Vienna, May 27 (IANS): Portraits of Holocaust survivors that were on display as part of a public exhibition in Austria's capital have been vandalized and covered in swastikas, authorities said on Monday.

Luigi Toscano's "Lest We Forget" project is the result of a year of interviews with Holocaust survivors in Germany, Israel, Russia, Ukraine and the US, and is a collection of 200 portraits of the individuals who shared their stories with the German-Italian artist.

"It deeply affects me that the exhibition 'Lest We Forget' was brutally destroyed. I know that the overwhelming majority of Austrian society has a clear, negative attitude towards Nazi atrocities," Austria's President Alexander Van der Bellen said on social media.

"It must be an incentive for us to place empathy and human dignity at the center of words and deeds. #NeverAgain can not become an empty phrase - we have to live it daily!" he added.

At least eight of the close to 100 giant portraits that were printed onto a robust fabric were vandalized, Efe news reported.

Toscano's art installation fell victim to acts of violence and vandalism twice in the course of the last week.

Several of the portraits were defaced with swastikas and others were covered with offensive anti-semitic messages. These have since been removed.

The exhibition of portraits has been on tour around the world and has already visited San Francisco in the US and Mainz in Germany.

Austria actively participated in the Holocaust and the mass killing of six million Jewish people at the hands of Nazi Germany in World War II. In Austria alone, some 65,000 Jews were murdered. Around 135,000 managed to escape.