<font color=blue>Austria honors 80,000 Holocaust Victims.<font color=black>
jpost.com
Austrian children research Holocaust victims as part of nationwide project
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
VIENNA, Austria
"Until recently, 11-year-old Lilly Maier had no idea that her small bedroom was once the piano room of a Jewish family evicted by Nazis and deported to Poland, where most of the family perished.
In fact, she knew nothing about the family, the Kernbergs , or even about the Holocaust , until she began researching the family's fate earlier this year as part of a nationwide school project which is encouraging school children to research the fate of Austria's 80,000 Holocaust victims.
The project, dubbed "A Letter to the Stars," is a grass-roots effort started by two journalists who want to keep the memory of the victims alive.
<font color=green>It has met with an enthusiastic reception in what appears to be a sign that Austria , where a majority long saw their country as "Hitler's first victim" , is now ready to acknowledge that many Austrians were willing perpetrators of Nazi-era atrocities.<font color=black>
About 15,000 students , most between the ages of 13 and 18 , have joined the project by "adopting" one of the victims, researching the person's fate with databases, archives and oral histories, and addressing their reflections to the chosen person in the form of a "letter."
The culmination of the project comes Monday when <font color=red>80,000 white balloons , each one representing one of the victims,<font color=black> with 15,000 bearing the letters , will be released in a ceremony at Heldenplatz, or Heroes' Square, the Vienna landmark where Hitler made his historic address to a large and jubilant crowd after annexing Austria to the Nazi Reich in 1938.
The organizers hope to continue the project and have more children research into the life and death of the remaining Holocaust victims.
Monday's ceremony , held on the national day of remembrance for Austrian victims of the Nazi era, May 5 , will also be attended by Holocaust survivors and various dignitaries, including President Thomas Klestil.
<font color=blue>About 65,000 Austrian Jews perished in the Holocaust, as well as 15,000 others, including Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses and handicapped people.<font color=black>
"We can't bring the victims back to life, but we can give them back their names, their faces, their dignity," said Andreas Kuba, one of the two project leaders.
Kuba said that he sees the enthusiastic response by students, parents and teachers as a sign of a new willingness to explore the country's responsibility for Nazi horrors.
"Even five years ago there wouldn't have been this kind of support," he said. "Today there's a new generation of students whose parents weren't involved in World War II."
About 500 schools throughout the country are participating. In one case, students in a Jewish high school in Vienna are researching Gypsy victims.
Some parents wrote to the organizers, asking if their children too could take part even though their classes were not participating. Among them was Sabine Maier, Lilly's mother.
By coincidence, only two days before the project was launched, friends of the only remaining survivor of the Kernberg family rang at her door to ask her if she would be willing to let the man see his old childhood home on a visit to Vienna.
Maier saw the coincidence as a good chance for her daughter Lilly to learn about the Kernberg family's fate , and to begin thinking about the Holocaust.
"This project is the first time in Austria that children are asked to confront the topic on a wide scale. It's the Austrian mentality not to talk about past problems," she said. "But it's wrong, it's immoral and it's also dangerous not to talk about this."
Since then, the Maiers have met the son of the Kernberg family, Arthur, who survived only because his family sent him out of the country in 1939, when he was only 11. It was the last time he saw his mother, father and brother.
In 1941, they were deported to a Polish village, Opole, where they died of unknown causes. He instead found safety in France before again fleeing to the United States in 1941 when the Nazis invaded. In America, he changed his last name to Kern.
Speaking Friday by phone from him home in North Hills, California, Kern, now 74, described the trauma of seeing his old home when he visited Vienna in March. He also praised the school project.
"By doing projects like this, Austria shows that it's more willing to face its history than it used to be," he said. "It's is a very heartwarming project to honor the 65,000 Jews who were killed."
<font color=green>Lilly says that despite her encounter with Kern, she still finds herself unable to understand how the Holocaust could have happened. "Mr. Kern has come to terms with what happened and he was so nice that it didn't make me sad."<font color=black>
After learning that Lilly sleeps in the Kernbergs' old piano room, Kern gave her a music box shaped like a piano.
"Lilly is now calling her room the piano room," Kern said. "Which is funny because they don't even have a piano."" |
