In cooperation with the Ghent Church Council, the Province of Styria and the Austrian Cultural Forum (ÖKF) Brussels, the opening of the exhibition "Silent Heroes of the Salzkammergut" will take place in the Ghent Cathedral at 16:00 on 16 October 2018. This extraordinary exhibition will run until 2 December 2018.

It tells of the incredible, dramatic rescue of the Ghent Altarpiece (Lam Gods – the Mystic Lamb) from total destruction by Hitler's Nazi regime. A group of courageous Austrian miners averted the plan to destroy Lam Gods and other irreplaceable works of art – including Michelangelo's famous Bruges Madonna. To this day, these dramatic circumstances are known almost exclusively to historians.

The Austrian artist Oskar Stocker shows his "reflections" on the Ghent Altarpiece on an area of 288 square metresThe next day, at noon, Zanoni visited Viola; and the
next day and the next and again the next,—­days
that to her seemed like a special time set apart from
the rest of life. And yet he never spoke to her
in the language of flattery, and almost of adoration,
to which she had been accustomed. Perhaps his
very coldness, so gentle as it was, assisted to this
mysterious charm. He talked to her much of her
past life, and she was scarcely surprised (she now
never thought of terror) to perceive how much
of that past seemed known to him.

He made her speak to him of her father; he made her
recall some of the airs of Pisani’s wild music.
And those airs seemed to charm and lull him into reverie.

“As music was to the musician,” said he,
“may science