In 2006, I began to research my father’s history of exile from Vienna. At the time, I knew very little about my grandparents. I was unaware of extended family living in Vienna and Poland, killed during the Holocaust. I was also clueless about Riga and the Jungfernhof concentration camp, an unremembered camp responsible for the murder of close to 4,000 Austrian and German Jews. In 2007, I used digital technologies to transcribe this research into a series of memory panels. I integrated photos with letters and paintings of carnage, to create a layered composite of new knowledge about the past. “Whereabouts Unknown” is a recently developed panel within a collection of 18 panels about exiled memory.

In December 1941, four deportation trains brought 3985 Austrian and German Jews to Jungfernhof in subzero temperatures. At Jungfernhof, an abandoned site lacking all forms of shelter and food, conditions were deplorable. Many deportees died within the first few weeks of arrival. In the panel “Whereabouts Unknown,” I insert my grandparents’ unused passport photos into the landscape at Jungfernhof. The panel depicts my grandparents as witnesses to their own murder. I use objects belonging to my father to describe his identity as a Jew within the larger context of my grandparents’ terrorizing experience as persecuted Jews at this forsaken camp.

On June 28, 1938, following my father’s release from the Gestapo headquarters at Morzinplatz, Vienna, he had 48 hours to collect documents and bid farewell to family and friends, as he boarded a train for Rotterdam. Among identification papers and photos of friends, he packed his tefillin, tallit, and Bar Mitzvah watch. In “Whereabouts Unknown,” some of these objects reappear. The richly embroidered fabric of the tefillin bag reads in stark contrast to the bleak, apocalyptic presentation of the camp. Two pages retrieved from a stash of correspondence, documents my father’s futile attempt to find his parents after the war. Eighty years passed before I could gather accurate information concerning my grandparents’ place of murder. The camp, recently converted into a recreation park, is yet to be memorialized.

Critical details about the camp are still under investigation. Were my grandparents killed at the camp in the first few months of confinement, or in the Bikernieki Forest during the Dünamünde Action taking place on March 26th, when 1800 Jews were shot “sardine style” into mass graves on a single day?  Did the lost mass grave at the Jungfernhof camp containing more than 800 bodies, eradicated by the installation of a recreation park at the site, include one or both of my grandparents? Uprooting trees and regrading the land likely destroyed additional evidence. Using ERT technologies, scientists search below the ground for the lost mass grave, recently retrieving two small bones. DNA analysis is in progress to identify whether the bones represent human remains.

I included the bones in the panel as a symbol of hope. Digging into the earth, scientists and historians continue to search for clues, hoping to piece together Jungfernhof’s devastating story of murder and slave labor. There are no surviving documents or photos portraying the profane brutality of the camp, from hanging, to rape, to unprovoked beatings, starvation, and humiliation. The question arises, why is memory important? Why do nations and individuals, time and again, choose forgetting over remembering difficult histories?

“What happens when we forget to remember?” was a question I posed for an earlier project. I maintain the premise that memory constitutes the essence of what it means to be human, to care, and to locate one’s place within history. Memory strengthens our basic capacity to connect to others and to feel energized by these connections, counteracting the numbing sensation of indifference. Memory can also invoke dialogue, inviting each generation to come to terms with the destructive forces of hatred and greed.

A selection of Exiled Memory panels was initially placed on exhibition at the University of Vienna’s Department for Philosophy of Law, Culture and Religion Law in 2008, to mark the 75th anniversary of the Anschluss. Turning into a generative project, the panels became the basis for directing The Vienna Project and the Locker of Memory Project. All three projects in addition to my teaching and writing, are dedicated to recovering memory, restoring dignity to victims and their families, while advancing issues of accountability and justice to audiences in Austria, Latvia, and the US.

Given the volatility of today’s world, will the unbearable history of the Holocaust, illuminating the collective conscience of European nations for decades, maintain its current course? Or will Holocaust memory, contributing to the enduring principal of human responsibility, become unsustainable? “What happens when we forget to remember?” becomes a call to action. Many claim that our very survival as a species is dependent on our ability to remember the crimes of past generations.