At Grim Anniversary, Vienna’s Jews Vow Never Again

Fifty years ago, it was the site of brutality and murder. Sunday, Vienna’s oldest synagogue--but back then Gestapo headquarters--served as the scene of prayers and tears as 1,000 of the city’s 6,000 Jews remembered the horrors of Nazi Germany. As part of a 4-day, 50th anniversary of the Anschluss, Adolf Hitler’s annexation of Austria on March 13, 1938, they gathered to proclaim that Jews never again would permit others to threaten them. Austrian Chancellor Franz Vranitzky addressed those assembled on the Morzinplatz, now a vacant area but then a site where Nazi police rounded up victims and meted out torture, saying: “Let the screams of desperation that are no longer heard but resounded from the cellar of this site be a reminder.” Rabbi Chaim Eisenberg told the congregation: “No one can feel our pain, no one can feel our suffering.” In the Vienna Opera House, a “Matinee for Reflection on March, 1938” was performed, while the Vienna Philharmonic played symphonies by Ernest Krenek and Arnold Schoenberg, two Jewish composers who fled Austria after the Nazi takeover. The Jewish community in Vienna totaled about 200,000 in 1938.

They huddled against the snow in Chicago’s Jackson Park, yearning not to be free but to observe yet another celebrated 50th anniversary--the death on March 13, 1938, of Clarence Darrow, renowned defense attorney of the downtrodden, the powerless, the damned. Those 100 people standing at the Darrow Bridge, where Darrow’s ashes were scattered, heard the powerful and the mighty--judges, ministers, politicians, attorneys--extol the memory of the man who had, in 1925, defended the right of John T. Scopes to teach evolution in Tennessee schools. A disbeliever on religion and the hereafter, Darrow once said that if there was anything to the spiritual world, he would come back to Chicago at 10 in the morning on each anniversary of his death, said Leon Despres, a former Chicago alderman. U.S. District Judge Prentice Marshall said: “ . . . Clarence is here in spirit today as we commit ourselves to follow the example of his life.”

With days remaining until St. Patrick’s Day, Pope John Paul II, appearing in St. Peter’s Square in Rome for the noon prayer before an estimated crowd of 25,000, appealed for peace in Ireland. “I invite you to pray so that in the land of St. Patrick there is an end to the political and terrorist violence that for almost 20 years has been causing death and suffering both in the Catholic and the Protestant community,” the Pope said. Since fighting resumed in Northern Ireland in 1969, 2,628 people have been killed.