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Politics : Stop the War! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Elmer Flugum who wrote (16735)	5/5/2003 5:19:18 PM
From: Machaon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21614

Thousands gather in Vienna to remember Austria's Holocaust victims jpost.com Thousands gathered Monday to remember the 80,000 Austrian victims of the Holocaust in a rare public acknowledgement of the alpine country's complicity in Nazi-era crimes. The mostly youthful crowd released thousands of white balloons into the sky in memory of the victims at a ceremony attended by Holocaust survivors and President Thomas Klestil. "Everyone was a possible victim of a regime, which like no other before or after, persecuted, tortured and murdered Austrians," Klestil said. "It's important, even indispensable, to keep the memory of that period alive." The ceremony came as the culmination of a nationwide grass-roots project which encouraged school children to research the fate of some of Austria's Holocaust victims. About 65,000 Austrian Jews perished in the Holocaust, as well as 15,000 others, including Gypsies, homosexuals, political resisters, Jehovah's Witnesses and handicapped people. About 15,000 students joined the project—dubbed "A Letter to the Stars"—by "adopting" a victim, researching that person's fate through databases, archives and oral histories, and addressing thoughts about the victim in the form of a letter. The organizers hope to continue the project and have more children research the life and death of the remaining victims. <font color=green>Two students, Antonia Wagner, 13, and Miriam Halselbacher, 12, read to the crowd from the letter they had written to a Gypsy survivor of Auschwitz: Karl Stojka, whose father, brother and 35 other relatives were killed by the Nazis.<font color=black> "The Third Reich stole a large part of you," Wagner said, speaking from the same balcony from which Hitler addressed a large and jubilant crowd after annexing Austria to the Nazi Reich in 1938. "Even your birthday because you were born on the same day as Hitler—and that would have been a scandal according to the people who filled out your Gestapo papers." "In the future, there will be no more living witnesses, and then it will be up to us to make sure World War II is never forgotten," added the letter to Stojka, a locally known painter who died last month at age 71. Later in the ceremony, several relatives of Holocaust victims placed small stones upon the balcony's balustrade in memory of loved ones and in accordance with Jewish tradition. Most of the ceremony—held on the national day of remembrance for Austrian victims of the Nazi era—was conducted on a stage set up in front of the balcony where several Holocaust survivors briefly addressed the crowd. Vienna's church bells rang out in memory of the victims, while the melancholic strains of the soundtrack to "Schindler's List" were played at different times throughout. The project was started by two journalists who want to keep the memory of the victims alive. 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 more ready than ever to acknowledge that many Austrians were willing perpetrators of Nazi-era atrocities. "Even five years ago there wouldn't have been this kind of support," said Andreas Kuba, one of the organizers. "Today there's a new generation of students whose parents weren't involved in World War II." Arthur Kern, 74-year-old Jewish survivor, agrees. "By doing projects like this, Austria shows that it's more willing to face its history than it used to be," he said, describing the project as "very heartwarming." Kern, who now lives in North Hills, California, was interviewed by an 11-year-old girl involved in the project, Lilly Maier. <font color=purple>Nina Nawara, a 13-year-old standing with a group of classmates holding their letters in baby blue envelopes, said learning about the fate of individual victims had made her aware that it was her responsibility to confront her country's past crimes. "We can't imagine how bad it was," Nawara said. "But we are trying, and we will try not to forget."