January 27, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1945, is marked in many countries as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. It is an occasion for commemorative ceremonies, educational programs, and other initiatives. Monuments and memorials are also dedicated or form centerpieces for commemorative events.
This year we are marking the occasion with a photo essay of Holocaust memorials in Europe. They range from grand structures, museums, and preserved death camps, to poignant or symbolic sculptures, to simple plaques or memorial stones. They have been erected by countries, cities, private individuals, NGOs and others. Many are powerful sites on their own. Others include inscriptions — some of which may leave out information or even be misleading. Others still lack inscriptions or material to provide context and let visitors know what they are meant to remember.
The images we present here encompass a variety of types of monuments.
Many memorials are impressive monuments whose goal is to place the memory of the Shoah in public space.
Others personalize the Holocaust by actually giving names to the millions victims. These include, for example, the nearly 60,000 “stumbling stone” or “stolpersteine” commemorative cobblestones around Europe placed by the German artist Gunter Demnig as a memorial art project in front of the houses of people who were deported.
These types of monuments also include memorials that list names — either full names or simply first names — of victims. Or personalize them in another way, by using fragments of gravestones from destroyed Jewish cemeteries to construct powerful memorials and memorial walls.
Sculptural monuments take many forms. The monument at Bełzec, Poland, dedicated in 2004, transforms the entire area of the Nazi death camp there into a land-sculpture.
In Berlin, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe includes an enormous, maze-like sculptural complex designed by architect Peter Eisenman and engineer Buro Happold, but it also includes as part of the complex a small but effective museum that teaches about the “final solution.”
In a recent essay on his blog, Samuel D. Gruber described a category of sculptural Holocaust memorial that symbolize the destruction by evoking “things left behind” — a variation on the concept of an enduring “presence of absence.”
These works began appearing in Europe in the 1990s and continue to be made today. They rely on contradictions to convey their powerful message of abandonment and loss. […] While these works are conceptual at their core, they are also highly realistic – even hyper realist in their visible subject and form. They juxtapose the commonplace and every-day with the realization of the reality of unspeakable horror and inconsolable lose. Most powerful of all, these works encounter the view on high intellectual level but with personal immediacy.
In particular he mentioned the bronze sculpture Der verlassene Raum (The Deserted Room), by Karl Biedermann, installed in 1996 on Koppenplatz, in Berlin; the “Empty Shoes” memorial on the bank of the Danube River is Budapest, where local fascists shot Jews dead into the water; and the 2004 monument by László Kutas in Sopron, Hungary, which was cast from real clothes to suggest the garments left by victims in the “showers” of Auschwitz.
The bronze sculpture is so natural – one can mistake the table and two chairs as the real thing – though in fact they are slightly bigger than normal and cast in bronze. And yet these cannot be normal – they sit on a faux-parquet floor in a room with walls and ceiling within a small city park. This represent a room on ordinary apartment or houses, that has been left in a hurry. Were the residents who so recently sat at the simple table arrested and deported? Or did they leave suddenly, saving themselves as refugees on the run? Sadly, we must think the former.
Empty chairs are used to another effect in Krakow, Poland — for a memorial to the Krakow Ghetto that covers an entire lot.
Another approach to the presence of absence can be seen in Bratislava, Slovakia, where a sculpture has been erected at the site of the destroyed Neolog synagogue, and in front of a black wall that bears a ghostly image of that synagogue. The monument urges people to Remember, but doesn’t explain what.
Sculptural memorials also take different forms, including more direct or less symbolic figurations. But they sometimes provide a backdrop.
Highly symbolic art can also play a commemorative role.
The Holocaust memorial on Judenplatz in Vienna by the artist Rachel Whiteread (sited above a branch of the Jewish Museum located amid the foundation of a medieval synagogue destroyed in the 15th century) shows a closed “nameless library” with its books turned backward on the shelves so their spines and titles facing inward.
Using related imagery, the Book-Burning Monument on Bebelplatz in Berlin commemorated the Nazis’ burning of books in 1933. Designed by the Israeli sculptor Micha Ullman, it is a subterranean chamber lined by empty bookshelves, which can be viewed through glass at street level.
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Want to read more about Holocaust memorials?
The classic book about them is James E. Young’s Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995) as well as Young’s other books.
Online:
Click to read Samuel Gruber’s blog post about “Things Left Behind” memorials
Click to read Samuel Gruber’s essay about the Holocaust memorials in Warsaw’
Watch a video of James E. Young present and lecture and slide show about Holocaust Memorials in Europe
2 comments on “International Holocaust Remembrance Day: Photo Essay of Memorials”
Thanks for the great article.
full mit dank… .