Special Assembly - Remembering the Past, Shaping the Future Speech by the Austrian State Secretary in the Federal Chancellery - Franz Morak March 16, 2005
On behalf of the Austrian Federal President Dr. Heinz Fischer, I would like to express my gratitude and appreciation to the persons in charge of Yad Vashem. I congratulate you on the impressive precision and educational wisdom that have gone into the new museum and made it a unique documentation of the Shoah and the historical context leading up to it.
As an Austrian I feel that the exhibition speaks to me in more ways than one. What happened in my home country immediately after Austria had ceased to be a sovereign state in March 1938 was unprecedented at the time. It was the onset of an unprovoked pogrom against Jewish citizens: in his autobiography, the writer Carl Zuckmayr described it in stirring words: “What was unleashed here was nothing but the mindless masses, a blind destructive fury, and the hatred was directed against anything ennobled by nature or the mind. It was a witch Sabbath of the mobbing crowds and a funeral of any human dignity.”
These events of March 1938 initiated the tragic involvement of many Austrians in the Shoah. For about 70,000 Jewish fellow citizens it was to end in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Sobibor, Madjanek or Treblinka. Many Austrians served as myrmidons of the National Socialist annihilation machinery, thus assuming significant responsibility and incurring their share of the guilt for this greatest crime of mankind.
It has taken Austria a long time to admit to itself that it was not merely a victim of National Socialist aggression, but that Austrians were among the perpetrators and that many actively supported or at least approved of National Socialism.
But there were also Austrians who risked their lives to uphold the spirit of humanitarianism and tried to help their persecuted compatriots. There were – to quote the title of a book by Erika Weinzierl – “Too Few Righteous People” who have followed the voice of their conscience. I would like to thank Yad Vashem for also honouring those who have actively fought to protect human life and dignity. A few years ago, when I first visited the Yad Vashem Memorial, I was invited at the end of the tour to enter my thoughts in the guestbook: Memory is our fortune, our only fortune. It seemed to me that this quote by Eli Wiesel most appropriately expressed what Yad Vashem represents for all countries on the globe in the 21st century: a place of commemoration that reminds us of the abysmal atrocities which perverted human minds are capable of.
