Vienna public memorial lists the names of all 64,440 Austrian Jews
who were murdered in the Holocaust.
Austria opened the country’s first public memorial on Tuesday that lists the names of all 64,440 Austrian Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust.
The memorial was unveiled 83 years after “Kristallnacht” took place in 1938.
The project was started in 2018 by Austria’s ruling conservatives’ previous coalition government, Reuters reported.
The “Wall of Names” is made up of 160 circular granite memorial stones. It will cover 2,500 square meters in a Vienna park.
A memorial plaque will also honor the victims of persecution before and during World War II.
The Austrian government called the memorial a “tangible symbol of its responsibility” for the murder of nearly 65,000 Jews, EuroNews reported.
“The names are indelibly engraved,” Constitution Minister Karoline Edtstadler said in a statement released before the dedication ceremony took place on Tuesday.
She added: “Eighty-three years ago today, the systematic persecution, dispossession and extermination of Jewish life in Austria by the Nazi regime reached a tragic low point. It is the responsibility of us all to ensure that these atrocities are never forgotten.”
Vienna’s only other Holocaust memorial that lists the names of victims is located in the city’s main synagogue.
The project was co-financed by the Austrian government. It was set in motion by Holocaust survivor Kurt Yakov Tutter, whose family escaped Vienna in 1939.
Austrian Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg, the president of the Vienna Jewish community, Oskar Deutsch, and Israeli Minister of Diaspora Affairs Nachman Shai attended the unveiling ceremony.
(Arutz 7).
