Looking back
by Mag. Magdalena Müllner (7th November 2008)
Seventeen years have passed since I started my research about the Jewish community of Laa an der Thaya. I am 33 now and I can truly say that more than half of my life has been shaped by the research I started as a teenager. At the time when a coincidence – or call it fate – made me aware of the existence of a former Jewish community of my hometown, it was not just my generation, but also the generations that were born after the war, who did not know about the Jewish minority that once had been part of the town.
I vividly remember the summers of my time as a senior at high school and my years as a university student. At this time they were full of visits by the former Jewish people from Laa. They were all welcome at my parents’ house. After I had graduated from high school I started to travel myself and visited my new friends abroad. It was a time full of surprises, puzzles to be solved and people to make friends with. It was an exciting, good time.
In retrospective I am aware that I owe much to my parents. They were ready to support my „project“, they were open to all the people I brought home. When it became obvious that the efforts of a private person could never initiate a memorial, it was them who supported me and together we founded the society “Lead Niskor”. My father, Dipl.Päd. Franz Müllner, has been the chairman of the society ever since.
Just recently, when I started to rebuild this website, I had many letters and documents that I had collected within all these years in my hands. It was a journey to my own past, tightly interwoven with the Jewish past of Laa an der Thaya and many personal stories that I have been told.
I rediscovered the handwritten draft of my first article („Lies in Laa“), which I had written in turquoise ink on two sheets when I had just turned 16. Now the handwriting seems awkwardly child-like to me; written down in a time when a computer was something no adult I knew possessed.
Nevertheless, the former people from Laa, whom I contacted, were all ready to take this teenager seriously. They opened their story and a part of their inner self to a girl from their old home, that must have started to vanish in their memory after all these years. Sometimes I wonder about this fact.
The result of all my efforts turned out to be bigger than life: The memorial in Laa has made it possible that the Jewish citizens of Laa permanently returned to their old home – even though only through this symbol made from stone. I consider it as important that I was the reason for many expelled people to return to their old hometown after all these years. For some of them it was the first time after the war. Due to the fact that my main interest was life before 1938, my questions also brought back happy childhood memories.
A few times I was lucky enough to connect old friends that had been separated for almost a lifetime. But new friendships were also made. At the day of the presentation of the memorial it was as if the descendants of the former people from Laa were one big family, even though most had only met a very few days before.
Friendships are essential when they form us. Many people, whom I was lucky to call friends in the past 17 years, have passed away in the meantime. Because my parents and grandparents are very young, most of my friends were even older than my grandparents. But age is of no importance when friendship rules. I miss them a lot, particularly when I recall these endless summers full of visitors. My mailbox, which used to be full all of the time, often stays empty now.
I am glad that the friendship often continues in the generation of the children and grandchildren, even though it rarely has the same intensity.
However, there is nothing I would want to have missed. The contacts that resulted from my „project“ have made me the person I am.