Before your eyes stand massive stone blocks behind the Vienna State Opera. Some weigh 57 tons. All came from Mauthausen, where thousands of prisoners died hauling granite up the stairs of death.
Sculptor Alfred Hrdlicka unveiled this memorial in 1988 to face a history Austria had buried.
You're standing where the Philipphof apartment building once rose. On March 12, 1945, Allied bombs struck. More than 300 people sheltering in the basement were buried alive. Only 180 bodies were recovered. The rest remain beneath this square.
The bronze figure before you shows a Jewish man forced to scrub the street. After the 1938 Anschluss, Nazis made Jews clean anti-Nazi slogans off Vienna's pavements using toothbrushes while crowds watched and mocked. These scrubbing actions swept across the city.
The granite came from Mauthausen deliberately. Prisoners there were worked to death cutting and dragging these exact stones.
When tourists began sitting on the bronze figure for photos, Hrdlicka wrapped it in barbed wire. The spikes still shine from people trying to touch it.
Sources. Story: https://www.wien.info/en/sightseeing/sights/memorial-against-war-and-fascism-342950, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_against_War_and_Fascism Photos: rene boulay, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
