76 years ago the Red Army liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. This liberation came too late for more than a million prisoners who had been murdered in this largest Nazi extermination camp since October 1941; gassed, then burned and finally crushed, in order to destroy all traces.
January 27 commemorates all more than 6 million people from Europe, mainly Jewish fellow citizens, but also numerous Roma who did not survive this genocide, including 7,144 people from North Macedonia who were deported in March 1943 under the occupation back then and were murdered in the Treblinka extermination camp.
Despite these gruesome numbers, not only the memory of the horrors of the Holocaust survived, but above all the social acting of our Jewish fellow citizens in Europe and their outstanding achievements in various areas. In the field of culture this includes the musical tradition of klezmer, which the Moritz Weiß Klezmer Trio skillfully combines with elements of jazz and classical music. Experience contemporary Jewish creativity from Styria/Austria in a concert recording from November 2020.
It should not go unmentioned that Austria has decided not only to enable the increasingly smaller group of Holocaust survivors to acquire or reacquire Austrian citizenship, but since September 1, 2020 also all of their descendants (including adopted children).
The essential provision of the Austrian Citizenship Act reads (in excerpt): “A foreigner acquires … [Austrian] citizenship, if he notifies the authority … in writing that he/she has gone abroad before May 15, 1955 as an [Austrian] national or a citizen of one of the successor states of the former Austro-Hungarian Monarchy or a stateless person with main residence in the [Austrian] federal territory, because he/she had reason to fear or suffered persecution by organs of the NSDAP or the authorities of the Third Reich … .
A foreigner acquires … [Austrian] citizenship, if he notifies the authority … in writing and proves by unobjectionable documents or other suitable and equivalent means of certification that he/she is the descendant in a direct descending line of a person who has acquired or could have acquired citizenship in accordance with paragraph 1 [see above]. Children adopted as minors are also considered descendants … .”
