The Foreign Service Journal, May 2016

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MAY 2016 89 the cemetery, but after all that time, I was determined to try. If it was impossible, at least I had made the effort. When I passed through the ancient wooden gates, I sensed I had entered a place sacred yet wild. The silence was unexpected. The great city of Vienna was only meters away, but one heard neither the squeal of trams nor the convivial gemütlichkeit sounds of the cafes. Trees were bent at crazy angles and under- brush was everywhere. It looked as if no humans had been there for many, many years. And, in fact, no one had. Other than Tina Walzer, almost nobody had set foot there for a long time. Eventually, among the vegetation and the gray murk of the day, gravestones became visible. Many of the memorials were overturned and overgrown, covered with weeds and vines. I found that most dirt paths were passable—but barely. They were narrow and rutted. But for the most part, the wheelchair was able to move forward. I thought that maybe a higher power wanted me to be there. Buried there were some of the great Jewish families of Vienna: financiers, industrialists, railroad magnates and cultural figures. Families that had liter- ally built the modern city of Vienna, and made it the center of art, science and music in the world. To us, the names are unfamiliar, but at the time they were the elite: Konigswarter, Wertheimer, Epstein, Arnstein-Eskeles, Ephrussi. In the city, they built palaces for life; in the friedhof, they built grand monuments to their passing. In Jewish tradition, cemeteries are meant to stand forever, where the soul revisits the body from time to time. But during World War II and since, those memorials have been looted and defaced, their coffins and bodies long gone. At its height, Wahringer had more than 9,000 graves. It housed in death not only the Viennese elite but regular people with modest gravestones of sandstone (soft as they are, those gravestones suffer the most from the elements). Starting in 1939, the Vienna Natural History Museum had a contract to study the “degeneration” of the Jews in both the moral and spiritual realms, as well as physically. So they needed bodies—and found them in Wahringer. They took the bodies to the museum (a tourist must- see) and subjected them to untold indig- nities. Some of these bones have never been recovered. During the war, the cemetery was significantly damaged and was reduced in size. In 1941, fear of bombing led the Nazis to take over a portion of the cem- etery to create water ponds as a defense against fire. Fifteen hundred graves were lost, the bodies reburied in a mass grave at the Central Cemetery. Under the Washington Agreement of 2001, the government of Austria pledged to make a significant contribution to the “restoration and preservation” of Jewish cemeteries in the country. Germany signed a similar agreement in the 1950s. Germany does an excellent job; but Aus- tria remains—as with many aspects of the Nazi-era experience—conflicted. Meanwhile, the Israelit Friedhof is much as I left it. The Jewish community is supposed to look after it. But in its much reduced state, the community does not have the resources to do so. The ceme- tery, a ghostly reminder of a long-ago war and the pathology of the Nazis, remains a window into the past. n The Israelit Friedhof, also known as the Wahringer Cemetery, was the chief place of Jewish burial in Vienna from 1784 to 1879. GRYFFINDOR/WIKIMEDIACOMMONS MICHAELKRANEWRITER/WIKIMEDIACOMMONS/CC-BY-SA2.5GENERIC