"Do You Have Words?" was the response of Holocaust survivor Edith Gilboa when I told her about the anti-Semitic graffiti on toilet no. 2 in the basement of the memorial centre of the former concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz I. I had paid a visit to Auschwitz I on the occasion of the 77th anniversary of the murder of the composer Viktor Ullmann on October 18, 1944 at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, as I was doing research work on Ullmann's life in his native town of Teschen, today a divided city as Cieszyn in Poland and Český Těšín in the Czech Republic, which is just now over an hour's drive from Auschwitz. Austria's Federal President Alexander Van der Bellen also paid a visit to the site of memorial centre of Auschwitz I on October 4, 2021 on the occasion of the opening of the newly designed Austria exhibition in Auschwitz. It is a duty to remember how democracy was destroyed and the ideology and the totalitarian dictatorship of the Nazi state came into power and later with Auschwitz as one of the central places of extermination. However, Federal President Van der Bellen did not visit toilet no. 2, otherwise he too would have been confronted with the anti-Semitic graffiti in Auschwitz. And the Auschwitz complex is and remains one of the most important places of remembrance of the Nazi terror, as Babi-Jar in Kiev or the blockade of the city of Leningrad by the German Wehrmacht or Terezin, which was presented by the Nazis as a propaganda concentration camp with Jewish self-government and leisure time activities, for these the Jewish prisoners fought for in their resistance, in which Viktor Ullmann also worked. Today Terezin is threatened with demolition, some parts of the former big fortress have already been demolished and there is a risk of further decay. In the case of Terezin the duty to remember becomes mere lip service. The advertising of a visit to the Auschwitz Memorial Centre by tourism in Kraków with the phrase "Enjoy a tour" is pure nuisance.           

Herbert Gantschacher is Director, Author and Producer