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azdak at 12:55pm on 14/07/2009
azdak at 12:55pm on 14/07/2009The Zentralfriedhof in Vienna is Europe's largest cemetery, with over 3.3 million resident corpses. Perhaps as a result of this population density, it has a curiously suburban feel to it. The grass is highly manicured, the marble is polished till it sparkles, and the flowers are of the colourful, low-growing kind favoured by lovers of bedding plants - begonias, fairy roses, wallflowers, pansies.
Except to the right of Gate One. To the right of Gate One is a jungle. That sounds like an exaggeration, but actually it's a plain description. There are trees everywhere, and grass and nettles up to your armpits. The cemetery staff have cut a grid of paths through the rampant vegetation, but if you want to find a grave that lies off the beaten – or rather mown - track, you have to hack your way through brambles and bushes and the omnipresent ivy that has roared over everything. It's dim in there, under the trees. Some of the trees have grown out of graves. Some of them were once little bonsai bushes, never intended to be more than a few centimetres high.
Over in the Catholic part, grieving relatives keep the grass cut, and trim the box plants, and replace the dying flowers. But here to the right of Gate One is the Jewish section of the graveyard, and the occupants of these graves don't have any relatives. Not surviving ones, anyway.
The cheapest headstones have fared worst, as the poor always do. They exist only as lumps of illegible stone under mounds of ivy.
When you drag the ivy off, the carved words have long been obliterated. In an effort to counteract this, someone – or more likely some organisation – has been replacing them with a modern stones, all identical.
At the top is a carved Star of David, below it a plaque printed with the name, age and date of death. They are reminiscent of the endless rows of white crosses in the military graveyards of the First World War. The information is there, but, with heavy irony, the graves themselves look anonymous.
The headstones of the wealthy line the mown paths. Row after row of expensive marble, mausoleums the size of small country cottages, each proudly announcing the name, job title ("Chefstabarzt", "Kommerzialrat", "Herausgeber der Neuen Freien Presse"), and date of death of the incumbent.
And almost none of them have a date of death after 1938. On most of them, the last date is somewhere in the early 1920s or 1910s. You can see they were expecting more - there is acres of space for additional names, additional dates of death, and of course there are thousands of names and dates that should have been added, but there is no one left to add them.
On only a handful of headstones do you find a later date, but always with the words "in memoriam" (because there was no actual corpse to inter) and sometimes the cryptic message verschickt ("sent away") 1942. A few, less discreetly, or perhaps more knowledgeably, mention Auschwitz, or Theresienstadt, or Minsk.
"In memoriam." In a way, they are the lucky ones, the ones who at least left someone behind to mourn, and to remember. With unbearable irony, many of the headstones bear verses to the effect that "No one dies, who lives in the memory of his loved ones", or "Only those who are forgotten truly die".
One – the only one I found, in an afternoon of searching – has the bitter words "Transported to Poland and murdered by Nazi criminals. Erected to his memory by a survivor." The vast majority have no survivors to remember them, no survivors to erect memorials, to plant fresh flowers, to pull up the ivy and polish the marble. No one to add the names of the subsequent generations. There are no subsequent generations. History stopped here.
Friede ihrer Asche
Except to the right of Gate One. To the right of Gate One is a jungle. That sounds like an exaggeration, but actually it's a plain description. There are trees everywhere, and grass and nettles up to your armpits. The cemetery staff have cut a grid of paths through the rampant vegetation, but if you want to find a grave that lies off the beaten – or rather mown - track, you have to hack your way through brambles and bushes and the omnipresent ivy that has roared over everything. It's dim in there, under the trees. Some of the trees have grown out of graves. Some of them were once little bonsai bushes, never intended to be more than a few centimetres high.
Over in the Catholic part, grieving relatives keep the grass cut, and trim the box plants, and replace the dying flowers. But here to the right of Gate One is the Jewish section of the graveyard, and the occupants of these graves don't have any relatives. Not surviving ones, anyway.
The cheapest headstones have fared worst, as the poor always do. They exist only as lumps of illegible stone under mounds of ivy.
When you drag the ivy off, the carved words have long been obliterated. In an effort to counteract this, someone – or more likely some organisation – has been replacing them with a modern stones, all identical.
At the top is a carved Star of David, below it a plaque printed with the name, age and date of death. They are reminiscent of the endless rows of white crosses in the military graveyards of the First World War. The information is there, but, with heavy irony, the graves themselves look anonymous.
The headstones of the wealthy line the mown paths. Row after row of expensive marble, mausoleums the size of small country cottages, each proudly announcing the name, job title ("Chefstabarzt", "Kommerzialrat", "Herausgeber der Neuen Freien Presse"), and date of death of the incumbent.
And almost none of them have a date of death after 1938. On most of them, the last date is somewhere in the early 1920s or 1910s. You can see they were expecting more - there is acres of space for additional names, additional dates of death, and of course there are thousands of names and dates that should have been added, but there is no one left to add them.
On only a handful of headstones do you find a later date, but always with the words "in memoriam" (because there was no actual corpse to inter) and sometimes the cryptic message verschickt ("sent away") 1942. A few, less discreetly, or perhaps more knowledgeably, mention Auschwitz, or Theresienstadt, or Minsk.
"In memoriam." In a way, they are the lucky ones, the ones who at least left someone behind to mourn, and to remember. With unbearable irony, many of the headstones bear verses to the effect that "No one dies, who lives in the memory of his loved ones", or "Only those who are forgotten truly die".
One – the only one I found, in an afternoon of searching – has the bitter words "Transported to Poland and murdered by Nazi criminals. Erected to his memory by a survivor." The vast majority have no survivors to remember them, no survivors to erect memorials, to plant fresh flowers, to pull up the ivy and polish the marble. No one to add the names of the subsequent generations. There are no subsequent generations. History stopped here.
Friede ihrer Asche