In
a century repeatedly marked by terrible atrocities, the gruesome sequence
of events that today is known as the Holocaust stands out as perhaps
the emblematic act of mass murder. A shorthand label such as “the
Holocaust” scarcely suffices to evoke the scale and depth of
the horrors to which it is applied.
At its core was what the perpetrators euphemistically
referred to as the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question in
Europe.” Official state policy in Nazi Germany consigned between
five and six million European Jews to “special handling”
through ghettoization, starvation, execution, deportation, gassing,
and cremation; thus was an entire civilization destroyed.
With the end of the war came the impulse to memorialize
the victims of Nazi genocide and honor the heroes who resisted the
onslaught. Initially, these efforts arose from the ranks of the survivors
themselves in the form of eyewitness testimonies, published memoirs,
and memorial books about their hometowns (the yizker-bikher). Some
also erected monuments at mass graves and in former ghettos and concentration
camps.
The sense of urgency to mark the Holocaust increased as the actual
events grew ever more distant and as the survivors aged. In subsequent
decades, numerous memorials, monuments, and museums devoted to the
victims of Nazism were built culminating with the 1993 opening of
the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.
In Fitting Memory was a pioneering research project undertaken
by Sybil Milton and Ira Nowinski in the wake of Nowinski’s exhibition
of George Segal’s Holocaust memorial, held at the Magnes Museum
in 1986. In her introduction to the book that emerged from this project,
Milton writes: “The title In Fitting Memory poses the
rhetorical questions: To whose memory and how fitting?”
We live “in a historical age that calls out for memory because
it has abandoned it,” observes the French historian Pierre Nora.
“Museums, archives, cemeteries, festivals, anniversaries, treaties,
depositions, monuments, sanctuaries, fraternal orders—these
are the boundary stones of another age, illusions of eternity.”
Nora refers to these “jealously protected enclaves” as
lieux de mémoire (sites of memory), and comments “that
without commemorative vigilance, history would soon sweep them away.”
These lieux de mémoire are “moments of history
torn away from the movement of history, then returned; no longer quite
life, not yet death, like shells on the shore when the sea of living
memory has receded.”(1)
Ira Nowinski made four photo-survey trips to Central Europe between
December 1987 and September 1989 as part of the In Fitting Memory
project. There he visited and photographed many of the “boundary
stones” that are associated with the Holocaust including former
concentration and extermination camps, ghettos, monuments, and Jewish
cemeteries.
How Is the Recent Past Commemorated?
Preservation of former concentration camps is not something that just
“happened.” To the contrary: it required deliberate decision-making
on the part of governmental bodies or private agencies. In Poland,
as early as July 1944, when the Soviet Army liberated Majdanek from
the Nazis, the very first such memorial was established at that extermination
camp situated on the outskirts of Lublin. Three years later, the Polish
parliament proclaimed that Auschwitz would be “forever preserved
as a memorial to the martyrdom of the Polish nation and other peoples.”
And, in the absence of structural remains at Treblinka (about fifty
miles northeast of Warsaw), a sculptural ensemble was constructed
as a memorial on its site during the mid-1960s.
Nowinski visited Germany before the Berlin Wall came down, and his
photographs document how Cold War politics influenced the contrasting
ways in which the recent past was being remembered in the East and
in the West. As Sybil Milton observes, “In Eastern Europe the
memorials were usually seen as forms of symbolic politics under the
direction and financial patronage of the central government. In Western
Europe the memorials were usually left to private and local initiative
and thus developed in an ad hoc and piecemeal fashion.”(2)
The impulse to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust is not limited
to the preservation of its historic sites. Sculptors, architects,
and conceptual artists have produced monuments ranging from the striking
to the banal, both within the former concentration camps and much
farther afield.
How is one to represent events that took place decades ago and very
far away? How can they be integrated into narratives that make sense
to local audiences of whatever age, wherever they may be? How can
historical memory be kept from going stale? Above all, why create
a memorial in this place and at this time? These are questions that
can prove vexing to the planners and builders of Holocaust memorials,
or indeed, any kind of memorial.
“The design and content of Holocaust memorials reflect national
differences in historiography, ideology, and culture as well as a
variety of styles and traditions of public art and sculpture,”
comments Sybil Milton.(3) Nowhere is this observation more apt than
with the Warsaw Ghetto Monument, by Nathan Rapoport, which the literary
scholar James E. Young describes “as possibly the most widely
known, celebrated, and controversial of all” Holocaust memorial
sculptures.(4) Unveiled in April 1948, exactly five years after the
ghetto uprising, this monument to Jewish heroism soon achieved iconic
status, even as it was derided for its adherence to the esthetic norms
of socialist realism.
And yet, as if in implicit rebuttal to Rapoport’s approach,
abstraction has been the esthetic vocabulary par excellence of much
subsequent sculpture devoted to the Holocaust, at least in the West
and in Israel. Strikingly and paradoxically, it is Rapoport’s
clichéd sculpture of the fighters and martyrs of the Warsaw
Ghetto that has emerged as the emblematic Holocaust monument.
George Segal’s Holocaust Memorial Sculpture in San Francisco
Dozens of Holocaust memorials have been built in other places that
are very far removed from the sites where the events actually took
place. One of these, bearing the simple title The Holocaust, is adjacent
to the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. Within a flat
concrete surface, approximately 20 feet square, a fully clothed man
stands staring across a barbed wire fence toward the Golden Gate.
Behind him are strewn the naked bodies of ten men and women. All eleven
figures are cast in whitened bronze, a medium that is familiar to
those who have encountered the works of the American sculptor George
Segal (1924–2000).
Segal created his sculpture at the behest of then Mayor Dianne Feinstein’s
Commission for a Memorial to the Six Million Victims of the Holocaust.
The original plaster version of this sculpture was first exhibited
at New York’s Jewish Museum in April 1983 and now belongs to
that museum’s permanent collection. The finished sculptural
ensemble was installed and dedicated in Lincoln Park in November 1984.
Ira Nowinski’s photographs provide a chronicle
of George Segal’s Holocaust sculpture before, during, and after
its installation in Lincoln Park. Some photos of the partially assembled
ensemble, taken in the sculptor’s studio, conjure up a prison-like
atmosphere.
Photography
and Memory
Primo Levi, an Italian Jewish chemist and survivor of Auschwitz,
wrote of his fellow inmates’ perception “that if we
came back home and wanted to tell, we would be missing the words.”
Photographs, by contrast, “demonstrate what information theory
claims: that an image, on parity of scale, ‘tells’ twenty,
one hundred times more than a written page… when applied to
the ineffable universe of the camps, they acquire a stronger meaning.
More and better than the word, they recapture the impression which
the camps, well or badly preserved, more or less transformed into
grand sites and sanctuaries, make on the visitor; an impression
that is strangely deeper and more unsettling for those who have
never been there than on us few survivors.”(5) The pictures
that Nowinski took of these haunting lieux de mémoire—former
ghettos and concentration camps, Holocaust memorials and cemeteries—underscore
the perceptiveness of Levi’s penetrating insight.
Notes
1. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de
Memoire,” in Representations 26 (Spring 1989), p.
7–24.
2. Sybil Milton, In Fitting Memory: The Art and Politics of
Holocaust Memorials (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1991), p. 10.
3. Milton, In Fitting Memory, p. 2.
4. James E. Young, “Introduction,” The Art of Memory:
Holocaust Memorials in History (New York: Prestel, 1994), p.
25.
5. Primo Levi, “Revisiting the Camps,” in The Art
of Memory, p. 185.
|
The
main gate at Auschwitz I, between 1987 and 1989. The motto of
the concentration camp system, “Work Sets You Free”
(“Arbeit Macht Frei”), is part of the gate’s
design. At the right a sign warns about the electrified fence.
Before World War II, a Polish army artillery barracks stood on
the future camp site. Construction of the Auschwitz concentration
camp began in May 1940; the camp continued to function until January
1945. Though Auschwitz I was not an extermination camp, it did
contain a gas chamber and crematorium.
Back
to the top |
 |
The
Appellplatz and gallows, Auschwitz I, between 1987 and 1989. Prisoners
assembled every morning for roll call at the Appellplatz, which
was also where public executions were held.
Back
to the top |
 |
Auschwitz-Birkenau,
between 1987 and 1989. “Prisoner cutlery in a ditch at
‘Canada’ (the name of the former warehouse for prisoners’
personal effects), destroyed by the Germans to obliterate all
evidence of Nazi crimes before the arrival of the advancing
Soviet army” (Sybil Milton, In Fitting Memory). This photograph
was one of several that Nowinski took of these utensils. The
contact sheet also contains images of the Birkenau camp (including
the ruins of the crematoria) and monuments that were erected
there after the war.
Back
to the top
|
|
Zyklon
B canister, Auschwitz, between 1987 and 1989. The SS used the
insecticide Zyklon B (“Cyclone B”) to asphyxiate
the prisoners whom they herded into the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
Its active ingredient was a form of cyanide, hydrocyanic acid.
The manufacturer, Degesch, was a subsidiary of the gigantic
chemical cartel I. G. Farben. After the war I. G. Farben was
broken up and today Degesch is a multinational corporation.
As the company’s American subsidiary’s web site
notes, “Degesch operates a state-of-the-art manufacturing
facility in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley. . . .”
Back
to the top
|
 |
The
crematorium at Majdanek, Lublin, Poland, between 1987 and 1989.
Between 170,000 and 235,000 individuals died or were killed
at Majdanek, which was primarily a forced-labor camp but also
functioned as an extermination camp. Among these were more than
100,000 non-Jewish Poles and tens of thousands of Soviet prisoners
of war. The crematorium was built in 1943, and contained furnaces,
a morgue, and a gas chamber. Majdanek was captured by the Soviet
army on July 24, 1944—the first large Nazi concentration
camp to be liberated by the Allies.
Back
to the top |
|
The
“Steps of Death,” Mauthausen, Austria, between 1987
and 1989. “Prisoners … were often required to carry
stone blocks weighing from 66 to 132 pounds on their shoulders,
while marching at double-time, vulnerable to the shouting, whipping,
and abuse of the SS guards. Adjacent to the 186 steps is the quarry
rim, which the SS ironically called ‘the parachute jump’
because Jewish and political prisoners were sometimes thrown to
their deaths from there into the quarry pit below” (Sybil
Milton, In Fitting Memory). Of the 200,000 inmates sent to Mauthausen
119,000 died there.
Back to the
top |
 |
Mounted
photograph of a concentration camp inmate, viewed through a window
of the former pathology barrack at Sachsenhausen, near Berlin,
Germany, between 1987 and 1989. The more than 140,000 prisoners
who were incarcerated at the camp between its opening in 1936
and its liberation in April 1945 were subjected to forced labor,
medical experimentation, and mass executions. Thirty thousand
prisoners died there.
Back
to the top |
 |
Ravensbrück,
between 1987 and 1989. “Will Lammert’s two bronze
statues of women prisoners standing watch in front of mass graves;
the statues are facing the lake across the courtyard. The mass
graves are located alongside the original camp wall. The names
of the twenty countries of origin of the victims are inscribed
in bronze letters on the camp wall behind each grave” (Sybil
Milton, In Fitting Memory). Lammert (1892-1957) fled Germany in
1933 and found refuge in the Soviet Union. From 1951 onward he
lived in East Berlin.
Back
to the top |
 |
The
Treblinka monument, between 1987 and 1989. Between 700,000 and
850,000 Jews were murdered here between July 1942 and May 1943.
The memorial was designed by the Polish sculptors Adam Haupt
and Franciszek Dusenko, and opened in May 1964. The installation
contains about 17,000 jagged rocks —many of which contain
the names of destroyed Jewish communities. The “fissure
[in the stone] symbolizes the irreparable breach of Jewish life
in Poland after Treblinka; it also serves as a metaphor for
the broken tablets of Moses” (Sybil Milton, In Fitting
Memory).
Back
to the top |
 |
Warsaw
Ghetto monument, between 1987 and 1989. Nathan Rapoport (1901–1987)
designed this monument in 1943, while in exile in the Soviet
Union. It was dedicated in April 1948, on the fifth anniversary
of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The sculpture has been criticized
for its adherence to the esthetic norms of socialist realism.
Rapoport responded: “Could I have made a stone with a
hole in it and said, ‘Voilà! The heroism of the
Jews’?” And yet, abstraction has been the esthetic
vocabulary par excellence of much Holocaust commemorative sculpture.
Back
to the top
|
|
Berlin,
between 1987 and 1989. “We must never forget these places
of terror.” The twelve linked shingles resemble signs
in railway terminals announcing the scheduled station stops
for departing trains. The “stops” listed here are
Nazi concentration and extermination camps. In the background
is Berlin’s most opulent department store, the Kaufhaus
des Westens, or KaDeWe, founded by Adolf Jandorf (1870-1932).
In 1934, after the Nazis came to power, KaDeWe’s Jewish
owners were forced to sell the store. Jandorf is buried in the
Jewish cemetery at Weissensee, in eastern Berlin.
Back
to the top |
|
Paris,
Île de la Cité, Mémorial de la Déportation,
between 1987 and 1989. The underground plaza is surrounded by
high stone walls; at one end is a metal grate, evocative of
prison bars or sewer grates, facing the Seine. The black metal
stakes with small jutting metal triangles on top of the grate
resemble barbed pikes and evoke feelings of imprisonment and
menace. (Source: Sybil Milton, In Fitting Memory.)
Back
to the top |
 |
Kraków,
between 1987 and 1989. The wall around the Remuh Synagogue incorporates
remnants of hundreds of broken tombstones unearthed during the
restoration of the cemetery after World War II. (Source: Sybil
Milton, In Fitting Memory.) The Remuh Synagogue is named after
the great Jewish legal authority, Rabbi Moses Isserles, who
lived in Kraków during the sixteenth century. A number
of other Polish Jewish cemeteries and Holocaust memorials incorporate
walls containing fragments of tombstones that were shattered
during World War II.
Back
to the top |
 |
“The
Holocaust.” Plaster maquette photographed in the New Jersey
studio of sculptor George Segal, 1984. The sculptural ensemble,
in whitened bronze, was installed in Lincoln Park, San Francisco,
in 1984. The maquette was acquired by The Jewish Museum in New
York.
Back
to the top |
 |
“In
Memory of the Victims of Concentration Camps,” Jerusalem,
between 1987 and 1989. This smaller replica of Nandor Glid’s
Dachau memorial was installed at Yad Vashem in 1979. The bronze
sculpture, with its explicit reference to the European graphic
tradition of crucifixions and pietàs, interacts differently
with the landscape and sunlight of Jerusalem than with its setting
at Dachau. (Source: Sybil Milton, In Fitting Memory.) The housing
complex in the background hugs the “Green Line”
marking the cease-fire zone between Israel and Jordan from 1949
to 1967.
Back
to the top |
|
