We have researched and were able to convince the committee that these children were victims of typical National Socialist injustice. Until then, they were not recognized as Nazi victims. Only a few children, including Alois Kaufmann and Fritz Zawrel, survived. Almost 800 children were cruelly killed, partly by medical testsStephan Mlczoch. For them, the horrors of this so-called sanatorium were the last thing they experienced in their short lives. What was left of them was misused for medical research and then kept for scientific purposes for a long time. In 2002, about 600 specimens were buried, in 2012 further tissue samples, today in the presence of Vice-Chancellor Babler and the responsible Minister of the Interior Karner another 19 remains… Thank you
Stephan Mlczoch and your department for the dignified commemoration.
So touching is the presence of relatives of Irma Dirry, who was murdered at Spiegelgrund … Wendy Maybury never travelled to her brother from the USA and took part in the commemoration ceremony with her rediscovered Austrian relatives.
From my speech:
“There were not very many of these children who came to the National Fund – but the individual fates we learned about clearly showed that behind this idyllic, almost fairytale-like old field name “Am Spiegelgrund” was one of the most terrible places a child could have come to at that time.
And if you understand childhood as the time in a person’s life in which the personality is formed, in which the foundations for self-confidence, self-confidence and trust in others are formed, then one understands that these people have been broken in the truest sense of the word. It is precisely the injuries of the early years that heal with the hardest. A stolen childhood often means a stolen life.
For the surviving children, the experience of persecution was an eternal present, a nightmare without a redeeming awakening. The scars have remained with them all their lives.
Friedrich Zawrel once said: “It’s as if everything happened yesterday.”
Copyright Isabelle Ouvrard
