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LEARN HEBREW

Austria’s Righteous Gentiles honoured
Updated: 12/Dec/2005 17:17
Heinz Fischer, Austria president
Photo: Austria Presidency
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Two Austrian citizens have been honoured with the title “Righteous Among the Nations” for their role in saving Jewish lives during the Holocaust.

The ceremony, which was held in the centre of Vienna’s Jewish Community, was attended by the Austrian president, Heinz Fischer, who spoke out against attempts to deny the Holocaust and praised the deeds of the Righteous.

Danuta Kleisinger and her late husband Ewald Kleisinger received honorary Israeli citizenship for hiding Jews in Warsaw and later in Austria during WWII. The late Hermine Riss, who saved a Jewish woman by hiding her in Vienna during the war, was also honoured.

Riss’s granddaughter, Irene Neubauer-Schmid, thanked the state of Israel and commented that she was very moved, by her grandmother’s deeds and by pride it gave her.

The Kleisingers grandson, Peter, praised his grandparents for the "perspective and values they gave us".

Too few rescuers

Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Museum and Institute, has honoured 85 Austrians for their role in saving Jews during WWII. The organisation, which primarily serves the memory of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, also honours non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews, by designating them as “Righteous Among the Nations”.

Fischer added that too few Austrians had aided Jews during the Holocaust.

"Out of a population of five million, only 85 adults [helped save a Jewish life], which means much less than one in a thousand,” Fischer said.

But he said that Austrians had now begun to recognise their role in the Holocaust, instead of continuing to insist that they were the first Nazi victims.

The president added that the Righteous Among the Nations were the polar opposite, or an “antithesis”, to the murderous Nazi machinery.

Condemning anti-Semitism

Israeli ambassador Dan Ashbel strongly condemned those who today seek "to reach their goal of creating a region without Jews or maybe even world without Jews".

Israel’s state memorial institution Yad Vashem has honoured 20,757 people for helping Jews during the Holocaust and has planted trees in the “Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations” in Jerusalem.

Following the Jewish tradition in which stones are laid on graves, visitors to the garden place stones around the trees honouring figures like Oskar Schindler, who saved thousands from the death camps.

Yad Vashem was created in 1953 with the aim of researching Jewish history during the Holocaust and preserving the memory of its victims. It receives more than 1,5 million visitors a year.

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