Nothing could have prepared me for the shaky experience I had at the "Monument of the Names" in Vienna.
I still have a hard time writing down what I felt there.
Maybe I should start with chronology.
Facts dull emotions.
For too many years the Beck family has, for me, been a very small circle of people.
My father, his brother, a memory of my grandfather who died quite young, and a heavy fog surrounding something connected to Austria.
Sometime, around the fall of the Berlin Wall, my father remembered that he had an uncle who survived the Holocaust in Germany and remained in the Communist East.
I tried to locate him through German friends.
In vain.
He was no longer alive.
A few years later, in the mid-1990s, we received a letter from the uncle's son who found us through Yad Vashem.
The cousin, Wolfgang, had documents and photographs of members of the Beck family, from Austria and Germany.
And so we became acquainted for the first time with a family we had not had until then.
Those who lived in Austria were almost all exterminated.
The few who moved to Germany before the war all survived.
Ways of destiny.
Until that late meeting with the Beck family, the Holocaust was a terrible but virtual affair for me.
Suddenly, she became tangible and personal.
The horror and horror that prevented me from a normal family life, names and faces of people, who could have played any role in world design, emerged from oblivion.
I felt the need to follow them - a journey that lasted a very long time.
I arrived in Vienna, which was not yet ready to deal with its part in the crimes of the Holocaust.
The archives slowly opened, and I found the documents that outlined the last years of my grandfather's nuclear family, Hugo, who immigrated to Israel alone in the early 1930s: his father, Herman, his stepmother Emilia, his sister Irena and Ingrid, her little daughter, and his half-brother Fritz.
The archives contained statements of property expropriated by the Nazis immediately after the Anschluss, deportation documents to camps in the east in the spring and summer of 1942, and death certificates issued shortly thereafter.
The ashes of the murdered are found somewhere in Sobibor and Majdanek in mass mass graves.
The day closed for them and for me circle.
Graves will never be murdered.
But, the names of the Beck family are etched forever, hopefully, on walls in the city they loved, and hated.
Before the opening of the "Walls of Names" monument in Vienna today, I was allowed to visit the place to be impressed.
I stood in the heart of the circle of "walls of names", lost and surrounded by about 65,000 names, destinies, people, victims.
A list engraved in small, dense letters, with dates of birth, that seems endless from every angle.
And these are only the names of about 1% of all Holocaust victims.
How many walls will be required to commemorate the names of all the victims of the Holocaust, some of whom are not known at all?
The horrors of the Holocaust are not only reflected in the horrific methods of murder used by the Germans and their accomplices, but in the forgetting of the existence of the murdered.
You murdered and also deleted?
The number six million took the place of Herman and Emilia, Irena and Ingrid, and Fritz.
They became part of an anonymous mass, inconceivable in size, of Jews who robbed them of a human, life, and male photographer.
But every victim had a name.
These names are being returned today to the heart of Austria, to replace a grave for a family I did not have.
I refused at the time to receive the ridiculous compensation that the Austrian government was willing to pay to the families of the murdered.
But on behalf of my family members who were murdered by the German and Austrian Nazis and their collaborators in the gas chambers in the extermination camps, and whose ashes were not properly buried - I thank from the bottom of my heart former Chancellor Sebastian Kurz for working resolutely and tirelessly to commemorate their city and memory in Vienna. The other Austrian Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust.
