Austria has acknowledged its guilt over the Holocaust in a new exhibition at Auschwitz — replacing a display that had claimed the country was the “first victim” of the Nazis.
“Confronting our history cannot only mean confronting half of our history,” president of Austria’s parliament Wolfgang Sobotka said.
The task of reconfiguring the exhibition was given in 2009 to the National Fund of the Republic of Austria for Victims of National Socialism, which has dispersed around £600 million in compensation and restitution since its foundation in 1995.
The fund’s general secretary is Hannah M Lessing, whose pianist grandmother, Margit Schwarz, was killed at Auschwitz in 1944.
Speaking at the fund’s office in Vienna, she told the JC: “We had to find a balance such that, if I as a grandchild of a victim visited the exhibit, I would have the feeling that this exhibit is a place of memory.
"But my grandmother wouldn’t have been killed, brutally gassed, were it not for the perpetrators. You have to talk about the perpetrators.”
The first national exhibition at Auschwitz, for countries whose citizens died in the camp, opened in 1960.
Austria’s earlier national exhibit opened in Block 17 in 1978. Much of the work on it was done by Auschwitz survivors, including Heinrich Sussmann, who created its stained-glass windows.
Ms Lessing explained that it focused heavily on Austrian resistance and said very little about the perpetrators.
Visitors were greeted with a map of Austria, in the colours of the national flag, trampled by Wehrmacht jackboots crossing from Germany in the Anschluss.
The sign beside it read: “March 11, 1938: Austria – first victim of National Socialism.”
The imagery reflected the general attitude in the late 70s, when the political class and general population adhered to the idea of Austrians as victims and otherwise wanted the past forgotten.
Austria’s coming to terms with its Nazi past began in 1986 when then-presidential candidate Kurt Waldheim was exposed as having lied about his wartime service.
In 1991, chancellor Franz Vranitzky acknowledged that Austrians too had been responsible for Nazi crimes in a speech address in parliament.
As attitudes evolved, the Auschwitz exhibit became an embarrassing anachronism. The National Fund was “constantly being told by the Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau that people were complaining” about it, Ms Lessing said.
Ms Lessing first visited Auschwitz in 2005. She said: “I went to Block 17 for the first time and said to myself, ‘No, this can’t be.’”
The new exhibition, Far Removed. Austria And Auschwitz, was designed by architect Martin Kohlbauer and a team of curators with the Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau. Unlike the 1978 exhibition, it distinguishes between Austrian victims and perpetrators.
Ms Lessing said: “The director of the museum said to me, ‘You know, Hannah, it might be an advantage that you are the daughter of a survivor and the granddaughter of someone who was killed here, but it might also be very difficult,’ and there really were days when I travelled there and it was hell. But I think it was worth it.”
Welcoming the new exhibition by Austria at its opening, Auschwitz survivor Marian Turski said: “A nation can only consider itself proud and great if it does not sweep a national disgrace under the carpet. It is part of the history of every nation.
“There is no nation or almost no nation at all, that can only be proud. Each of us must be consumed by anxiety of conscience towards those who committed detestable acts.”
At least 110,000 Austrians were victims of the Nazis. Up to 20,000 Austrians were sent to Auschwitz; 1,500 survived.
