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| Dr. Jacqueline Vansant. |
CHESTERTOWN, MD—Sometime
between March and August of 1938, a small group of 15- and 16-year-old Jewish
schoolboys stood on a bridge in Vienna and said goodbye to each other “forever.”
Their families were about to flee Austria to avoid the increasing Nazi persecution.
But pledging to stay in touch, the boys first devised a complicated plan for a
group correspondence or “round robin.”
On Tuesday, October 23,
Washington College alumna Jacqueline Vansant ’76, a professor of German
studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, will share the story of the
remarkable correspondence the young men maintained for more than 15 years
across three continents. Her
presentation, “Making Connections over Space and Time: The Extraordinary Group
Correspondence of Jewish-Austrian Schoolboys,” will take place at 4:30 p.m. in
the Washington College Hillel House, 313 Washington Avenue. It is free and open
to the public.
Vansant says she was first
drawn to exile studies as a student of Washington College professor of German Erika
Salloch, who had fled Nazi Germany. She has long focused her research on
post-war Austrian literature and culture and in 2001 published Reclaiming
‘Heimat’: Trauma and Mourning in Memoirs of Jewish-Austrian Reemigres.
When Vansant heard about the correspondence among the
nine Viennese schoolboys, she saw an opportunity to study how the experiences
of the youth compared with those of the adult Jews who escaped Austria. “I was
also fascinated by the thought of looking at texts that were contemporaneous
with the historical events described in them,” she adds. “The letters indeed
are amazing!”
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| John Kautsky. |
Vansant has worked closely with one of the original
correspondents, John Kautsky, now a professor emeritus of Political
Science at Washington University in St. Louis. She also met the son of
correspondent Ali Hector, who emigrated to Erez Israel, and learned more about
Ali’s life after the correspondence ended.
“My conversations with John Kautsky have given me a
fuller understanding of just how important the correspondence was for the young
men,” says Vansant. “John remained friends with some of the correspondents
until their recent deaths. His wife, Lilli, has also shared her experiences of
flight from Austria, which bring home how many stories are out there to be told.”
The Oct. 23 talk is sponsored
by the Department of Modern Languages; the Institute for the Study of Religion,
Politics, and Culture; the Office of Multicultural Affairs; and Hillel House.
For more information, contact Nicole Grewling at (800) 422-1782, ext.
5763, or by email, ngrewling2@washcoll.edu.
