massacre at Rohoncz

In the Burgenland countryside stands the Kreuzstadl, a ruined farmhouse near Rechnitz. The building’s broken walls mark the edge of a field where, on Palm Sunday 1945, around 180 exhausted Jewish forced labourers were shot after a night-long shooting party at nearby Schloss Rechnitz. Ten local men led by the Gestapo officer Franz Podezin carried out the killings on orders from the estate’s owners, Margit and Ivan Batthyány. The victims had been too weak to join the death marches to Mauthausen, so they were murdered instead. Sixteen other prisoners were forced to dig graves and then themselves shot to hide the crime. The site remains a place of investigation and remembrance. Search parties have dug across parts of the 300 000 m² field since 1966, yet the mass grave has never been found. In 1970 only eighteen bodies were recovered; they were buried in the Jewish cemetery at Graz. Every Palm Sunday a ceremony is held at the Kreuzstadl, attended by officials from Austria, Hungary and Israel. A small open-air museum with five video steles stands beside the ruins, waiting for the day the grave might be located. Visitors walk among the low stone walls and read the panels that list names and dates. The wind carries voices from the videos across the empty field. The place offers no comfort, only the weight of what happened there. The annual gathering keeps the memory alive while the search for the dead continues.