The Shoah Walls of Names Memorial
About the memorial
The Shoah Walls of Names are a memorial project to commemorate the more than 66,000 Jewish children, women and men of Austria who were murdered in the Shoah and whose names had been gathered as part of a government project by the Documentations Archive of the Austrian Resistance (DÖW) started in 1995. The planned memorial will be built in Vienna’s Ostarrichi Park, a central space located adjacent to the Campus of the University of Vienna. The memorial walls will carry the name of every Austrian Jew murdered during the darkest chapter of Austrian history to underline that they were not merely an anonymous mass, but individuals with personal histories. As can be seen on the visualization, the memorial is designed to only have one entrance, thus creating a place of reverence where visitors can remember the victims’ fate and honor their lives in peace, today as well as in the future.
Inspired by the Hall of Names at Yad Vashem, the National Memorial to the Belgian Jew Martyrs in Anderlecht near Brussels, the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris, and the Dutch Holocaust Memorial planned in Amsterdam, the project initiator Kurt Y. Tutter, a Holocaust survivor who once fled from Austria to Canada via Belgium while his parents were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp and murdered there, had been lobbying with his non-profit Gedenkstaette Namensmauern (Memorial Walls of Names) for such a memorial to be built in Austria for almost 20 years. On November 6, 2018, the Austrian Government finally announced that it would finance the entire cost of the memorial. As of that date, the Shoah Walls of Names Memorial has been on track towards its realization envisioned for spring 2020. With the Shoah Walls of Names Memorial “we want to create a lasting sign of remembrance and commemoration for the Austrian Jews who fell victim to the NS terror regime,” said former Chancellor Sebastian Kurz.
For more information please visit: https://www.shoah-namensmauern-wien.at/en/