Vienna unveiling

The Vienna Stones of Remembrance Association (Verein Steine der Erinn- erung) invited me to take part in late April in the unveiling of a memorial stone to my mother, one of two unveilings in the Inner City district. The first ceremony was for Sofie Schlesinger, two of her daughters and their spouses; tribute was paid by her granddaughter, Elfie Kazarov, who as a teenager spent the war years with her mother hidden by sympathetic Viennese. I was to speak with regard to my mother’s memorial but, 48 hours before the event, on receiving the Verein’s nicely designed brochure, I learned that the reason my mother had remained in the family home until her deportation was that it was part of a Jewish collection point housing her, three named and 30 unknown men and women, and two children. Almost all of them shared my mother’s fate: deportation on 9 April 1942 to Izbica, where death awaited them. Elisabeth Ben David-Hindler, the Verein’s secretary, having spoken about the impressive work done by the Verein, the largest of its kind in Austria, introduced my family, who had come to support me. After thanking the district, the Verein and the landlord, I improvised on the unknown, spoke about my mother and then turned to the present: Yes, we know about the anti-Semitism in the first and third largest political party in Hungary – just 150 kilometers down the motorway from here. But in Europe today again asylum seekers are being sent back across the Mediterranean in damaged boats because of their race; children are being sent to specially poor and bad schools because of their race; women are forcibly sterilised because of their race; families are only allotted flats unfit for human habitation because of their race. Therefore I am proud to be here and hope that these stones will warn passers-by that today’s racist curse can tomorrow be a beating-up and can lead to mass murder the week after next. So let us do the dedication together. Please take your neighbour’s hand and can we say together ‘Niemals wieder/never again.’ Both the Verein and we were delighted that some ten residents came out of the block to join us. The present occupiers of our flat invited us to come and visit, and the several video and camera operators simply joined in. We were pressingly invited to a formal tea two days later. There we met several more elderly occupants and compared recollections on the Portier who kept children in order, and shared recollections of our primary school, which I attended pre-war and which the eldest resident attended immediately post-war. The warmth and kindness we encountered were striking. Finally, the Verein asked me to conduct a ‘living witness’ session with a number of 13-14-year-olds in a co-operative middle school. This was a Q&A session about not knowing the language, making friends, losing friends, and feelings of separation. Until, that is, it was time for ‘Last question please’ – when a cheeky-looking boy asked ‘How did you meet your wife?’ Francis Deutsch