1TP6Against forgetting

In the garden of the Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue, four exhibits from the exhibition "Against forgetting" by Luigi Toscano have found a new home. The portraits of Eleanor Chroman, Eva Gewitsch, Viktor Klein and Zdislaw Swiniarski are accessible to all visitors as a permanent installation.
With this initiative, the Kreisky Forum is echoing the words of Susan Cernyak-Spatz, a 96-year-old US-American and Auschwitz survivor born in Vienna: “If we forget the past, we are condemned to repeat it“.

The installation "Against Forgetting" shows large portrait photos of survivors of Nazi persecution.

The photo exhibition was initiated by the German-Italian photographer and filmmaker Luigi Toscano. Toscano took portraits of more than 300 survivors for his project and exhibited these approximately two-metre-high portraits in several cities in Europe and the USA. In May, the pictures were also on display on Vienna's Ringstrasse in front of Heldenplatz.

The exhibition in Vienna was severely desecrated several times. Less than three days after the opening, the pictures were cut up with a knife for the first time, followed a few days later by graffiti in the form of swastikas. In the course of a third attack on the installation on 27 May, several portraits were extensively vandalised. Using knives, unknown perpetrators shredded seven of the larger-than-life photos of Jews, Roma and Sinti, Russian prisoners of war and other people persecuted by the Nazis, rendering the faces unrecognisable. The cut-off parts of the faces hung down like shreds of skin.

Subsequently, spontaneous vigils from the ranks of civil society guarded the exhibition around the clock until it was dismantled. The destroyed pictures were restored.

Viktor Klein

Eva Gewitsch

Elanor Chroman