Vienna – London: passage to safety is a documentary project that highlights the life stories of 21 Austrians who fled to the United Kingdom during the 1930s to escape National Socialism and remained there. Many of them arrived in Britain on the Kindertransport.

Over the course of several years, the photographer Marion Trestler entered into conversation with these Austrian Jewish refugees, photographing, filming and visiting them often over a period of time. She thus approached these individuals’ life stories in a very personal way and documented them in recorded interviews. In the second phase of the project, Marion Trestler asked contributors drawn from a diverse range of disciplines to provide biographical essays and contributions on her interviewees’ life stories.

"To describe this as another record of Kindertransport survivors does not do justice to the richness and depth of detail, the continuities and discontinuities of lives lived in many different ways, which are revealed through this painstaking archive. The emphasis throughout has been on the individual accounts of lives ordinary and less ordinary, the remembered life before in Vienna, and after in Britain. The accounts resist a dramatic retelling of tragedy and survival to reveal instead, through layers of personal and collective memory, prismatic accounts of displacement, contested and new identity, the diverse and different experiences of acceptance and rejection, the sometimes unstable relationship with the country of birth, and the country of adoption."  (Dr Diane Silverthorne, University of the Arts, London)

“Vienna - London: Passage to Safety” 
Emigré portraits in photographs and words
Marion Trestler (Ed.)

Format: Hardcover