The “Wall of Names” is a memorial to 64,450 Austrian Jews murdered by the Nazis.
Austria inaugurated on Tuesday in the center of Vienna a memorial of the 64,450 Austrian Jews murdered by the Nazis, “a tangible symbol of its responsibility” in these crimes that it has long denied, the government announced.
The “Wall of names”, which extends over a 2,500 square meter area in a park, is made up of 160 oval commemorative stelae, built in granite.
A plaque also honors other groups of victims and individuals who suffered persecution under the Nazi regime.
“Austria creates a tangible symbol of its responsibility. The names are indelibly engraved, ”declared the minister in charge of the Constitution, Karoline Edtstadler, in a statement published before the ceremony.
When “Holocaust survivors are dying”, it is necessary to “create places of memory” like this one, estimates the general secretary of the Austrian national fund for the victims of Nazi National Socialism, Hannah Lessing, questioned by AFP.
This project, funded by the Austrian government, the regions and donations, was started by one of the survivors, Kurt Yakov Tutter, who fled Vienna in 1939 with his family.
Conservative Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg and President of the Vienna Jewish Community Oskar Deutsch will attend the inauguration, as will Israeli Diaspora Minister Nachman Shai.
Austrian environmentalist president Alexander Van der Bellen was going to participate, but was placed in isolation due to the contamination of a collaborator with the coronavirus.
This event takes place 83 years after the “Night of Broken Glass”, the vast program conducted on the night of November 9-10, 1938 by the Nazis against Jews in Germany and in annexed Austria.
Before World War II, the Jewish community in Austria numbered 192,000 people, or almost 4% of the population. Almost destroyed by genocide or exile, it slowly regained its place in Austria after 1945.
The country of 8.9 million people tried for a long time to pass itself off as a victim of Nazism, denying the complicity of many of its own in the crimes of the Third Reich. (I)
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