In Vienna with Max and Erich: A Holocaust Survivor and the Work That Connects Us

With Dachau survivor Erich Finsches and Max in Vienna © Erin Fath Allen

Some days the work is sitting alone, pouring through documents in an archive or on a screen. Other days it looks like this.

My friend and colleague Max brought me to Vienna to meet Erich Richard Finsches, a Holocaust survivor who survived the bunker at Dachau, among other horrible things, and has lived in Vienna ever since, spending decades returning to schools and memorial sites to make sure the world does not forget.

Erich made me a ham and cheese sandwich.

I don't know exactly how to explain what that meant. Only that sitting there, in his apartment, eating something he had made with his own hands — the simplest, most ordinary human gesture — I felt the full distance and the full closeness between his life and mine. The most horrifying things in the world had happened to him. And here we were. Still human underneath it all.

Max and I have been working on projects together for some time and one of the great gifts of this work is the community it builds: researchers and historians who bring the same seriousness and the same love to this material. Time with Max, and time with those who witnessed history with their own eyes, always reminds me why it matters.