Memory and Myth: Holocaust Memorials Mix History with National Ideals

...The next hall represents armed Jewish resistance and the aftermath...

...Yet whether it is adopted by Solidarity as a symbol of resistance, or by the Palestinians as their own fighting icon, it lends a Jewish cast to all who gather in its square, even as its own monumental vision is redefined by every new commemoration...

...But by eradicating the Jewish type of memory, the Nazis would also have destroyed the possibility of regeneration through memory that has marked Jewish existence...

...In this way, it is integrated into Jewish history...

...A great obelisk stands in its center, surrounded by a symbolic graveyard of more than 17,000 jagged granite stones set in concrete, several thousand of them bearing names of Jewish communities in Poland destroyed during the Holocaust...

...Having defined the Holocaust as the murder of 11 million innocents by the Nazis, Jimmy Carter established a Holocaust Memorial Commission in Washington...

...The mass murder of Jews becomes significant in Polish memory only insofar as it is perceived as a precursor to the Poles' own narrowly averted genocide...

...At its base, the monument is dedicated in Hebrew, Yiddish and Polish to "The Jewish People, its heroes and its martyrs...

...Because so few non-Jewish Germans were interned in the death camps, these camps seem to have entered German memory only in an abstract sense...

...Eyes to the ground, all trudge resignedly and passively to their fate, except for a rabbi holding a Torah scroll in one arm, who looks up and reaches to heaven with his free hand, as if to beseech God...

...In .every country's memorials, in every national museum and archive, we find a different Holocaust—and, at times, we find no Holocaust at all...

...Torched and demolished a block at a time by the Germans, it was eventually bulldozed altogether for new apartment buildings...

...There are, therefore, three religious memorials in the camp: one each for the Catholic Church, the Protestant Church and the Jewish community...

...The Holocaust museum at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles is thus renamed "The Museum of Tolerance," to reflect both its pedagogical aim—tolerance—and the heterogeneous audience it hopes to attract...

...Where prisoners of the camp were once Well-scrubbed barracks at Dachau convey an antiseptic impression of camp conditions...

...It was not to mourn the loss of a Jewish population that either of the Christian memorials was established, but rather to atone for Nazi sins against humanity...

...Given the almost antiseptic cleanliness of the grounds and of the two replicated barracks, the tasteful symbolism of the other barracks' foundations and the excellent museum, it is not surprising to hear visitors complain that this memorial aesthetizes memory—as if to vanquish the past rather than to recall it...

...By breaking down the identity of victims by their states of origin, however, national martyrs displace Jewish victims...

...The massacre of Polish Jewry is not only contextualized here in the midst of other nations' suffering, it is also linked specifically to Poland's own destruction...

...On each of these the name of a country is inscribed, the national home of Jews who perished in Treblinka...

...But at a deeper level, this may be a consequence of all museums...

...In its panoply of figures drawn from both socialist and Jewish traditions, it lends itself to both specific and universal interpretations...

...Thus framed by the hotel, a muscular and bare-chested Mordechai Anielewicz, commander of the ghetto fighters, emerges heroically amid flame and ruin...

...Survivors of Dachau still living in Germany are primarily Christian, and it is mostly their memories that inform the memorial project While the seemingly unadorned ruins of memorial camps in Poland compel visitors to take them literally as the physical artifacts of the Nazi era, the freshly painted, efficiently organized remains of Dachau offer a mixed message to visitors: How could the Nazis have been so evil if the camp was so clean and orderly...

...As a result, in Germany what we would call Holocaust memorials tend to be highly stylized when remembering the Jews, and oriented largely toward all victims of Fascism when remembering the Germans...

...Will the proposed museum recall the six million Jews slaughtered for having being born Jews, or the 11 million who were murdered in all the camps, for all different reasons...

...Total liquidation would not have come through the Jews' physical annihilation only, or in the expunction of all reference to them afterward...

...Kibbutz Lohamei Hageta'ot (literally, Fighters of the Ghettos) was founded by survivors of the camps and ghettos, many of them partisans and members of Hechalutz and the Jewish Fighting Organization, as a living monument to what they had seen...

...Even more striking are the "tombstone walls" in the Warsaw and Krakow Jewish cemeteries: retaining walls built from the broken fragments of tombstones smashed by the Nazis...

...Or will it become a generic museum of all holocausts, including the massacres of Armenians, Cambodians and Russians...

...By juxtaposing in a photographic montage images of German soldiers killed in battle, bombed German cities and liberated Jewish concentration camp inmates, the museum at Neuengamme in West Germany recalls collectively the victims of war as it forgets who the specific makers of that war were...

...A section on the world's silence and sealed ports of refuge is included in this hall...

...walks forward, his eyes on the ground, cradling—almost pieta-like—a concentration camp victim...

...From the narrative of events and diagrams inscribed on this plaque, we learn that the SS Cap Arcona was one of three converted cruise liners carrying thousands of prisoners from Neuengamme concentration camp into the Baltic Sea, where, we are told, it was strafed and bombed by RAF warplanes...

...For the martyrs, however, we must walk around to the stone bas-relief on the dark side of the monument, where they are remembered separately and just as archetypally as the heroes...

...worked to death in the brick factory as slaves to build Hitler's Reich, volunteers at "Work-camp Neuengamme" now work as excavators of remembrance...

...On one level, the archaeological approach at Neuengamme threatens to turn the Holocaust and the camps into ancient and inaccessible history...

...If the taison d'etre for Holocaust monuments is "never to forget," we must ask precisely what is not forgotten at Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Auschwitz, Babi Yar, Yad Vashem or Liberty State Park in Jersey City...

...The only sign of a Jewish presence in Lukow, which was half Jewish before the war, is this monument to the Jewish cemetery...

...But beginning with an ordinance in 1936 forbidding German stonemasons to carve gravestones for Jews, continuing through the Nazis' methodical destruction of documents in Vilna recording past persecutions and ending with Hitler's plans for a museum in Prague to the extinct Jewish race, it grows clear that if the first step toward the destruction of a people lay in the blotting out of its memory, then the last step would lie in its calculated resurrection...

...Guard towers, barbed wire, barracks and crematoria—abstracted elsewhere, even mythologized—here stand intact...

...From there, the visitor walks for 200 yards through dense woods along a path of railroad ties laid to symbolize the tracks that once fed this death camp...

...On the death ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, surrounded on all sides by crumbling barracks, rusty electric fences, bombed-out crematoria and ash-filled ponds, four blocklike sarcophagi mark the end of the rail line and the beginning of the "death zone...

...Given American egalitarian ideals, it may not be possible for an American national museum of the Holocaust to define its aims otherwise...

...While references to Jewish victims are often submerged in the political character of Eastern Bloc memorials, the issue of historical distortion grows more complex on closer examination...

...The photographs of survivors coming ashore at Haifa and Caesarea suggest that the "end of the Holocaust" comes only with the survivors' resistance and their return to and redemption in Eretz Yisrael...

...This monument is thus consonant both with the specific experiences of Americans in the war and with traditional self-perceptions and idealizations of the U.S...

...The monuments at Treblinka and Sobibor, in particular, must be sought out as deliberately as the camps were hidden—or they are not found at all...

...By preserving the memory of the heroes as well as the martyrs of the destruction, Israel's Yad Vashem memorial actively opposes what Israelis view as an exaggerated fascination with the Jews as victims only...

...Any record of the Holocaust thus appears in principle to defeat Nazi plans...

...According to local villagers, Nachl und .Vebet-clnd (night-and-fog-clad)* bodies washed onto their meticulously groomed beaches near Neustadt and Timmendorf for months afterwards and were immediately buried by the townspeople to prevent the spread of disease...

...At Treblinka in Poland, large inscriptions at the entrance to the memorial inform visitors in several languages that of the 800,000 people murdered there, almost all were Jews...

...Though they were killed as Jews, the victims here are remembered on these sentinel stones as Yugoslavs, Poles, French citizens, Russians and Germans...

...In the United States, the Holocaust has begun to dominate all Jewish past and present...

...The result is a monument to thousands of defenseless prisoners killed by the British...

...As literal fragments of events, these artifacts of catastrophe blur the distinction between themselves and what they evoke...

...After direct narrative reference to Jewish victims at the entrance, the Jewish character of this memorial is shown more subtly...

...Like sentries to the memorial area, a separate row of granite stones six to ten feet high stands before the clearing...

...In feast Germany today, according to a recent New York Times article, the camp is considered to have been ^self-liberated," and the D.S...

...That many of these prisoners had survived the death marches from Auschwitz, that most were Jews and that all were being hastily evacuated from concentration camps in northern Germany to somewhere—anywhere—away from German soil is not recalled in this memorial...

...They were not witnesses to the process of destruction, only to its effects...

...Arranged into a pastiche and set in mortar, angular chunks of Hebrew-inscribed marble and granite, variously smooth and time-eaten, recall not only the broken Jewish communities of Warsaw and Krakow, but also the pogrom of headstones itself...

...Designed by the Warsaw-born sculptor within months of the uprising in 1943, during his exile in Novosibirsk,* this monument was initially submitted by Rapoport to the Party * Born in 1911 in Warsaw, Nathan Rapoport began studying the art of sculpture at the age of 14...

...The religious identity of two million of these people and why they suffered is obscured...

...In addition to being subsumed in the larger Polish consciousness, Polish memorials to the death camps are often swallowed up more literally by- the vast Polish landscape...

...Behind the sarcophagi stands a tower of stone blocks resembling a giant tombstone, bearing in its center a single triangle recalling the patch all prisoners wore on their camp clothing...

...When the myths and ideals embodied in a nation's monuments are those of its peoples, they are reaffirmed and made to appear natural and true...

...tend to organize Jewish culture and identity around this one experience rather than represent events as part of a greater Jewish continuum...

...The Babi Yar Memorial therefore commemorates "The Two Hundred Thousand Victims who died [at] Babi Yar, Kiev, Ukraine, USSR, September 29, 1941-November 6, 1943...

...Prisoners slept in the triple-decker bunks with no space between them, and disease spread easily, but today visitors are given the impression of cleanliness and order rather than of the filth and chaos that actually existed...

...soldiers, which has been movingly described to the Wld by one of those liberated, Nobel Prize-winning author Hie Wiesel...

...One hundred crab apple trees in the Babi Yar Park in Denver, Colorado, signify thousands of Jews gunned down in a ravine near Kiev, in the Ukraine...

...Of the Dachau survivors still living in Germany, most are Christians, many of them clergymen and Social Democrats, whose own memories constitute the core of these memorial projects...

...this fragments the martyrdom of a people into that of so many nations...

...Of the 12 halls of the museum, only two are devoted to the ghettos, concentration camps and exterminations...

...Rapoport died two years latei Arts Committee in Moscow, which rejected it straightaway as too nationalistic—i.e., too Jewish—in its conception...

...Memorialization occurs not only between events and the memorial, but between the memorial and ourselves...

...role of providing rescuers in war and continued on page 59 sanctuary for the world's "huddled masses...

...In this archaeology of the Holocaust, students dig up artifacts of the era—e.g., nails, tools, old shoes—around which the instructors reassemble, teach and memorialize events...

...East German/s transfer to Soviet domination is portrayed as Buchenwald's ultimate liberation...

...There is scarcely an artifact left of the Jewish ghetto of Warsaw...

...Since the "American experience" of the Holocaust in 1945 was largely confined to the liberation of the camps, it is appropriate that the recently dedicated Holocaust monument, entitled Liberation, is located in Liberty State Park, New Jersey, within sight of our greatest ideological icon, the Statue of Liberty...

...A rosebush at Dachau designates the plot of ground where thousands of prisoners were lined up and shot...

...Initially conceived as a Jewish monument, this memorial has been criticized as not Jewish enough...

...Memorials in the United States are also limited by our own experience of the Holocaust...

...Finally, unlike other memorial expositions of the Holocaust, the history traced at Yad Vashem does not end with the liberation of the camps, but continues...

...In Lukow and Sando-miercz, camp survival's have gathered the broken and scattered tombstones from the communities' pre-war cemeteries and piled them—pyramid-like—into memorial obelisks...

...An inescapable partnership grows between a people and its monuments...

...But then there is a break in the exhibition, and we must move physically from one hall— i.e., one era—to another...

...Cast and poured in Paris because no foundry stood in Warsaw after the war, this bronze statue of seven mythically proportioned fighters is set in granite blocks intended to recall the Western Wall in Jerusalem...

...The harassment, deportations and even the pogroms of Kristallnacht are all presented here as being consistent with the European anti-Semitic tradition...

...There were no killing centers per se in Germany...

...In the dim light, our eyes are drawn downward to the eternal flame and to the names of the death camps inscribed on the stone floor...

...On each occasion, this Jewish icon functions as a monumental figure for someone else's cause...

...The first concentration camp in Germany (built in 1933), Dachau housed many Christian political prisoners...

...The memorial camps invite us to mistake their reality for the actual death camps' reality, to confuse the vision that shaped the monument for raw, unmediated history...

...The Jewish identity of victims at Treblinka is not altogether displaced, however...

...The majority Jews with Ukrainians and Others...

...Instead of learning about the Holocaust through the study of Jewish history, many students in the U.S...

...In this way, a nation's monuments efface as much history as they inscribe...

...From well-scrubbed barracks floors to the swept gravel walks outside, to the crematorium (open, a sign tells us, from 9 to 5), cleanliness and order now govern the "remembrance" of filth and chaos...

...Through the Prague museum and other monuments to his victory over the Jews, Hitler never planned to forget the Jews, but rather to supplant their memory of events with his own...

...If in this layout, the path to Holocaust lay through the centers and shtetlach of Diaspora life, then the road from Holocaust leads through resistance to survival, to the kibbutz itself and to the vibrant new self-sufficiency of Jews in their own land...

...Despite the Polish government's recent efforts to restore Poland's Jewish monuments, absence and brokenness remain the dominant Jewish motifs here...

...History, memory and state policy intersect in Warsaw, where the Jewish ghetto uprising preceded by months the Poles' own revolt against the Nazis—the latter rebellion crushed by the Germans while the Red Army watched from across the Vistula River...

...Meaning and memory depend not just on the forms and figures in the Warsaw Ghetto Monument itself, but in the viewers' responses to the monument, how it is used politically and religiously in the community, who sees it under what circumstances, and how its figures are used and recast in new places, in foreign contexts...

...In their view, the killing centers in Poland were to have begun with the Jews and ended with the Poles...

...Divided into three principal sections, the powerful historical Gamp That...

...To some extent, the city itself was thus rebuilt around the Warsaw Ghetto Monument...

...Where the seemingly unadorned ruins of memorial camps in the East compel visitors to take them literally as the physical artifacts of the Nazi era, the freshly painted, efficiently organized icons at Dachau openly invite metaphysical speculation...

...A simple message is inscribed on 20 stone tablets in 20 different languages, including Yiddish and Hebrew: "Four million people suffered and died here at the hands of the Nazi murderers between the years 1940 and 1945...

...Imprisoned Hie Wiesel Denies Jewishness of Victims Buchenwald concentration camp, located in what is now East Germany, offers us another example of memory remade and history revised by a national memorial...

...survivors' ultimate fate...

...Clenching a homemade grenade hammerlike in his tattered trousers and rolled-up sleeves, this Anielewicz has risen against the Nazis as both partisan-worker and Jew...

...The memorials at Majdanek and Auschwitz in Poland, are devastating in their impact because they compel the visitor to accept the horrible fact that what they show is "real...

...Stylized and cerebralized, all of the monuments within the grounds of the camp emphasize the great gulf between past and present...

...The Holocaust is studied and taught in Israel as one event—even though of watershed proportions—among many others in a long Jewish history...

...Only one of the many memorial stones at Buchenwald is dedicated to Jews: exhibition at Yad Vashem reflects a characteristically Israeli grasp of events...

...In Israel, the Holocaust marks not so much the end of Jewish life as it does the end of viable life in exile...

...As surely as Anielewicz is a worker, the huddled and stooped figures on the reverse are archetypal Jews in exile, with only three Nazi helmets and two bayonets barely visible in the background to distinguish this expulsion from any other...

...But a critical approach to these monuments might rescue us from this complicity...

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...In this museum, one arrives at these halls only after visiting graphic reconstructions of Vilna, "the Jerusalem of Lithuania," and "The Shtetl, Olkieniki...

...After convincing the Polish authorities to let him erect his monument on the site of the uprising command post, Rapoport moved to Paris and made the sculpture...

...All memory of the rebellion and destruction is thus compressed into sculptor Nathan Rapoport's Warsaw Ghetto Monument, which stands strikingly alone in an otherwise clear and well-maintained memorial square...

...In adjoining exhibits, the Warsaw ghetto uprising and Jewish partisans are linked spatially to the current historical moment— the creation of the state of Israel...

...He completed his last work—a statue for Liberty State Park...

...Built in 1933 for political enemies of the Reich, Dachau, the first concentration camp in Germany, housed and thereby created German victims, many of whom were also Jews...

...army is referred to at the memorial as the "occupation power...

...It seems as though nothing but airy time separates the visitor from past realities...

...At the end of the line now, the visitor steps into a huge expanse of open land enclosed by trees...

...New Jersey (see p. 29)—in May 1985...

...A few years later Rapoport emigrated to Israel, but he moved to the United States in 1962 and became naturalized in 1965...

...Given the U.S.'s pluralistic concept of itself, it is not surprising that ideals like liberty and pluralism would constitute central motifs in both current and projected museums to the Holocaust in this country...

...For even though the attack on this ship is recorded here in detail, there is no mention of where these prisoners had been before Neuengamme (one of the political camps), or how they came to be gathered in Lu'beck Bay, or where they were going, or why the RAF bombed the ship...

...These tracks lead to barracks, mass graves and gas chambers, but all traces of the camp itself were destroyed, plowed under and planted over by the Germans...

...jumbled together and protruding in all directions, the densely packed stones bear striking resemblance to the ancient Jewish cemeteries in Eastern Europe...

...When World War II bioke out, Rapoport went east with the Polish army and found himself in Soviet-occupied territor...

...After falling short of funds, the Babi Yar Memorial Committee in Denver was able to complete its memorial only with assistance from the local Ukrainian community...

...A menorah is carved into the cap of the obelisk on its reverse side...

...The aim of a nation's monuments is not merely to remake memory in the image of its ideals...

...As horrifying as the conditions were at Dachau, its gas chamber was never used, so the crematorium burned "only" the remains of those who died of shootings, beatings or, most often, disease...

...Although the museum on the kibbutz is dedicated to the memory of poet Yitzchak Katznelson, in both its name and memorial configuration, the museum commemorates less the dying of Jews and more their fighting during the war and survival afterwards...

...That the death camps were located on Polish soil is not viewed by the Poles as evidence of local anti-Semitism or collaboration, but as a sign of the Germans' ultimate plans for the Polish people...

...It was unveiled in Warsaw in 1948...

...In remembrance lies the secret of deliverance...

...For the young American G.I.s who liberated Dachau and Buchenwald, a history of the Holocaust necessarily excludes the conditions in Europe before the war, the wrenching break-up of families, deportations to the ghettos and camps, ano\even the killing process itself...

...In the first section, the rise of anti-Jewish laws and actions between 1933 and 1939 is traced through a mixture of photographs, leaflets, Nazi propaganda and historical narrative...

...how these events are remembered depends, in turn, on the shape memorials now lend them...

...The Nazis had intended the destruction of the Jews to be total: The Jews were to have been removed from history and memory...

...As we enter the great memorial hall at Yad Vashem—a huge megalithic tomb sunk into the earth—we also pass beneath the words of the Baal Shem Tov, which distill the raison d'etre of this memorial in Israel: ' 'Forgetting lengthens the period of exile...

...it is also to invite the collaboration of the community in acts of remembrance...

...From this room, one goes around the corner into a section entitled "The Struggle to Survive: 1939-1941"—an extension of the first section...

...In this way the Holocaust is contextualized not only to include aspects of life in exile, but also to remind us that Jewish life preceded the Holocaust and now follows it...

...The insides of the barracks at Auschwitz have been converted into national pavilions, including one dedicated in 1978 and devoted solely to an exposition of the Jewish experience at Auschwitz...

...For what is remembered depends on how it is remembered...

...In both cases, the camps have been preserved almost exactly as the Russians found them 40 years ago...

...When Rapoport returned to Warsaw in late 1946 with a clay maquette of the monument, the Warsaw City Arts Committee accepted it and Rapoport insisted that the monument be located at the site of the Jewish Fighting Organization's bunker...

...The result is a two-sided monument, each side to be viewed separately, each preserving an archetype as much as a historical event...

...The reasons for the widespread tendency to make Jews and Poles apposite in the memorial texts of the Polish camps are more complex than mere appropriation—or efface-ment—of the Jews' experience...

...After walking out of this section and back through the museum lobby, we enter the next room...

...For by bringing the past into the present one rusty artifact at a time, archaeologists of the Holocaust necessarily atomize events in order to reconstruct them...

...Invited to remember and then to contemplate remembrance in this great dark space, itself an objectification of absence, we do so within an ever-vigilant context: exile, memory and redemption...

...In a shaded clearing at the end of a farm road near Timmendorf, West Germany, an inscribed plaque and large wooden cross commemorate the "Catastrophe of the SS Cap Arcana," a German luxury liner with 4,600 people aboard that was sunk by the British Royal Air Force in the last days of April 1945...

...Anti-Semitism is not mentioned at the memorial, and the fact that so many of Buchenwald's victims were Jewish is played down...

...In effect, there may be no self-critical monuments, but only critical viewers...

...It is not to Holocaust monuments as such that wc turn for remembrance, but to ourselves within the reflective space they open up...

...The exhibits at Buchenwald today ignore the camp's dramatic liberation by US...

...This hall is devoted to the killing process done between 1941 and 1945...

...As it turns out, hidden death camps lead to hidden Holocaust memorials...

...Those who attended the unveiling had to climb over the rubble that had been the Warsaw ghetto to reach the monument...

...By identifying 100,000 victims massacred at Babi Yar only as "citizens of Kiev and prisoners of war," for example, a memorial near Kiev not only inflates the actual number of victims, but also forgets that almost all were killed for having been Jews...

...The concentration camp is now treated as an archaeological dig, where remnants of a Holocaust past are excavated and catalogued as evidence of Nazi atrocities...

...It has provided an iconographic context for everyone who visits it: from Willy Brandt to Nehru, from Jimmy Carter to Lech Walesa and from Pope John Paul II to Yasir Arafat...

...Mountains of hair, eyeglasses and toothbrushes at Auschwitz refer metonymi-cally to the lives that once animated them...

...The proportions and methods of this were so unlike anything before, that— as the layout suggests—it cannot be located within the context of traditional anti-Jewish persecution...

...Rapopoil worked as a sculptor for the Soviets until the war ended...

...A solitary concrete obelisk amid dozens of mass graves condenses Jewish memory at Bergen-Belsen...

...By deliberately hiding the extermination centers in the most remote regions of Poland, the Nazis effectively obscured both their deeds and the monuments to their deeds...

...In coming to stand for past realities, each of these icons displaces them and creates new ones in their stead: hence, an inescapable potential for "historical revision" in the memorializa-tion process...

...From the plaque, however, it is not clear whether the ' 'catastrophe" of the SS Cap Arcona lay in the massacre of so many innocents by the RAF or in the horrible irony of these camp * .\aclil und Xtbel was an official Nazi term ior organized roundups of Jews...

...Without other kinds of museums to a Jewish past, even to current life in the Diaspora, Holocaust museums in the U.S...

...In this new work by Nathan Rapoport, a young, solemn-looking G.I...

...With skeletal chest showing through tattered prison garb, his arms spread, his eyes staring vacantly into the sky, the victim exemplifies helplessness...

...are learning the whole of Jewish history through the lens of the Holocaust...