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The End of Gavrilo Princip

Following the arrest and trial of Princip and the other assassins and conspirators, he was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment. He was sent to the former fortress of Terezin (later the notorious Nazi show ghetto of Theresienstadt). He died there of tuberculosis in 1916 and was buried in an unmarked grave. But a symapthetic guard noted the location and the body was later disinterred and mved to Sarajevo, where he and his fellow conspirators now overlook the fruits of their handiwork.

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Where History Turned the Corner

Centropa seems to specialize in providing amazing moments. Yesterday it was the opportunity to stand where the 20th century started on 28 June 1914. It was the corner across from the Latin Bridge where Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his beloved wife, Sophie. Princip was NOT, contrary to some mythology, eating a sandwich at the now no longer extant Moritz Schiller's delicatessen. He pulled his FN Model 1910 automatic pistol in .380 ACP (9mm x 17mm Browning Short) and fired twice. The echoes of those two shots continue to reverberate to this very day. 

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Nicholas Winton in Liverpool Station

In London, we decided to find where Nicholas Winton's children had ended up - at Liverpool Station. There we found a monument, not only to his children but to the entire Kindertransport project. This became even more poignant when we were blessed to meet a survivor of that effort - courtesy of Centropa - in Vienna.

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Kathe Kollwitz Part 2

Last summer on the way to Centropa we came across Kathe Kollwitz's rooms near Moritzburg, where she died. We saw some of her works there, and in Berlin her magnificent sculpture. It was a delightful surprise to come across this 1923 work, "The War againat War!" in the MAK in Vienna with Centropa.

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Mahnmal gegen Krieg und Faschismus

From 1988 to 1991, noted artist Alfred Hrdlicka created his Monument againat War and Fascism in the Albertinaplatz in Vienna. This monument, while it deals with all of the victims, does pay special attention to the plight of the Jews, with the prone figure of a jew, tied down by barbed wire, being forced to scrub the streets. The granite bases were quarried from Mauthausen. Other, more recent memorials tend to indicate that Austria is coming to better grips with its past.

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Memorial to the Victims of National Socialist Tyranny

After the 1938 Anschluss of Austria by Nazi Germany, the Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei - Secret State Police) set up headquarters in the Hotel Metropole on Morinplatz. After the war the hotel was razed, and in 1951 a stone was placed at the former location in memoriam. The city of Vienna erected the current monument to all victims of National Socialism. The word "Jew" appears nowhere.

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Schottenring und Schottenbastei


The headquarters of Casino Austria, across the street from Bank Austria and the University of Vienna, was formerly the residence of the Ephrussi in Vienna. By the way, it is no where as difficult to stand - or even sit - and look at the building from either of its two faces. I presume dramatic license on the part of the author. And on the ground floor is a branch of the Bank Austria and, the ultimate indignity, a Starbucks.

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A Place where Things Just Ended, Part 2

One of the first high-rise housing units in Paris was nicknamed La Cite de la Muette, "The Silent City," for its intended peacefulness. It was confiscated by the Nazi and turned into a detention and transit camp for Jews from France and elsewhere - and with the connivance of the Vichy Government, as France has only recently admitted. Before Liberation, 67, 400 were deported to the east - 6,000 of which were children. They were sent to Sobibor, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and other terminal destinations. Only 1, 542 were alive on 17 August 1944, when Allied forces entered the camp.

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A Place where Things Just Ended, Part 1

The Nazis, with the collaboration of the Vivhy government, deported over 40,000 people from the Royallieu-Compiegne transit camp, constructed on old French army barracks from the Great War. They were political prisoners, Jews, resistance fighters, and went to Dora and Auschwitz. After a death march, a German discovered various diaries and later returned them to Compiegne, where they are part of this collection.

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A Place where Two Things Ended and Started, Part 2

At eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, the bugles blew "All Quiet" on the Western Front. That armistice was signed in the forest just west of Compiegne in a railroad car. The marker in the foreground was the car where the document was signed, in the car occupied by Field Marshall Ferdinand Foch. The markers in the background show where the German coach was parked.

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