On 4th October 2021, Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg was invited by National Council President Wolfgang Sobotka and Piotr M. A. Cywiński, Director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, to speak at the commemoration ceremony to inaugurate the new Austrian national exhibit “Entfernung – Österreich und Auschwitz” (Distance – Austria and Auschwitz) at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. The Foreign Minister travelled to the Auschwitz’ remembrance and memorial site as part of a high-ranking delegation led by Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen.
This is a place of the unspeakable – and that’s why we need to raise our voices here: for six long years, people were dehumanized and murdered in this extermination camp. People from all over Europe, including countless Jews, fell victim here to a despicable regime and its aides. This unfathomable suffering is almost impossible for us to grasp in terms of its enormity and bestiality,
emphasised Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg.
Second National Council President Doris Bures, Federal Council President Peter Raggl, Minister for the EU Karoline Edtstadler, Minister of Health Wolfgang Mückstein, State Secretary Andrea Mayer, and Governor of Tyrol Günther Platter also took part in the ceremony memorialising the more than 11,000 Austrians who met their death in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. One-sixth of all Austrian Holocaust victims were murdered in Auschwitz – the vast majority of whom were Jews.
Today’s opening of the Austrian exhibit faces this dark part of our history head-on. And it clearly accepts Austria’s historical responsibility. We must confront the shadows of the past – as a state, as politicians, and as individuals. That is the only way for us to turn ‘never forget’ into ‘never again’,
said Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg.
The new concept is a fundamental redesign of the first Austrian exhibit, created in 1978 and located in Block 17 of the former concentration and extermination camp, now the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. The title “Distance” is meant to reflect not only the geographic distance between Austria and Auschwitz, but also the distance between the people deported to Auschwitz and their homes, families, and life itself.
In addition to the fates of the Austrian victims and their resistance efforts in the concentration camp, the exhibit also promotes a modern culture of remembrance and Austrian responsibility by telling the stories of Austrians who committed or contributed to crimes in Auschwitz as perpetrators.
