Recently, the Republic of Austria explained to my family, in precise legal German, that a forced place of stay is not a residence. A person must have the will to remain. A prison is not a home. Deportation does not establish a center of life.

As a historian, I know that is true. A concentration camp is not a residence. A transport in an overfilled cattle car bound for imprisonment was not travel in any meaningful sense.

The problem begins when that clarity is carried forward into Austria’s citizenship restoration framework under Section 58c of the Austrian Citizenship Act, a provision created to address the ongoing consequences of Nazi persecution. My husband and son are now being denied citizenship under that law because my husband’s grandfather, Alois, called Luigi by the fascists, does not fit cleanly within the categories the statute recognizes.

He was born in 1914 as a subject of the Austrian part of Austria-Hungary. The empire collapsed, borders shifted, and nationality became unstable across Central Europe. He was later arrested........

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