Not to remember means to side with the executioners against its victims; not to remember means to kill the victims a second time; not to remember means to become an accomplice of the enemy.
Elie Wiesel, Holocaust Memorial Dedication, February 4, 1990
The Miami Holocaust Memorial The Beginning Sculpture The Arbor of History The Lonely Path
The Sculpture of Love and Hate The Memorial Wall The Final Sculpture References
The difficulty, however, in creating a physical space, a metonymic substitution that stands for the Holocaust, far removed from the “topography of terror” (Young 283) of European memorials, is that the builders, no matter their good intentions, risk creating a narrative that either sensationalizes or inadvertently trivializes and packages the experiences of survivors. As Geoffrey Hartman questions in The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust, “Will our Holocaust museums become a series of macabre theme parks?” (12), or can the construction of memory offer a genuine experience of history?
At the Miami Holocaust Memorial, like many memorials throughout the country, it is the Holocaust survivors themselves who offer that experience of history, giving life to the unavoidably inanimate structure. It is their testimony that “keeps the events before our eyes. The volume of testimonies is remarkable; it not only contradicts the notion of the Holocaust as an inexpressible experience (though that retains an emotional truth) but creates an internally complex field of study” (Hartman, Holocaust 6).
Currently, there are twenty-five active Holocaust survivor volunteers, and it is their constant presence at the Memorial, whether working the Information window or walking through the Memorial with visitors, their narratives, that transforms the experience from one of removed intellectual encounter to visceral experience.
On April 5th, 1985, Kenneth Treister was commissioned by a group of Holocaust survivors to create a sculpture dedicated to the memory of the Six Million. The group was called the Holocaust Memorial Committee, and it was comprised of Norman Braman, Chairman, Jack Chester, Dr. Helen Fagin, George Goldbloom, Abe Resnick, and David Schaecter (Figure 1).
An experienced sculptor, Treister’s daunting task was to create a memorial that, in his words, paid tribute to a “lost civilization,” a culture that was systemically decimated, a culture that had inhabited Europe for thousands of years. Treister researched several memorials and traveled to Jerusalem to study the archives at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial museum.
The Miami Holocaust Memorial project took five years to develop. Treister went to Mexico to do the bulk of his sculpture work at a foundry--Fundicion Artistica. Working at the foundry, it took Treister three years to cast the Memorial’s bronze sculpture. It took another year and half to enlarge the Marquette to full size in plaster and then cast in bronze.
In constructing the memorial, Treister decided not to use barbed wire and twisted steel--“The materials of war and destruction--” but, rather, incorporate more organic elements by creating a garden with a reflection pool that contains blooming white water lilies, and a colonnade resplendent with white bougainvillea. He also used Jerusalem stone and a forest of palms (13).
Like the survivors’ narratives, Treister’s memorial tells a story, and its circular architecture, with its seven distinct “chapters,” allows for the unfolding of events, beginning, as all compelling stories do, with characters.
The first sculpture a visitor encounters depicts a nameless mother shielding her two children. In back of her, on the wall, an inscription from Anne Frank: “Then, in spite of everything, I believe that people are really good at heart.” It is the irony of that inscription that sets the tone for the rest of the Memorial, since by the time the visitor journeys through to the gruesome end, Frank’s words are painfully naďve and hollow. The Beginning Sculpture also has special meaning for Holocaust Memorial volunteer and survivor, Ann Rosenheck.
Born 1931, in the Carpathian Mountains of Czechoslovakia, in a small town called Rachov that one of her great, great grandfathers had started in the 1700s, she was sent to Hungary in March, 1944.
“German troops came in and said we had twenty minutes to pack,” she recounts. She was thirteen at the time, and was with both her parents, and her sister with her two children. A kind family had let them stay in a stable, but four weeks later she was taken to Auschwitz. She recalls getting onto the cattle cars.
Ann Rosenheck
“We had an advantage,” Rosenheck explains. She and her family stood by a hole in the cattle car, which allowed them to “stick our fingers out to get water, but at night we were cool.”
It took four and half days to arrive at Auschwitz. Men and women were separated. “Mama didn’t come down. The S.S. is chasing us with guns and dogs.” She also notes that her mother was “never bare-headed.” And when her mother finally emerged from the train, another inmate told her, “Nobody is younger than seventeen--nobody is older than thirty-eight.” A little girl at the time, Ann tells me, she was wearing a braid, and so in order to make her look older, her mother had a plan.
“My mama took off her kerchief and put it on me. “’Now remember,’” her mother told her, “’you are seventeen, say you were born in 1927, use the same birthday.’”
And so it was her mother’s sacrifice, handing over her kerchief, that Rosenheck credits with saving her life. It was also the last time she saw her father.
Her mother and sister came before the notorious Dr. Mengele and he had her go to the left side--right meant you went straight to the crematorium. She finds that even today she can’t stomach the smell of barbeque. “Today, if a barbeque is on . . . it has the same smell.” In 1945 she was liberated from Dachau.
She says that the Beginning Sculpture has particular meaning for her, since it is the mother-figure of the sculpture, clinging to her two children, that reminds her so poignantly of her own mother.
"Joe" Dzubiak
Passing from the first sculpture, the visitor encounters black, granite panels etched with photographic history of the Holocaust. One of the panels displays a photograph of American forces liberating young men at Buchenwald in April 1945.
Josek
Dziubak, or “Joe” as he prefers to be called, is one of those young men in the photograph. A Holocaust survivor and one of the first volunteers at the Memorial, Dziubak points out the photograph to those who visit the memorial. Dziubak was born in
Lodz, Poland, September 6, 1925. His mother was widowed at an early age, and in order to make a living, Dziubak and his five siblings worked with leather, making soles for shoes. “It was a rough life,” he admits. But it was about to get worse.
In the ghetto, Dziubak worked at a leather factory making harnesses and saddles. But when the Germans liquidated the ghetto, he and his family were taken in cattle cars to Birkeneau. When they got off the train, he recalls that they made the selection.
“Men on this side, women on this side. My mother was holding my hand . . . a trustee, a capo that was there before, a Jewish guy, said [to my mother] let him go, just let him go to the other side. My mother let go of my hand. Nobody knew that there were gas chambers. Who ever heard of gas chambers? Nobody knew.”
Dziubak also recalls another incident when he stepped off the train; he overheard two capos talking. One said to the other, “’Look at the smoke; they’re burning yesterday’s transport.’”
He was taken to a barracks where an S.S. officer picked out a hundred and twenty-one boys. These boys had numbers tattooed on their forearms. “The Poles told us, ’now you’re going to live.’” The numbers meant they were to be used for the labor force.
Alone, already separated from his family, along with thirty other boys, Dzuibak went to Auschwitz and did an assortment of jobs ranging from working on a farm, to picking up garbage and ashes from the crematorium.
In an attempt to dismantle the camps, the Germans sent the prisoners from Auschwitz to
Buchenwald. Ultimately, as the photograph in the Arbor shows, he was liberated from
Buchenwald. Afterwards, he recounts, “We were sent to France, to an orphanage home, an organization called
OSE.” At the orphanage, Dziubak says Elie Wiesel was “three bunks away from me.”
He eventually made his way to the U.S., where he worked as a busboy at Grossinger’s Hotel in the Catskills. Today his focus, like the other survivors at the Memorial, is singular: “I’m here to teach the kids.”
From there, a visitor moves down The Lonely Path, where on the wall, engraved in stone, are the names of the concentration camps. A skylight projects a yellow Star of David.
Another Holocaust survivor volunteer, Nathan Glass, remembers when the order came to wear that Star of David. On September 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland, and Glass recalls that the “One thing we learned very fast. If you want to live, you obey the order.”
Born in Poland in Pabianice in 1922, Glass remembers, “Anti-Semitism was every day. . . . We knew we were Jewish at every step. We went to a movie, a bunch of hooligans would beat you up. They knew from a Jew, they could take.”
Nathan Glass
When the Germans invaded, they took over Glass’s father’s textile factory. And like all the Jews, Glass was sent to live in the Lodz ghetto, where they were systematically starved. “The worst thing a human being can observe is hunger,” Glass says.
But Glass argues that in the midst of this starvation, madness, and murder, Jews continued to resist. “People said we went to the slaughter house like sheep. It’s a lie. We did things . . . It was not allowed to gather, so we created a young adults group. [We] said we would do everything in our power to educate the younger generation.” It was their goal to keep Jewish values alive. Glass remembers that at the meetings they would sing Yiddish Zionist songs, and he sings a song for me, his voice strong and resonant. He translates the Yiddish for me: “I want to go home, I want to go home to Zion.”
Glass maintains that the Jews attempted, as best they could, to construct a life within the confines of the ghetto, having a Jewish theatre, and even playing soccer games where they took in a German policeman to referee. “We lived a ‘normal life’--one thing you had to see to it that you don’t get sick.” Hospitals didn’t have medications, and when the Germans went into the hospitals, they would remove the patients.
In the ghetto, Glass remembers, “We lived six people in a three-room apartment. We had to share our apartment with two other families. Twelve people in three rooms.”
Every now and then, in the ghettos, the Germans came in and needed people. “When you left the house, you never knew if you came back. They needed people to build the concentration camps. The Jews built the camps.”
When they liquidated the ghetto, Jews lined up in front of their apartment buildings, and the Germans marched them to a sports field. “The irony was that the Poles were standing as we walked, applauding, ‘Bravo, there would be no Jews in our cities.’ They took all the kids away.” However, Glass notes that his family was still together, and the Germans had them go back and clean up the ghetto.
Eventually, like the others, he was put on a cattle car, and when the train doors opened, he found himself at Auschwitz. His first thought was, when he smelt the smoke, “What is it? A bakery? A chimney?
When I got off the train was the last time I saw my mother and my sisters, Esther, Rachel, and Florence.”
At the camp, Glass saw his father and brother, “and I was happy.” In the barracks, Glass remembers that a man walked in and told him, “’Guess what happened? They just removed one of my testicles.’”
At Auschwitz Glass worked in the crematorium and received extra rations. At the crematorium someone remarked to him, “’I just burned my father and mother.’” This was life at Auschwitz.
Glass was liberated by Americans, the 82nd Division, and was sent to a Displaced Persons camp. He eventually found his brother, Morris, and he came to the United States to live with his uncle in Patterson, New Jersey.
As painful as the memories were, Glass knew he had to speak about the Holocaust, and so, in the 1960s, he joined the New Jersey Speakers Bureau. “Somebody had to preach the gospel about the Holocaust.”
And Glass continues to do just that. Not only does he work at the Memorial, he also volunteers at the Jewish Federation, visiting the lonely and sick. When he lectures at schools, he talks about tolerance. “We survivors don’t hate, because we saw what hate can do.”
The Sculpture of Love and Hate
From The Lonely Path, a visitor moves to the ultimate sculpture, a giant outstretched hand, marked by a number. “The sculpture represents my portrayal of a scene from hell . . . frozen in bronze” (qtd. Treister 18). The grotesque sculptures that surround the hand are eerie in the accuracy of their depiction of human misery, and they are a frightening reflection of the photographs the visitor has earlier glimpsed in the Arbor of History--naked, human skeletons, barely clinging to life; dead bodies littering the ground. The sculpture forces a visitor to react to its brutality. This is not a Steven Spielberg, Roberto Benigni version of the Holocaust, but rather a horrific, brutal, confrontation with the visitor, challenging him or her to ask, as Elie Wiesel imagined a visitor might, “Was the killer really that cruel? Were the victims that hopeless, that lonely, that abandoned? How was it possible for an entire people, the Jewish people, to be singled out for humiliation and annihilation?” (qtd. in Treister 9).
While to trace the origins of that cruelty is an impossibility, one Holocaust survivor and Memorial volunteer, Herbert Karliner, remembers the experience of Kristallnacht, “the night of broken glass” as the beginning of the end.
In Germany, on the night of November 9th, 1938, Herbert Karliner remembers his father’s store being ransacked, and the synagogues burning to the ground. “A Brown Shirt made a bonfire with books and a Torah,” Karlinger recalls. “My father tried to retrieve it. He was kicked.” The Cuban Council in Hamburg was selling permits to go to Cuba, and the German government gave a luxury liner for the Jews--the S.S. St. Louis.
On May 13, 1939, Karliner recalls the exhilaration he felt as they boarded the ship. “For us children it was very exciting, a big adventure. We had a wonderful trip. The weather was beautiful, the food was good. The German captain was fantastic.” The ship arrived in Havana, and this is where Karliner says that he learned his first Spanish word: mańana. “But mańana never came.” After seven days the ship was ordered to leave Havana. “Outside Miami, I remember well,” Karliner reflects. “I saw beautiful homes. I was 12˝ years old, ‘This place, I’m going to come back some day.’”
The ship returned to Germany, and Karliner and his brother made their way to France to the Jewish Children’s home, where he was sent to work at a bakery in a small village. “One morning the French police came and arrested me and took me to a camp where all the Jews were taken. They took boys over 16 and it was one week from my 16th birthday. Those boys were taken and they never came back.”
Karliner’s uncle sent a visa for him to come to the U.S. and in 1947 he went to Hartford, Connecticut and then to Florida.
He enjoys his work at the Holocaust Memorial and believes, frighteningly, that, “It can happen again--even here in the United States,” but “America is a wonderful country.”
From the horror of the Sculpture of Love and Anguish, the visitor comes upon the Memorial Wall, a black granite wall etched with the names of victims. The names were submitted to the Memorial by the families of Holocaust survivors.
Avi Mizrachi
The Memorial survives on private donations and grants.
The visitor arrives at the end of the Memorial, and the mother and her two children who we’ve seen at the beginning of the journey, now lay crumbled in death. And above their heads, etched into the wall, a more somber, less idealistic quote from Anne Frank: “Ideals, dreams, and cherished hopes rise within us only to meet the horrible truths and be shattered.”
We are coming to an historical end of first-hand Holocaust narratives, and all that will remain will be Holocaust museums and memorials. It is inevitable, as Geoffrey Hartman notes, that “education will have to replace all eyewitness transmission of those experiences” (Longest 5). But what a loss it will be to not hear their Eastern European accents, to see the blue dye of their numbered tattoos on their tired skin, to hear them say, “I was there, I saw, I know.”
Hartman, Geoffrey H. The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana U P,
1996.
--. Ed. Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory. Oxford UK & Cambridge USA: Blackwell, 1994.
Holocaust Memorial: A Sculpture of Love and Anguish. Video. Kenneth Treister, Sculptor; Narration by Chaim Topol. Introduction
by Elie Wiesel. N.D.
Interviews conducted with Nathan Glass, Herbert Karliner, Ann Rosenheck and Joe Dzuibek. September 2002 – May 2003.
Treister, Kenneth. A Sculpture of Love and Anguish: The Holocaust Memorial, Miami Beach, Florida.
New York: S.p.i. Books, 1993.
Young, James. E. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven and London: Yale U P, 1993.
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