Memory
How complicated the acquaintance with the past is, shows the example with the Burgenland Romani. While 1984 in Lackenbach, almost 40 years after the end of war finally a memorial for the „Zigeuner-Anhaltelager“ was uncovered, the wish for a memorial in Kemeten has not yet been fulfilled. Prior to the war, 200 Romani people lived in Kemeten. They were deported in the year 1941; only five of them came back in 1945.
In Summer 2004, the question about how to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the death of Robert Bernardis, who was shot on August 8, 1944 after being involved in the July 20 plot against Hitler, led to a political conflict. Politicians of the opposition (SPÖ, Grüne) as well as some celebrities suggested renaming a barrack to „Robert Bernardis-Kaserne“, which was turned down by the governing ÖVP and FPÖ. The defence minister Günther Platter (ÖVP) finally decided to build a memorial in the yard of the Towarek-Barrack in Enns. The Green Politician Terezija Stoisits pointed out that a barrack has been named after Austrian sergeant Anton Schmid in Germany on the 8th of May 2004. Schmid was sentenced to death by a Wehrmacht court-martial and was shot on 13 April 1942, after he saved the lives of a hundred Jews in the Vilnius Ghetto.
In the first years after the war, many memorials were built in several places, commemorating the dead soldiers of World War II who allegedly fought for their country. For the victims of the Nazi regime, memorials have only been built at a much later time.
As from 1992, there is the possibility of doing Zivildienst (alternative National Service) in the Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service. Approximately 15 people are deployed in the archive of the concentration camp memorial Mauthausen and alternatively in the camp itself. On the 1st of September 1992, the first Austrian Holocaust memorial serviceman started working in the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Andreas Maislinger has taken over the idea from the Action Reconciliation Service for Peace. Annually approximately 30 civil servants are sent to Holocaust memorials and connected institutions in Europe, Israel, USA, South-America and China by the Holocaust Memorial Service.
The biggest Austrian Memorial for the remembrance of National Socialist crimes is the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp. A part of the Contemporary History Museum Ebensee, emerged by private initiative in 2001, memorializes victims of the Ebensee concentration camp.
Read more about this topic: Austria In The Time Of National Socialism
Famous quotes containing the word memory:
“Language was not powerful enough to describe the infant phenomenon. “I’ll tell you what, sir,” he said; “the talent of this child is not to be imagined. She must be seen, sir—seen—to be ever so faintly appreciated.”... The infant phenomenon, though of short stature, had a comparatively aged countenance, and had moreover been precisely the same age—not perhaps to the full extent of the memory of the oldest inhabitant, but certainly for five good years.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“It must be a peace without victory.... Victory would mean peace forced upon the losers, a victor’s terms imposed upon the vanquished. It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which the terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“... memory is the only way home.”
—Terry Tempest Williams, U.S. author. As quoted in Listen to Their Voices, ch. 10, by Mickey Pearlman (1993)