Day 2 – January 27, 2026

Our second day in Vienna included a visit to the Wall of Names, where I was honored to lead a memorial service for the group. The number of names is just staggering. But I was more struck by the inscription in the entryway. In addition to honoring the more than 65,000 Jews from Austria were murdered in the Shoah, the text acknowledges the “countless Austrians that participated in their mass murder.” This is a powerful confession of complicity from a nation that for decades considered itself a victim, not a perpetrator, of the Holocaust. 

 

In fact, this admission spoke to the cognitive dissonance I experienced throughout my time in Vienna. How could this capital of high culture – the home of Strauss, Mozart, Beethoven, Klimt, Mahler, the architects Fellner and Helmer, Freud, etc — also be a site where such evil took place? As someone who has always believed in the arts as a humanizing force, it is hard to confront this reality.