Watching My Mother: Memories That Never Wash Away

Authored by Abena Amoh

Jewish people scrubbing the sidewalk in Austria (1938).

“I watched as my mother was forced to scrub the sidewalks with other Jews shortly after the Anshluss.”
Vienna, Austria (March 1938)

On March 12, 1938, Adolf Hitler officially announced an Anschluss between Austria and Germany (History, n.d.). The German term Anschluss means union (Encyclopedia Britannica n.d.). Hitler claimed that his desire was to unify all European countries that spoke German. Interestingly, the idea of this type of unification was initially proposed by Austrian socialists in 1919 (Low 1974, 1).

Continue reading