‘The Suppressed Years’ Austrian Railway exhibition on complicity in the Holocaust

Austria’s national railway company, Austrian Federal Railways (ÖBB), has opened an exhibition at the European Parliament documenting their complicity in the Holocaust.

The exhibition, titled “The Suppressed Years,” was opened on 4 November at a ceremony attended by members of the European Parliament, European Jewish Congress Staff, and executives of Austrian Federal Railways.

The exhibition is presented in a confined space similar to the cattle wagons that transported tens of thousands of Austrian Jews and other persecuted groups to concentration and death camps across Europe. It also documents the stories of foreigners who were forced to work on the Austrian railway, and explains how the railway was absorbed into the German rail system within days of Austria and Nazi Germany merging in 1938.

Milli Segal, an Austrian Jew who is curating the exhibition, said that it, “tells not only the story of what happens in the Holocaust, but also the background – the process of Nazification among the railway’s workers, the rooting out of dissidents, the severe oversight that existed.”

For more information, see this article by the Times of Israel, or the ÖBB website (in German).