Melanie Dejnega opens her book with a quote from Hungarian Holocaust survivor György Konrád on the complexity of having a Heimat that tried to kill you and another on oral history from Alessandro Portelli: “Historical work using oral sources is unfinished because of the nature of the sources: historical work excluding oral sources (where available) is incomplete by definition” (8). This signals the book's emphasis on survivors’ new beginnings as reflected in the powerful title and the importance of oral sources in historical analysis. The core of the study is extensive analysis of interviews that were part of the Mauthausen Survivors Documentation Project.

Chapter 1 deals with how the Austrian Second Republic dealt with the legacy of National Socialism and spells out how victims groups were recognized in the postwar period. Chapter 2 continues with details on victims’ organizations and their process of seeking recognition, including political prisoners, Jewish survivors, national/ethnic groups (the Carinthian Slovenes), Roma and Sinti (not recognized until the end of the 1980s), homosexuals (handicapped by the fact that homosexuality was illegal until 1974), Jehovah's Witnesses, those labeled asocial, and criminals. The latter did not organize as a group, in part, Dejnega says, because they were sometimes henchmen for the Nazis in the camps. Chapter 3 then chronicles the process by which these groups were, or were not, recognized by the Second Republic and how those recognitions reflected changes in postwar Austrian political culture and historical memory.

Given the importance of oral history to the study, it is surprising that we are only introduced to the Mauthausen survivors in chapter 4. We meet seven remarkable men (no women) accompanied by photographs taken at the time of interviews. Josef Hechenblaickner, a Jehovah's Witness, Michael Horvath, a “gypsy” from Burgenland, Communist resister Hans Marsalek, ethnic Slovenian Anton Okorn, Jewish Communist Leopold Redlinger, Galician Jew Ignaz Wachtel, and Leon Zelman, a Jewish survivor hailing from Silesia. Dejnega is interested in linking these stories and the official recognition of victims groups to French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's concept of social capital. It is through this lens then that the interviews with the seven survivors are analyzed, for to be recognized was key to having social capital for the survivors. In chapter 4, by far the most extensive in the book, Dejnega analyzes segments of the interviews that focus on different aspects of recognition including symbolic recognition, relationships between survivors and the state, social recognition, personal recognition, and material recognition. In terms of style, this is the most rewarding part of the book as Dejnega is adept at mining these interviews for telling specific examples, while successfully linking these details to the categories of recognition.

In the end, this is a useful study and valuable contribution to our understanding of postwar Austria. The organization is effective, but a narrative structure that better wove in the invaluable oral interviews could have been more satisfying. The seven subjects represent an interesting cross section of victims in terms of why they were targeted. It is also interesting that the seven men represent so many geographical regions of the old empire. Although never mentioned, one cannot help but think of the more tolerant and diverse world of Kaiser Francis Joseph's Austria, at least compared to the brutal and absurd world of the Nazi “racial” policy. These are important stories and more subjects would have enriched the study. In her 1990 study One, by One, by One, Judith Miller reminded us that each victim of the Holocaust was an individual. This study reminds us that the survivors, too, are individuals who lived complex lives of success, resilience, and tragedy as they “returned” to the outside world and negotiated for their own social capital in postwar Austria. The outside world could still be a precarious place. In 1995 two of Burgenlander Michael Horvath's grandchildren were killed in a racially motivated bombing in Oberwart.