Memorial for Peace
The Memorial for Peace is a memorial in the municipality of St. Anna am Aigen in Styria . It is reminiscent of a camp that was located in St. Anna during the Nazi era, in which mainly Hungarian-Jewish forced laborers were interned for the construction of the south-east wall .
history
The memorial is located on Sinnersdorfweg in Höllgraben in the immediate vicinity of the Austrian-Slovenian border . Towards the end of the Second World War , new defensive positions were built here on the south-eastern border of the German Empire .
In the position construction subsection V / 3-St. Anna am Aigen, around 400 Hungarian Jews were deployed from January 1945. Most of the forced laborers were quartered in often inhumane conditions in the middle of the parish of St. Anna am Aigen. B. in the former elementary school (today Schuhhaus Rindler), in the club house (theater, parish hall) and also in a building that no longer exists next to the Lippe department store. A barrack camp in the Höll between Deutsch Haseldorf and Aigen (near Kramarovci) and at times also a tent camp served as quarters .
Some of the Jewish forced laborers came from the labor service of the Hungarian army. In addition, there were also a large number of Jews who had been employed as slave labor in the Greater Vienna Gau since the summer of 1944, including some women. They were mainly used in the construction of the anti-tank ditch from the Aigner fields to the Höllwiese near the border with today's Slovenia, where they often worked under inhumane conditions. It took months of work to dig an anti-tank trench almost two kilometers long, 4.5 meters wide and five meters deep. This later proved to be of no military importance when the Red Army marched in in 1945 and was filled in by an excavator in November 1947.
Construction of the monument
The memorial, designed by the artist Roswitha Dautermann , was created in 2009 as part of the 72 hours without compromise campaign by the Austrian Catholic Youth on the initiative of the former Hungarian slave laborer Sandor Vandor, the market town of St. Anna am Aigen and Auxiliary Bishop Franz Lackner . It was inaugurated on April 26, 2009. At the location of the memorial, in the so-called Höll, was the above. Barrack camp.
description
The monument is located under an old oak tree, in front of which there is a ceramic cube that symbolizes a boundary stone. The building next to it consists of four columns, which stand for the remains of a house. Historic bricks from a camp barracks were built into the pillars.
The four pillars form a square with a volume of 2.5 cubic meters in the interior. Multiplying this number by 10 results in 25, the number of workers combined in a work group and the daily work target of 25 cubic meters of anti-tank ditch, which had to be fulfilled by ten workers in a group. The interior of the small building can only be entered individually in order to feel the forlornness and loneliness of the prisoners.
Inside the pillars there are four panels in German, Hebrew, English and Hungarian. You can read on them the human rights , compliance with which has not yet been achieved worldwide. In another pillar on the other side of the street there is a lantern that reminds of the old tradition of waymarks that used to show the way at night. The word peace is incorporated into German, Slovenian, English and Hebrew. The way to the ceramic cube symbolizes the daily way of the prisoners. If you sit on the memorial stone, you can look through the pillars to the lantern in the fifth pillar. The lantern is supposed to keep the memory of the dead alive with its light, but with the word peace on the glass it is also supposed to be a “light of hope” on the way to the future.
literature
- Alexanderlegenstein: The living situation of the Hungarian-Jewish forced laborers in the area around St. Anna am Aigen during the 2nd World War , pre-scientific work at the BORG Feldbach, 2015
- Eleonore Lappin-Eppel: Hungarian-Jewish forced laborers in Austria 1944/45: Labor deployment, death marches, consequences , LIT Verlag Münster, 2010, ISBN 978-3-643-50195-0
- Eleonore Lappin-Eppel: The role of the Waffen-SS in the use of Hungarian Jews for forced labor in Gau Styria and in the death marches to the Mauthausen concentration camp (1944/45) , in: Documentation Archive of Austrian Resistance, Yearbook 2004, Vienna 2004, pp. 77–112, Online version as PDF
- Rudolf Grasmug, Stefan Karner, Gerberhaus Fehring: BoundariesLos: Austria, Slovenia and Hungary 1914-2004: Contribution volume to the exhibition in the Gerberhaus Fehring , Fehring, 2007
- Christian Gmeiner (Ed.): Mobile Remembrance: Death March of Hungarian-Jewish Forced Laborers 1944–45 , Handout for the memorial sculpture of February 16, 2005, online version as PDF
- Sandor and Ron Vandor: Return to St. Anna - Memories of a Jewish Forced Laborer on St. Anna am Aigen, Graz 2009, online version as PDF
Web links
Coordinates: 46 ° 48 ′ 22 ″ N , 15 ° 59 ′ 35 ″ E
Individual evidence
- ↑ Memorial for Peace on the Intergenerational Dialogue in Styria
- ↑ Return to St. Anna: Foreword Schober on the Pavelhaus Museum website
- ↑ Congregation for Home - Church newspaper from St. Anna am Aigen, April 2009, p. 2
- ^ Memorial for Peace at the Museum Pavelhaus