»When I talk about it, I can’s sleep at night. But I want to tell. It has to be known. When we are gone, nobody will know what it was like. The Nazis will tell it their way« explains the first woman interviewed in With Death as the Only Certain Faith, a document ary film by Andrina Mračnikar, a young ethnic Slovene director from Austria. Born in 1981, Mračnikar spent part of her life in Ljubljana, and par t with her grandmother in Austrian Carinthia; she is currently s tudying film direction in Vienna.
The choice of this introduct or y statement is anything but accidental, because this documentary concerns itself with whose voice is going to remain, whose narrative will survive, and who will be heard by Austrian society when it comes to relating and documenting such traumatic events as the Nazi Anschluss of Austria in 1938. Upon annexation a manifesto entitled – The Carinthian Speaks German! was issued, and during WWII Slovenes were deported to concentration camps. The oppression of those ethnic Slovenes who remained continued af ter the war; indeed, the atmosphere of never-accomplished de-nazif ication prevails to this day. Various witnesses – all of whom are now in their old age – were at last provided an opportunity to speak out, and, in their own language - that peculiar Carinthian dialect which fades away with their passing - testify in person about these events. In the final inter view, Mračnikar visits the site where eleven members of an inter viewee’s family were massacred; af ter talking of the events leading up to this atrocity, both fall silent, unable to utter a word in the shadow of the horror of this scene of mass murder.
