Holocaust Memorial and Memory

(Events from August 5, 2009)
Pictures taken by Daniel Kashima

Holocaust Memorial















A street brushes against each edge of the holocaust memorial. Tour buses, cars, bicyclists, tourists, and locals create traffic and significant amount of commotion. Stepping onto the memorial, several things strike me. Right angles. Lots of them. Gray boxes of concrete. Lots of them. Atop an uneven terrain that at parts represent a sine wave lay these gray blocks of concrete, with all the blocks virtually parallel to one another on all surfaces. This results in the apparent topography created by the tops of the blocks to differ from the small rolling hills on which they lay as well as a similar pattern of light shadowing for all structures.

Walking through this garden of concrete immerses me into a wholly different environment. Whereas the structures on the edge hardly reach my waist in height, walking deeper into the memorial soon finds me surrounded by structures taller than I am. This results in me unable to see beyond a straight and narrow plane of vision. Behind the sheets of concrete, I lost sight of others I easily fixated on prior to entering. Even the hustle and bustle of the surrounding streets and tourists die away in this concrete jungle. In the middle of four busy streets, the memorial managed to isolate me and instill a sense of desolation.















Are these feelings what the designer planned for this memorial? I vaguely recall that this memorial stands as a place where different feelings come and go for different people. For myself, my first visit yielded desolation and isolation. At the same time, I saw children climbing atop the stones, leaping from one to the next. Presumably, their viewpoint of the memorial is one more simplistic and less dark than those knowing more about the holocaust. I wonder what their interpretation is?

……

Memory. To build and forget?

One of the arguments made against the construction of the holocaust memorial stipulated that its building will give an excuse for people to forget about what happened. I presume the same argument was used against the construction of the holocaust museum, chronicling the events leading up to and following the rise and fall of the Nazi Party. While a valid argument, I feel as though the creation of symbolic memory aids provide a catharsis to help cope with (but not forget) the past.

Keeping one’s head stuck in the past does little good for the present or future while fixating on the present and future while forgetting the past infallibly leads to disasters down the line. I’m in the opinion that these memorials are a metaphorical rear-view mirror; allowing the city to glance back on itself to view the road blocks passed while looking along the road ahead.