fell into a restless sleep. Sometime before dawn, I startled awake from a nightmare. In the dream, someone was pounding on our hotel door, shouting that we had to get up, to leave now. It was Claudia, her face urgent, her words desperate. She had come to hide us before the roundups began, before the morning when the Jews of Vienna would be taken away once again.

Even awake, the fear lingered. I thought of my father who survived the Shoah by the narrowest of margins. I thought of the stories I grew up with—stories of families separated by a knock at the door, of neighbors who looked away, of warnings ignored until it was too late.

It is easy to believe, walking in Vienna’s sunlight, that the past is past. But the signs are everywhere, antisemitic incidents are rising across the world. There are moments when it feels like the old cycle has begun anew: an insult shouted on a tram, a swastika scrawled on a wall, a synagogue firebombed in the night. The headlines pile up, each one a little more alarming, each one a little harder to dismiss.

History teaches us that hatred, once unleashed, is rarely content with words alone. It escalates, it spreads, it finds new justifications, new targets. And always, there are those who say it cannot happen here, not now, not again. That, too, is part of the cycle.

As we left Vienna, I was haunted by Claudia’s words and by my own dream. The lesson of this city, and of so many others, is that vigilance is never optional. Memory is not enough. We must see the warning signs for what they are and speak out before the cycle of hatred turns once more.

For the sake of those who once walked those streets, and for those still living in their shadow all around the world, we cannot afford to look away.