Infinite Light: A Memorial to Children Who Died in the Holocaust

FURSTENBERG, ROCHELLE

Infinite Light A Memorial to Children Who Died in the Holocaust ROCHELLE FURSTENBERG Previous page: thousands of yahrtzeit candles, mirror images of four continuously lit candles, illuminate the...

...Herded into the ghettos, children watched as their demoralized parents scrounged for bread...
...In the Bible, Pharaoh is the evil power who seeks to destroy the Jewish people through their children...
...We can never be comforted for the child who was lost...
...As we enter, we cannot help remembering the inferno...
...Among the children whose names are read is Uziel Spiegel of Czechoslovakia, in whose memory the Spiegel family has donated the memorial...
...we cannot help reliving the evil...
...You will see them both later.' And so they were separated...
...Photo by Richard Nowitz...
...In addition to its historical museum, which traces the history of the Holocaust, Yad Vashem has a library with the world's largest collection of books on the subject...
...parents say...
...With the distance of time, the children's memorial comes to comfort us...
...I receive letters daily from all over the world saying, 'We too lost a child, thank you.' We are a community, we who have lost children in the Holocaust...
...It is of Europe in the 1930s...
...Children, in fact, were the least likely to survive the Holocaust...
...He was attracted to the idea of a memorial candle...
...The memorial is for all these children...
...When we arrived there they separated the men from the women and children...
...As one walks though the darkness of the A child's drawing embedded in Jerusalem stone stands at the entrance to the memorial...
...It has a powerful effect on everyone who sees it...
...It is a symbol that will raise the consciousness of today's young people, sensitizing them to those who were viciously cut off at the same stage of life...
...We feel the memorial is special...
...Subconsciously, they can more easily identify with those of their own age who were killed in the Holocaust...
...They stood in line for bread and hot water...
...We file into the darkness...
...In the dark vestibule of the memorial, the pictures of these children long gone peer out at us, photographs of well-fed, well-clothed Jewish children in Europe before World War II...
...The faces are photographs of children who died in the Holocaust They represent more than a million other children who left no photos...
...And their children would have had children...
...And we remember other children decades ago who were swallowed up by the black gases of the night...
...After the war, we had a son and a daughter, and today we have four grandsons," said Abraham Spiegel proudly...
...the screaming child being pulled away...
...Human confusion and fear are dispelled...
...But they did not survive...
...But the problem arose as to how to make a memorial candle for one and a quarter million children...
...the mother pleading for the life of her family...
...The Yad Vashem archives holds more than 50 million items...
...This is a pattern that has repeated itself with greater and greater force throughout history...
...Perhaps that is why children have always been particularly cherished in Jewish life, carrying with them the hope for continuity and future...
...My wife was carrying our little boy...
...These young creatures are so helpless, so innocent...
...Established by the Israeli Knesset on August 15, 1953, Yad Vashem, the National Authority for the Study and Commemoration of the Holocaust, promotes Holocaust scholarship, education and commemoration...
...When they came in front of Mengele, he said to my wife, Edita, pointing to her mother, 'Is this your mother?' She nodded yes, and he ordered her 'Give the child to your mother...
...And perhaps that is why the children's memorial is particularly important, although it is only one of the many achievements of Yad Vashem...
...But on the whole, children were liquidated immediately...
...For one moment there is panic and dread...
...The child went into the gas chamber with his grandmother...
...These will be our pyramids," says Reuven Dafni...
...In this infinity of lights there is memory, but also a measure of comfort...
...Although on a smaller scale, the children's memorial will remain one of the most poignant memorials of all...
...We had taught him German, hoping that perhaps it would help, that it might save him...
...Most of all, the systematic destruction of Jewish children symbolized the primary objective of the Nazis葉o finally rid the world of Jews, to ensure that this inferior, despised people would not continue to exist...
...Tahrtzeit candles light up the darkness all around us預bove us, below us, on all sides...
...Avraham Baruch, Greece...
...One of the most dreadful aspects of the Holocaust was that we could not act like parents, we could not jump out and take our children from the line, we could not save our children from the horror...
...It has been said that these "young smugglers" became the basis of the ghetto economy...
...fewer than 100 survived...
...In the complex are also memorials to the righteous gentiles, partisans and ghetto fighters...
...the confusion, dread and filth...
...This was his solution...
...If they would have grown up, they could have had children...
...Thirteen years ago we decided to create this children's memorial," explains Reuven Dafni, vice chairman of Yad Vashem...
...The final memorial, which has yet to be finished, is that of the Destroyed Communities, a valley of simulated villages memorializing each Jewish community destroyed...
...I will give them an everlasting name which shall not perish " Jewish Children Who Perished in the Holocaust is a place where the Jewish people now can house their sorrow for and memory of a generation of children slaughtered...
...How painful is the death of a child under any circumstances...
...Terezh was used by the Germans as a way-station for Auschwitz...
...Josef died in Auschwitz on May 18,1944...
...She too went to Auschwitz...
...As we stand in the darkness looking at these innocent faces, everything we've ever read or heard or experienced about Jewish children under Nazi rule assails us...
...With the baby in her arms, my wife went with her mother into line...
...A child cries, "Mommy, I'm afraid," and gropes for his mother's hand...
...Infinite Light A Memorial to Children Who Died in the Holocaust ROCHELLE FURSTENBERG Previous page: thousands of yahrtzeit candles, mirror images of four continuously lit candles, illuminate the interior of the Memorial to the Jewish Children Who Perished in the Holocaust, newly constructed at Yad Vashem...
...In the ghettos and concentration camps, starvation, pneumonia, dysentery and typhoid took their worst toll among this vulnerable population...
...Parents devote themselves to protecting their children, watching them, keeping them safe...
...Faige Beck, Warsaw," the names are read...
...It has more than 30,000 testimonies容yewitness accounts of the Holocaust...
...Survivors have reported how even young children helped their families...
...Only four candles, encased in special glass and surrounded by mirrors that don't reflect the viewer, create this wondrous memorial...
...Stark white granite pillars cluster on the mound atop the children's memorial and line the path leading to its underground rooms...
...More dangerously, children who claimed to be older than they were would work outside the ghetto and smuggle food in...
...Chaim Heller, Berlin...
...It holds out to us the possibility that these pure souls continue to exist in a sphere of infinite light, limitless being...
...When we are finished," he goes on, "there will be a garden around the memorial, with a bridge to a room where children will be able to react to what they have seen葉o draw and to write, to express their feelings about the subject...
...The faces of lost children peer through the blackness of the children's memorial...
...When you grow up...
...More than 15,000 children under the age of 15 passed through Terezm...
...But as we wind our way into the main hall of the memorial, an amazing thing happens...
...There were my parents, my grandparents, six brothers and their wives...
...The children often exhibited amazing maturity...
...And these works we will keep...
...Chana Lifschutz, Hungary...
...We came from Munkash, which at that time was part of Czechoslovakia," said Abraham Spiegel, recalling the death of his two-year-old son, Uziel...
...An unfinished arch made of exposed iron bars, which in other structures are covered by construction, bridges the path overhead...
...They have had so little time to grow, to experience life, to accomplish things...
...The liquidation of Jewish children most poignantly reflects the larger scheme of the Nazis: It was the first step in the biological extermination of all races and nations deemed inferior...
...We bring our children into the darkness, leaving behind the white light of the Jerusalem hills...
...Brilliantly designed by architect Moshe Safdie and donated by the Abraham Spiegel family of Los Angeles, the Memorial to the * Literally, "a monument and a name," from Isaiah 56:5, "I will give them, in My House and within My walls, a monument and a name better than sons or daughters...
...The style is different...
...Babies and young children, in particular, were of no use as they could not be put to work in labor camps...
...There are half a million names of children that have been recorded at Yad Vashem by their families and friends...
...The memorial is built underground, into a hill at the Yad Vashem complex...
...We are suddenly lifted from the sordidness and evil, the filth and obscenity of the Nazi genocide of children, into an infinity of memorial candles...
...Those allowed to work in the concentration camps often endangered their lives stealing bread for others...
...A children's memorial has now been dedicated at Yad Vashem,* the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, to commemorate the children murdered by the Nazis...
...Parents watched panic-stricken, paralyzed, helpless, as their children were directed to the line that led to the death chamber...
...But the memorial shakes up the world, brings attention to what was done to innocent little children...
...But the children葉hey could be our own children, loved and pampered, secure in their parents' protection, full of joy and life and hope...
...I once played like you, and studied in school and teased my sister...
...But in the Holocaust, there was no illusion of "when you grow up...
...One and a quarter million children were killed by the Nazis...
...the last touch of a hand...
...We have entered some mysterious heavenly realm, where the souls of one and a quarter million children radiantly light our way...
...My mother-in-law who lived in Bardyof came to stay with us when things became difficult there...
...Youth who come here begin to comprehend that it was not only old people and adults who died in the death camps, but also young people like themselves...
...But we feel that it is particularly relevant to young people...
...We approached Moshe Safdie to design it...
...The cold white granite pillars severed at different heights, placed at the entrance to the memorial, solemnly testify to this tragic history...
...We are always leading our children to some future event...
...We see the baby clinging to his stunned parents...
...Remember me, remember me," the litany of names seems to beg...
...We were all herded together into the ghetto of the town and in March 1944 we were sent to Auschwitz...
...It will take three years to read them and then様ike the triennial cycle of Torah readings葉hey will be repeated forever...
...Images rise before us...
...How precious is each child...
...Each memorial commemorates a different aspect of the Holocaust...
...Drawn by ten-year-old Josef Pollack from Czechoslovakia while he was interned at Terezm (Theresienstadt) concentration camp, it is one of many drawings featured in / Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children's Drawings and Poems from Terezh Concentration Camp 1942-1944 (Schocken Books, 1978...
...The bars are deliberately left exposed to create a sense of the destruction wrought by the Holocaust memorial, lit by numberless memorial candles, the names of children who died in the Holocaust solemnly resound through its halls, child after child...
...Perceived by the Nazis to be a dispensable population, they were sent to their deaths upon arrival at the death camps...
...The vision of innumerable candles has been created by a brilliant illusion...
...the blood, feces and tiny dried-up cadavers thrown into pits of bones...
...The Hall of Names has registered the names of three million Jews who died in the Holocaust, submitted by surviving families...
...My wife was the only one of the brothers' spouses to survive...

Vol. 12 • January 1988 • No. 10


 
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