Silence and memory” “

“Night of silence”: that is the name of an initiative jointly promoted by the association “A letter to the stars”, the Austrian Churches, the Ministry of the Interior and the Austrian Trades-Union Federation (öGB) to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Mauthausen. On the night between 7 and 8 May 100,000 candles will be lit in silence in the former concentration camp in memory of the 1000,000 victims killed in Mauthausen and surrounding camps during the war. The act of commemoration was presented at a press conference held at the Neue Burg in Vienna on 13 April: it was from a balcony of the Neue Burg that Hitler proclaimed the annexation of Austria (“Anschluß”) in 1938. NIGHT AND SILENCE. “The young must always learn anew what it means to be a person or a monster”, declared Bishop Egon Kapellari of Graz, who spoke at the press conference and expressed the hope that the project would be a positive impulse in this sense. Austrian Minister of the Interior Liese Prokop, Lutheran Evangelical Bishop Herwig Sturm, vice-president of the ÖGB Renate Csörgits and the journalist Alfred Worm, promoter of the project “A letter to the stars”, also spoke at the presentation of the event. Sturm called it “a suitable way of being present in such a place of horror and commemorating the violence and humiliation perpetrated there”. The project is supported by the Ecumenical Council of the Churches in Austria (ÖRKO). The commemorative events will also include an ecumenical celebration at Mauthausen, with the participation of Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, archbishop of Vienna, and Greek-Orthodox Metropolitan Michael Staikos, as well as Bishop Sturm. SilenCE AND MEMORY. “The silence of a night creates a deliberate counterpart to the ‘jubilee year 2005’, called to commemorate that the Second Republic rose from the ashes of fascism with the unparalleled crime of the Holocaust, for which Austria and the Austrians are co-responsible in no minimal way”, declared Worm. “And it is just in the places where the terrible massacre took place, as in the Mauthausen death camp, that we remain lost for words and stunned by the memory. We want to create a space for reflection in which all the participants have the chance to give a sign in silence, by lighting candles for the 100,000 victims killed in the Mauthausen concentration camp. The light of the candles, a gesture of living memory, will give a welcome to the various delegations of survivors from various countries on the following day”. LetterS TO THE STARS. 20,000 schoolchildren took part in the project “A letter to the stars”, promoted in 2003 against forgetfulness of Nazi crimes and particularly of the Holocaust. They contributed to the greatest research project ever conducted on the history of the victims of Nazism and contemporary eyewitnesses. “We cannot bring back to life all these people, but we can restore to them their name, their face, and their dignity”: that is the declared objective of the project, which aims to “create a Living Memorial, an archive of very personal stories of life. Only thus will the history of the Holocaust become tangible”. And after ten years of work a list has been compiled, comprising the name, date of birth, last residence, date of deportation, place and date of death for almost all the 80,000 victims of Mauthausen (65,000 Jews, 15,000 non-Jews). The students gathered other information on the victims; lastly, each wrote a personal letter to one of the victims and a letter to the future, launched into the air with 80,000 white balloons on 5 May 2003. “A letter to the stars” is to continue with a collaborative project being run together with the Jewish Welcome Service, the Mauthausen Committee, the Jewish cultural community of Vienna, the Austrian National Fund and many national and international archives, aimed at identifying the thousands of persons of Austrian nationality, who survived Nazism and who would like to recount their experience to Austrian youth. MEMORY AND ACTION. “I hope that with events like that of 7 May, the young will be encouraged to oppose current forms of violations of human rights”, declared Msgr. Kapellari”. Referring to the imminent reform of the right of asylum, which would be more restrictive than the present regime, Sturm called for “humane legislation” and judged the provision “incomprehensible” against the background of history. In response, the Austrian Minister Liese Prokop expressed the government’s willingness to grant “asylum to those who really have need of it as rapidly as possible”. For her part, Renate Csörgits declared that the anniversary of 2005 must encourage us “to combat current forms of discrimination and racism”.