With the far right on the up worldwide, it’s getting late in the day to exhume the lessons of the mid-20th century. There are few surviving Holocaust perpetrators and victims still living, but this exemplary Austrian documentary, an attempt to chronicle the massacre of Hungarian Jews in the Danube river community of Hofamt Priel, does its damnedest to track down and understand both sides before they are gone.
Director Hans Hochstöger grew up in Hofamt Priel, a rural farming village about 100km west of Vienna, which was annexed to the larger town of Persenbeug. It was from a construction site on the river here that, on the night of 2 May 1945, the SS marched more than 200 refugees a short way inland and murdered them; an atrocity all the more senseless because the Nazis surrendered days later. Their remains, shoved into a ditch, were moved to a Jewish cemetery in 1964. But the killing was wilfully ignored and never investigated, unlike similar “endphase” incidents nearby, and only half-heartedly acknowledged in the form of a forlorn roadside memorial.
