Der Standard, November 8, 2021
German Original: https://www.derstandard.at/story/2000131001118/gedenkstaette-ort-zum-trauern-um-65-000-tote
For twenty years, the Austro-Canadian Kurt Tutter, whose parents were murdered in Auschwitz, has been fighting for a memorial. On Tuesday the Walls of Names will be inaugurated. Der Standard met him on Monday.
When the Shoa Walls of Names will be ceremoniously inaugurated on Tuesday afternoon at Ostarricipark in Vienna, it will be a special day for one man in particular: Kurt Yakov Tutter, 91, born in Vienna, has been fighting for the memorial for over 20 years; he has been fighting for a place where he and his sister can mourn their parents, who were murdered in Auschwitz as there exists no grave they could visit.
The names of 65,000 murdered Jewish children, women, and men are eternalized on 160 commemorative plaques, which are arranged in an oval shape around a lawn area with trees close to the former General Hospital (AKH). During the 1980s, Tutter, who has been living in Toronto, Canada since 1948, could probably not have imagined that it would eventually be him who would be the initiator of a memorial in Austria and receiving the Great Decoration of Honor from the Republic of Austria. He had to flee Austria for Belgium as a nine year-old in 1939.
New Friends
Der Standard met Tutter on Monday before the award ceremony for the Grand Decoration of Honor. For him, Austria has long been a country with which he wanted nothing to do, he said. This is different today. It really all started when then Federal Chancellor Franz Vranitzky “extended his hand” and offered citizenship to those expelled by the Nazis. Tutter thought he reaches for that hand, but then he received a message from the municipal authority stating that he is not eligible (his father came from Galicia and fought for Austria in World War I) and said to himself “go to hell” (Hol Euch der Teufel). The dauntless efforts of the Austrian Ambassador to Canada, Walther Lichem, eventually made it possible for Tutter to receive Austrian citizenship after all. “It cost me 2,000 Euro.” He also remained a Canadian citizen, of course.
In the year 2000, Walther Lichem also supported the founding of a non-profit that enabled the memorial, in part against heavy head winds. At the end, the Austrian government financed most of the cost of some 5.3 million Euro; the rest was paid by the federal states (600,000 Euro) and the Austrian Federation of Industry (230,000 Euro).
Too Abstract Without Names
For Tutter it is not just about his parents, who were deported from Belgium to Auschwitz in 1942 while Tutter and his sister were hidden by a Belgian woman. For him, it is also about the thousands of Jewish families who did not survive. For them, no descendant can say a prayer. They, too, shall be mourned at this memorial site. Existing memorials like the one on Vienna’s Judenplatz are “much too abstract” for Tutter, because “there are no names.”
And: “It is about equality between the children and the 660,000 Wehrmacht soldiers,” who returned home and were buried in Austria, often after having lived a long live: “With a large headstone that contains their name, where their children can lay flowers.” This is how Tutter explained it to then Federal Chancellor Sebastian Kurz (ÖVP) in 2018. “I belive that impressed him,” he said.
Those 65,000 will also be there for Tutter on Tuesday. When he began designing the name panels at home in Canada, he typed two pages of the names that the Documentation Archive of the Austrian Resistance had sent him in order to see how big the letters should be. “As I typed the names, I had the mysterious feeling that those people were standing behind me.” The dead told him to carry on and that is what Kurt Tutter did.
Over the past few weeks there was also criticism from several sources. In an op-ed published in Der Standard, the writer Doron Rabinovici called for a dignified place to mourn the extermination of Roma and Sinti, which still doesn’t exist in Vienna. Rabinovici also interpreted the fact that at the end the turquoise-blue coalition government enabled Tutter’s memorial as an attempt by the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) to mask the memory of their own anti-Semitism.
No Comment
The robust Austro-Canadian Tutter does not want to comment on matters of domestic policy. He does vote in Austria, because it is a “democratic duty, but I live in Toronto.” No comment is to be had on contemporary domestic politics, but he eventually did comment on the Roma and Sinti: As a boy, when he was waiting in line in front of the prison where his father was held to deliver him food, he witnessed how a NS guard handled a Roma woman in such a way that the baby she was holding in her arm flew through the air.” Tutter is still shaken when he talks about it.
“No Potato Salad”
He visited Rudi Sarközi in 2005 and discussed the idea of a wall of names. Sarközi liked the idea, but did not yet have a complete list of Roma and Sinti victims, Tutter recalls. “Then he said: you should understand one thing, I don’t want any potato salad, those were his words, you Jews should have your memorial and us Roma should have ours.” The two men apparently met in friendship several times after that, but the issue had been concluded for Tutter.
Before the meeting with Der Standard on Monday, Tutter also spoke with Federal Minister for the Constitution Karoline Edtstadler (ÖVP), who has been attending to the Walls of Names project on behalf of the federal government for several years. She counters criticism that claims additional plaques (without names, however) commemorating other victim groups should have been affixed to the memorial. She does not rule out additional commemoration sites, but does not want to discuss those one day before the unveiling of the Shoa memorial, which has been in the planning for years.
The fact that the foundation of the memorial was erected by a construction firm that used Jewish forced labor during NS rule – Der Standard reported – was not know, according to Edstadler. “This should motivate many other companies to investigate their histories,” the minister said. Not too many options were available when choosing a firm due to technical issues. It is important for her “project of the heart” that Tutter “feels comfortable in Austria now,” said the politician from the People’s Party. Tutter is comfortable; at the end of the conversation he states that he feels better with every visit and every step he takes in his birth city. (Colette M. Schmidt, 9.11.2021)