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With big-scale events still banned due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Austria is celebrating the landmark 75th anniversary of the end of World War II online.
For the first time since 2013, the Festival of Joy, a celebration of the liberation from the horrors of World War II, will not take place on Vienna's Heldenplatz, but only as a live stream and as a TV broadcast, according to the website of the event's organizer, the Austrian Mauthausen Committee.
The highlight of the ceremony will be a speech by contemporary witness Erika Kosnar, an 88-year-old woman with a Jewish background who survived the Nazi terror in Vienna.
What had happened in the concentration camps is still "an open wound in the history of Austria," said Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen in a video message marking the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Mauthausen camp on Tuesday.
It is crucial that younger generations learn what happened back then and how it came about, and have "the civil courage" to act against injustice, he added.
According to the Mauthausen Memorial, at least 90,000 people perished in the notorious Nazi concentration camps, located 12 miles (roughly 19 km) east of Linz, from April 1938 until May 5, 1945.
