Memorial crypt Steyr

The memorial commemorates the concentration camp inmates cremated in the Steyr municipal crematorium in 1941 and 1942. Their urns were stored temporarily in a shed and buried in a crypt in 1948. Later an asphalt path was laid across the crypt. The crypt was opened in 2011 on the initiative of the Steyr Mauthausen Committee. After several years of research, the contents of eighty-four of the eight hundred or so urns were identified. These names standing for all of the people buried in the crypt were inscribed on a memorial plaque. The memorial was interpreted as a “crystallisation point” at which the large number of individual graves come together in the form of a collective grave. The design is based on the grave typology and cemetery structure. Five irregularly aligned columns are grouped on a flat pedestal. The columns have the shape and size of cemetery gravestones. A sixth column, standing apart, plays a mediating role: it connects with the surrounding graves, but its shape and material indicate that it is also part of the memorial.

To symbolize that the individuals here were connected only by the fact that their urns were all buried in the same place, the design consists of different sized “gravestones”. Some of the columns are taller than the largest gravestones in the cemetery as indication of the fact that this is a special grave with very many dead persons buried in it. The memorial also symbolizes the sudden break in the lives of the deceased. It “obstructs” the path and has to be circumvented. This impression is amplified by the material, weathering steel, with which the columns are made.

The names of the deceased, engraved in the steel to a depth of 3 mm, face the path on either side of the memorial. These cut-outs may be interpreted as a negative form, the imprint of a material that no longer exists. On the third side of the memorial is a text recalling the persons buried at this site. It is placed on a low inclined podium so that visitors have to bend down to read it, bowing and paying homage – without realising it – to the persons buried here.