POUGHKEEPSIE, NEW YORK, 2013

“No photos.” The broad-shouldered security guard in a dark blue jacket sounds firm yet polite as he gives me the once-over. I am so focused on taking a picture of the hospital’s entrance hall that I didn’t even notice him approaching. I’m in Poughkeepsie, in the Hudson Valley, north of New York City. A few people are waiting on benches, and the wall behind the reception desk—an oblong, mint-green counter—is painted brick red. The main glass door whirs when it opens. I lower my smartphone, which I had pointed toward the huge window overlooking the parking lot, and put it in my coat pocket, a bit intimidated. The guard turns away, visibly reassured to have warded off a threat. I summon the courage to ask him: is there anyone who might help me locate some old personnel files? He seems puzzled, thinks for a second, and leads me to the virtually empty hospital library, where I’m enthusiastically greeted by a librarian.

Back in the fifties, two young doctors from Vienna worked at this hospital, I tell her. They were interns—what we’d call residents today—and spent a year serving various departments. I’m now looking for documents, references, maybe old rosters—anything that might tell me more about their time here. The librarian replies that she’ll gladly look into it, visibly flattered by the provincial hospital’s international reputation. “What are their names?” “Helga and Hans Feldner-Bustin.” She disappears into a back room. Five minutes later, she’s back. No, unfortunately, they aren’t in any of the old files. I’m so clearly disappointed that she asks why I’m interested. “They’re my grandparents.”

That evening I take the train some ninety miles back to New York City, downcast that no one here remembers my grandparents. After all, my grandmother Helga spoke of their stay here so often. In her bedroom there’s even a newspaper clipping from 1955 hanging on the wall, from a Jewish-American newspaper. The photo shows a smiling young couple; Helga is twenty-six, Hansi twenty-nine. “Also aboard the Saturnia were Drs. Hans and Helga Feldner-Busztin [sic], who came from Vienna to intern at Poughkeepsie Hospital. Dr. Helga was liberated from Nazi concentration camp in 1945. Dr. Hans said his brother and parents perished in concentration camp but he escaped when a Christian doctor adopted him.”

The two had arrived in the States still fairly undecided. They knew they’d definitely stay there a year, they said, and then they could see how they liked it. Due to the shortage of doctors in the United States, Helga was immediately given demanding work in Poughkeepsie, unlike the Viennese hospital where she had worked as an assistant doctor for the previous two and a half years. The salary was good too. Hansi had previously been an unpaid visiting physician at a neurological clinic in Vienna and had only earned pay for overnight services. In Poughkeepsie they could even afford a car, which they shared with two other doctors. And yet by April 1956 they had gone back to Vienna, where they spent the rest of their lives.

Helga and Hansi, 1950s.

I only began to wonder why when I moved to the United States myself. In the summer of 2012, I started my master’s degree in New York City. I was 23, just a bit younger than my grandmother had been back then. New York had fascinated me since my teenage years, of course, because it had been the backdrop for pivotal scenes in so many movies. Here, Woody Allen had been funny in a way I had long enjoyed. Here, shy Spiderman saved people from all sorts of villains. Here, despite all adversities, the heroes of the rom-coms I adored invariably found each other.

With its various neighborhoods, cultures, and broad range of possibilities, the city was so visibly diverse that I was convinced I could make a place for myself here. Like my grandparents, I’d stay for a year and then see how I liked it.

Within the first few weeks of my arrival, though, I realized I was often misunderstood when I told people where I came from, especially when talking to local Jews. Many who heard my accent and learned I was Austrian became suspicious at first. “I’m Jewish,” I said, as if to reassure them my ancestors hadn’t committed war crimes. They were astonished: What? There are still Jews in Austria? Had my grandparents migrated from the Soviet Union after the war? No, I explained, my grandparents are Holocaust survivors who remained in their birthplace, Vienna, after the war. This was met with even more incomprehension. How could they live in a country where they’d been treated so terribly? Every now and then people’s reactions sounded reproachful, as if my grandparents had lacked the pride or courage to leave Austria. “Many stayed for financial reasons,” somebody once explained to me, with a condescending tone.

I had never made a big deal about my homeland. Like every member of a minority probably does, I often felt ignored. Why was there a Christmas break, even though I didn’t celebrate the holiday? I didn’t feel particularly Austrian. Still, it made me angry that my grandparents’ decisions were being called into question. Did that mean something about my childhood and youth in Vienna was wrong, since it arose from my grandparents’ questionable decision? At the same time, I myself had no adequate answers to such questions. That irked me even more. In fact, I couldn’t quite understand why my grandparents had returned to Vienna. How had they found reconciliation with Austria? Weren’t they constantly reminded of the humiliations they’d been subjected to following Hitler’s 1938 annexation of their homeland?

The longer I lived in New York, far from my familiar surroundings, the more interested I became in my family history. In the winter of 2012, I participated in a radio reporting workshop as part of my master’s program at the Columbia University Journalism School, and I called my grandmother Helga in Vienna. “What was your first impression of America?” I asked. “There was enough to eat,” she replied.

A couple of weeks later, one cold, sunny January day in 2013, I go to Poughkeepsie: I wanted to see the America my grandparents had come to, to try out. The formerly industrial city lies right on the Hudson, a river spanned by numerous bridges. I see colorful, three-story homes with manicured front yards, lush lawns, and Victorian estates. It’s a college town, so students now make up much of the population. It feels like a sweet, sleepy little place.

A few months later, my mother casually mentions the existence of Hansi’s papers. Her father, my grandfather, died in 1996, when I was seven. I remember his black hair and bushy eyebrows. He kept his reading glasses on a strap around his neck, so they often lay on his stomach; Helga always found his belly too big, but he affectionately referred to it as his Backhendlfriedhof, a “cemetery” for classic Viennese fried chicken. When he was listening or deep in thought, he’d put his thumb and forefinger beside his nostrils and trace the wrinkles to the left and right of his upper lip, down around the corners of his mouth, until his fingers met again at his chin. I was sure that he’d inflicted the two furrows on himself with that tic.

I find over a hundred different text files in the folder my mother sends me. Hansi had begun to write about his life around 1986. Perhaps the uproar surrounding President Kurt Waldheim’s wartime past, which sparked discussion of Austria’s complicity in the Holocaust, prompted him to document his experiences. Maybe he was just trying out his first personal computer. He had visited the IBM factory in Poughkeepsie—describing it as “the company that produces electronic brains”—and enthusiastically written home that “an industrial revolution is underway here that’s virtually unknown [in Austria].” Computers had fascinated him ever since.

Weeks go by before I look at his files. I want to establish myself as a journalist and deal with the fast-paced here and now—not the past, which we’ve already heard so much about. Besides, I already know a lot of Hansi’s stories, since they’re often retold within our family.

Finally, I read them.