'Write’ of passage: Professor receives Fulbright to teach in Austria, research historic letters

Professor Jacqueline Vansant, pictured above (left) on a hike in Austria last summer, will return to Austria as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar.

She was in Amsterdam at the time—the same place as the young man who penned it nearly 70 years earlier.

“He was describing the rows of bicycles and how the windows didn’t have curtains,” said Vansant, Professor of German. “Those were the same details that I noticed when I was there. I got chills.”

But the young man who wrote the letter—John Kautsky—and Vansant had different reasons for their stay in Amsterdam. She was doing research. He had been forced out of his home in Vienna, Austria, and was fleeing the Nazi party. He ultimately immigrated to the United States in the 1940s.

Kautsky, whom Vansant had interviewed, said these letters sat in his St. Louis, Missouri basement. They weren’t just any correspondence – they were nearly 15 years of letters from Jewish boys who had fled Vienna prior to World War II, moving to France, England, the United States and Palestine, which later became Israel.

The letters began in 1938, when the boys were young teens, and ended in the mid 1950s. Some were written in German, some in French and others, English. Kowski later collected the surviving letters from the other boys for safekeeping.

“Letters like these are so important because they really put a human face on the statistics. We hear about how people fled their homes during the reign of the Nazi party and how difficult it is to get an affidavit,” Vansant said. “The boys tell us their story. It’s their words.”

Your Place or Mine?

Vansant now will help spread their words to others. To help her do this, the long-time University of Michigan-Dearborn educator was awarded the prestigious Fulbright U.S. Scholar grant. This is her fourth award.

This Fulbright honor enables her to further research the boys’ letters (which Kautsky later donated to the Graz Archive for the History of Sociology in Austria), organize them, put them in historic context and translate them so that both German- and English-speaking people can read them.

College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters Dean Martin J. Hershock said the college is proud of Vansant’s award and her work to preserve the past.

“Faculty like Jackie Vansant are more than just teachers, they are teacher-scholars whose work is shaping academic debate around the globe. Our students are thus exposed to leading-edge research in the classes that they take with our faculty,” he said. “As we rapidly lose direct ties to this pivotal and incomprehensible moment in the world’s history, the work of scholars like Jackie Vansant ensure that the world will remember.”

In addition to her correspondence research, Vansant will teach three courses she designed and organize a film series at the University of Vienna from March through the end of June 2016.

“My proposed courses and activities aim at a nuanced understanding of the relationship between the individual and place, and the social construction of place, and its relationship to memory and individual and national identities,” she said.

The Fulbright award will take Vansant back to a country she has grown to love. Vansant first traveled to Austria as an undergraduate junior in 1974 for a study abroad experience. She said a favorite teacher named Erika Salloch— who had fled Europe when the Nazis came to power—encouraged her to go.

Years later, Vansant revisited Austria on a student Fulbright in 1982 for her dissertation on Austrian woman writers, including Elfriede Jelinek, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004.

She returned on a Fulbright in 1990 to research Jewish-Austrian authors who wrote memoirs about being exiled and later moving back. Their memoirs were an attempt to reclaim their roots as Austrians.

“It’s just a beautiful place. I remember my first train ride there when I was 20, looking out the window and seeing fields of poppies,” she said. "Those experiences stay with you.”

Preservation for the Next Generation

Reading the letters the boys wrote, Vansant said they were attached to the culture. But unlike those who fled as adults and longed to return to Austria, the boys saw their new travels as an adventure and never looked back.

“This was very different than the memoirs of those who left Austria as adults. These boys hardly talked about Austria,” Vansant said.

“It’s amazing that 15- and 16-year-old boys would write these really involved letters that chronicled their experiences getting out of their homeland, adapting to their new countries, how Jewish people were treated in their new places, and what happened to their family members who couldn’t escape with them.”

Vansant’s research will not only share these personal stories with a new generation and give faces and names with an important historic time – it will also preserve the memories of the boys who wrote those letters many years before.

Vansant said Kautsky passed away in October 2013, and she believes he was the last surviving letter writer.

“Very early in their correspondence, the boys talked about wanting to make sure the letters were kept, just in case they would be of historical interest in the future,” she said. “They had the foresight, as teens, to see that. I want to do what I can to continue sharing their story.”