The Third Generation.
‘So are these the footsteps of my grandmother or my own?’
Presentation by Sabine Apostolo, Vienna (Austria)

Curator Sabine Apostolo will give a virtual tour through the exhibition “The Third Generation. The Holocaust in Family Memory” that was shown at the Jewish Museum Vienna from September 2024 to March 2025 and just closed at the Jewish Museum Munich.

Eighty years after the Holocaust, the last eyewitnesses are dying. Their stories, but also their trauma, have been passed on to their children and grandchildren. While the Second Generation grew up as direct observers of their parents’ psychological and physical damage, the Third Generation can look with greater distance at the family histories, in which memories and silence, family myths and secrets, and overwhelming or missing family legacies are ever-present. The exhibition investigates various ways of dealing with the inherited trauma and the difficult confrontation with the burden of family history. The objects show biographical and artistic coping strategies by the generations after the Shoah and highlight the common features shared by a heterogeneous group scattered throughout the world.

Sabine Apostolo is curator at the Jewish Museum Vienna; her exhibitions and publications include: The Third Generation. The Holocaust in family memory (2024) Espresso at last! The Café Arabia on Kohlmarkt (2022), Without a Home: Kindertransports from Vienna (2021), Three with a Pen: Lily Renée, Bil Spira and Paul Peter Porges (2019), Persecuted, Engaged, Married: Marriages of Convenience in Exile (2018), and Comrade. Jew. We Only Wanted Paradise on Earth (2017). Since 2014 she manages the Jewish Museum Vienna collections. Her research focuses are Judaica, history of Jewish culture and literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially the Vienna Gründerzeit, history of the labor movement, exile stories, Shoah, and culture of memory.