A Palpable Absence

Being a Sunday (when nearly everything in Austria shuts down), Todd and I decided to go out to the Zentralfriedhof, or Vienna cemetery, on the outskirts of the city. It is here that Todd’s family (the Bosel’s) have a large mausoleum, and we wanted to visit it. On our last journey to the mausoleum in November, it had been a cold and very wet day, which didn’t afford you the luxury of spending time at the cemetery.

The Zentralfriedhof is utterly immense -- larger than the entire 1st District of Vienna-- and, with over two and a half million “inhabitants,” it boasts a larger population than all of Vienna today. In addition to the many ordinary citizens buried here, the Zentralfriedhof contains a veritable ‘who’s who’ list of classical composer remains. Strauss, Brahms, Mozart, Schubert are all buried within the confines of the cemetery.

When you arrive at the first of the cemetery’s three gates, which houses the old Jewish section of the cemetery, the Bosel mausoleum is quite literally the first and arguably the largest mausoleum you see. It suggests the prominence of the Bosel family (which is likely why they were targeted by the Nazis). The mausoleum itself is beautiful, and is unique because the grounds surrounding it are still well maintained, relative to the graves and mausoleums that surround it. This is because Todd’s Aunt Julie ensures that the mausoleum and the ground around it are maintained, and it shows. The mausoleum shows some wear and tear – in fact, we noticed that the head of one of the gargoyles has come off, and Todd was able to retrieve a part of it from the surrounding weeds – but all in all it is in good condition.

Being able to spend some more time there on this visit, it became apparent the true sense of loss and absence in the Jewish section. While tourists and visitors walked by the mausoleums and gravestones, appreciating their beauty, what struck me was feeling complete isolation and abandonment. Many of the gravestones have broken or fallen down over time, and weeds climb high, obscuring the gravestones and making it difficult to walk to specific gravesites. There is no family to pay to care for these gravesites, and no one to visit them. The Jewish community is all but gone from Vienna, being either killed or forced out of the country by the Nazis.

In contrast to the well-manicured Christian sections of the cemetery, with fresh flowers or plants growing on top of the grave, there are no flowers on the graves in the Jewish section. Indeed, the flowers that Linda placed in front of the mausoleum in November were still there yesterday, dried and dead but oddly not looking too bad. To add insult to injury, the Jewish section of the cemetery was also bombed during World War II (no peace even for the dead), and perhaps because no family sought to repair those graves that were damaged, a memorial has sprung up beside the tall pile of rubble, yet another demonstration of a palpable absence.
We saw many people coming to visit the graves of their loved ones, but in the Jewish section we saw no one. Several graves had stones placed on top of them, and we did see some post-humous memorial sites (sometimes with the person’s death date followed by a question mark) but all in all what remains with you is a sense of loss, and sadness for these thousands of people who have no one left. I wish had the money to put a flower on every one of the hundreds (perhaps thousands) of gravestones, to show that all of these people are not forgotten, and that we honour and respect the lives of these everyday people. One can only hope that the world doesn’t forget again.