A cold wind tugs at the white-blue and red-white-red ribbons of the wreaths that were laid on the memorial stone of the former Mauthausen concentration camp.

He blows the kippah off the head of guest of honor Jair Lapid.

But the wind does not disturb the dignity and intimacy of the moment, it rather gives a vague idea of ​​the misanthropy of this place.

Lapid, Israel's foreign minister, came here on Thursday for the day of remembrance because he has a very personal connection to Mauthausen.

Stephen Lowenstein

Political correspondent based in Vienna.

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His father's father was beaten to death in one of the satellite camps in 1944, how exactly can only be guessed at.

A few weeks before the end of the war, the meticulously mendacious SS bureaucracy noted between countless similar entries: "lampel, Bela, lawyer, born 8/5/98 in Csurog, died 4/5/45 at 9:35 a.m. with acute cardiac insufficiency."

The Mauthausen concentration camp was built after the Wehrmacht invaded Austria and the “Anschluss”.

In the granite quarry there, materials for Nazi buildings such as those in Nuremberg or Linz were to be extracted and at the same time people whom the regime regarded as its enemies were to be deliberately maltreated and killed.

During the war, branch offices were set up throughout Austria as forced labor camps, primarily for the armaments industry, for which Mauthausen served as the SS administrative headquarters and distribution camp.

Around 190,000 people were deported there before it was liberated by the US Army, at least half of them were killed.

In 1947, the Soviet occupying power handed over the site to the re-established republic on condition that a memorial be erected there.

obligation to protect Jewish life

Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer, who accompanied the Israeli guest to Mauthausen together with the foreign and interior ministers, said he apologized on behalf of the Republic of Austria for the crimes committed here - and personally to Lapid for the murder of his grandfather. He promised that everything would be done to fight anti-Semitism and the enemies of democracy. And he accepts the obligation to protect and promote Jewish life in the country.

Lapid made very personal references to his family history. On the night in March 1944 when his grandfather was picked up by a blond SS soldier in his small Hungarian town, his father had grown from being a child. The Nazis would have done anything to make numbers out of people. So too with Béla Lampel, a portly and jovial man, loving husband and father who was deported to Auschwitz and then from concentration camp to concentration camp.

Even when the war was obviously lost and the Germans would have needed every man and gun, they would have put their effort into killing Jews.

But that was not the last word, his grandfather still accomplished something after death: "He sent me here today to say that the Jews have not surrendered." The Nazis imagined that they were the future and the Jews maybe something for the museum.

Instead, the Jews have established a strong, proud, and free state, and Mauthausen is a museum.

"Rest in peace, grandfather.

You won."