Tag: holocaust

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Vienna: Scarred Faces

Vienna has many faces. One very beautiful. The city, peacefully slow yet vibrantly social-democratic, has scored the top ranking as the world’s most livable city for the past ten years (Mercer Quality of Living City Ranking). One very ugly: Stained and scarred by history: fascism, the holocaust and the loss of the city’s Jewish community.

Vienna counts almost two million faces – plus 90. Italian-German photographer Luigi Toscano has mounted 90 larger than life current portraits of holocaust survivors at Vienna’s picturesque main boulevard, the Ringstraße, an avenue that features the architectural splendor of the old city. The collection of photos, printed on water repellent, slightly transparent canvas, has toured 70 countries to commemorate the past: Lest we Forget! in times of resurgent totalitarianism, xenophobia and right wing extremism worldwide.

But it was only in Vienna that the photos – touching close-ups of aged, wrinkled faces, eyes that 80 years after the fact still reflect the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps, the sadness of the being orphaned and unrooted, and even the optimism and love of reconciliation – were vandalized: defaced and slashed with swastikas.

Toscano’s outdoors exhibition, free and accessible to anyone, has arrived in Vienna in the midst of a political scandal. Until last week, Austria was governed by a coalition between the neo-liberals and the right wing party . The former, whose young chairman Sebastian Kurz eerily resembles the young Emperor Franz Joseph II, husband of Sissy and erector of the Ringstrasse, mastered marketing and political staging to the perfection, hence becoming strongest force in Austria. The latter not so: A video surfaced depicting the right wing leaders drugged and in the act of instigating corruption. A week and a parliamentary motion of no-confidence later, the coalition was history. The act of vandalism, it is suspected, was an act of frustration, hate and antisemitism, which the government had encouraged.

The destruction of the portraits came as a shock to everyone. Another shameful mark in the history of Vienna. But it’s from the dark that the sun rises. Viennese spontaneously got together at Ringstraße, brought needles and threads and sewed the torn portraits back together. Vigils are held to protect the photos 24/7, flowers laid, candles lit. Vienna has learned from its history, it seems.

Who are these faces who stand the rain, the wind and the cold to keep watch? It’s the young Catholics. It’s the Boy scouts. It’s the Young Muslims, who sit feasting through their days of Ramadan and for whom the Chief Rabbi brings food each night. What love, what solidarity!

The portraits now are as scarred as the city. But what is a scar? It’s something that mends together which hate, violence, fear and terror has ripped apart. A scar is a symbol of growth. Of: love conquers everything.

Vienna has many faces. Scarred faces, beautiful faces.

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Vienna: Remembering The Lost

On January 27th, Vienna commemorates the Holocaust Memorial Day. 72 years ago, on January 27 1945, the Red Army liberated the concentration camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the biggest Nazi concentration camp.

More than six million Jews were killed in the holocaust, plus an estimated number of 200,000 Roma and Sinti, 250,000 mentally or physically disabled people, and 9,000 homosexual men. To never forget the tragedy, the United Nations declared January 27 International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

80 years ago, in 1938, Austria was annexed to the Third Reich and Adolf Hitler famously welcomed by the masses in the streets of Vienna. In the following seven years, more than 65,000 Austrian Jews lost their lives and the Jewish community was extinguished.

Judenplatz, the Jewish Square, in the center of Vienna, is now a sleepy, little square. Once it was the center of the Jewish community, Instead of a synagogue, a holocaust memorial stands on Judenplatz today, to remind the passers-by of the Jewish lives that vanished in the third Reich. The concrete cube, designed by the British artist Rachel Whiteread, resembles a library, but the books are turned inside out. They are inaccessible, unreadable, a symbol of the many biographies, the untold, unheard stories, that were irreversibly lost in the holocaust.

The statue of Ephraim Lessing stands opposite the holocaust memorial at Judenplatz. Lessing wrote the novel “Nathan, The Wise”, a plea for religious tolerance, in 1779.

It was WWII that ended the abhorrent Third Reich, a war that came at a high toll for the city of Vienna and its inhabitants. Thousands of civilians lost their lives in the cruel fights over the city. It was also the Red Army that liberated Vienna from the Nazis.

Today, Vienna is again capital city of the Austrian Republic, but still high bunkers are scattered all over Vienna. These towers, unique to the cities Hamburg, Berlin and Vienna, and equipped with canons to fight hostile bomber planes, were built by the Nazis in a last and futile attempt to withstand the allied bombardments.

As the sun sets, Joggers pass by a high bunker from WWII in Vienna’s Augarten.

This year however, the commemoration day is over shadowed by the recent inauguration of Austria’s new government, a right-wing neo-liberal coalition, which – following an international trend – fails to distance itself from fascist thinking. Are the tragic events of 20th century already forgotten in Austria?

This high-bunker was turned into a Zoo and Museum. There are no canons on its rood any more. “Smashed to pieces in the Still of the Night” it reads instead – a reminder of dark times in the Third Reich.

Two weeks ago, on January 13, the streets filled again. Despite the bitter cold winter weather, an estimated number of 70,000 people, peacefully demonstrated the Austrian new government’s program of economic aggravation and xenophobia, reminding many of the bitter days of the Third Reich. But instead of bombs, it rained hearts. For a day, Vienna was filled with love – and hope that history will not repeat itself.