Deportations from Vienna to nowhere: mapping the Nisko experience of Austrian deportees through rare survivor accounts

In October 1939, around 5,000 Jewish men were deported to the Nisko area in occupied Poland. While often viewed as an early test run for later mass deportations, this article reinterprets the Nisko Action through accounts of Austrian survivors in their post-war victim welfare applications. These rarely examined sources reveal a different perspective: the deportees experienced Nisko less as a camp and more as a vast, dangerous, and disorienting borderland between Nazi and Soviet control – defined more by expulsion than by internment. This aligns their experience more closely with that of Polish Jewish refugees fleeing eastward at the same time. By mapping these trajectories, the article challenges perpetrator-centered narratives and reframes Nisko as part of a broader phase of expulsion in the early months of the Holocaust.