On Assignment for Peace, Die Presse, 24.08.2004

On Assignment for Peace There is military service, civil service and Holocaust memorial service. It was proposed that the founder of the Holocaust memorial service become “Austrian of the Year”.

VIENNA. Andreas Maislinger is a political scientist, founder and chairman of the Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service. The organization acknowledged by the Republic of Austria offers young people the opportunity to alternatively serve their military duty in Holocaust memorial institutions, social institutions or do peace service, in meanwhile 118 institutions around the world. Young Austrians are being sent abroad for 14 months to do one of these three services instead of regular civil service in Austria.

Maislinger built up this unprecedented organization over years and years of hard work, mostly gratuitous; “his humanitarian engagement finds itself again in the work of the young men doing memorial-, social- and peace service for others and with other people”, writes “Presse”- reader Heidrun Strasser. The members of the memorial service do their work at the most important Holocaust institutions. Andreas Maislinger, political scientist from Innsbruck, himself worked as a volunteer for the German “Aktion Suehnezeichen”at the Museum in Auschwitz – Birkenau. In 1991 the Holocaust Memorial Service was acknowledged by the Republic of Austria, as an alternative to military service. Consequently an organization which is independent, however mostly financed by the Ministry of Interior, was founded. The intention of the Holocaust memorial service is to emphasize the complicity of Austria in the Holocaust and to especially show us our responsibility to fight for a “never again”. The Holocaust memorial service is a worldwide network of Holocaust memorial centers and museums. Since 1992 more than 100 memorial servants worked at Holocaust memorial institutions.

Translation by Patrick Kaser