Events
The Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI) organises academic events in order to provide the broader public as well as an expert audience with regular insights into the most recent research results in the fields of Holocaust, genocide, and racism research. These events, some of which extend beyond academia in the stricter sense, take on different formats ranging from small lectures to the larger Simon Wiesenthal Lectures and from workshops addressing an expert audience to larger international conferences and the Simon Wiesenthal Conferences. This reflects the institute’s wide range of activities.
The range of events further extends to the presentation of selected new publications on the institute’s topics of interest, interventions in the public space, the film series VWI Visuals, and the fellows’ expert colloquia.
VWI Visual | |||
„Package Tour" (Társasutazás), 1984, Gyula Gazdag, OmeU | |||
Thursday, 7. March 2013, 18:30 - 21:00 Admiralkino, 1070 Wien, Burggasse 119
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Gyula Gazdag’s Hungarian documentary follows a group of concentration camp survivors on a bus tour that takes them back to Auschwitz. With his emphasis on the passing of time and the transformation of the camp into a tourist attraction, Gazdag seems to be after something other than the usual Holocaust documentary, yet the tales of horror told by the survivors overwhelm his abstract, philosophical perspective, and the end result is a serious and moving film. The "package tour" of the title of this excellent documentary is a trip to Auschwitz and Birkenau by a group made up of concentration camp survivors and a younger generation of their relatives. Interspersed with the tour of both death camps and the reactions and comments of the visitors (no narration is added), is an interview with a woman who could not go on the tour because she needed yet another operation to mend the physical damage she suffered in one of these camps. As a part of her story, she tells of a chilling encounter with a neo-Nazi during one of her hospital stays who flatly states that Hitler "should have finished the job." One of the reasons that „Package Tour“ is effective and eye-opening is just this kind of juxtaposition of ignorance and cruelty versus the harsh truth of historical reality and human suffering.
Followed by a discussion between the director Gyula Gazdag and Frank Stern (Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Universität Wien)
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