Across the world today, there are thousands of memorial sites representing the Holocaust, a term that referred to the systematic genocide of approximately six million Jews by the Nazis during the Second World War (Marcuse, 2010). Due to Anti-Semitism propaganda and Hitler’s regime, Jews were persecuted and murdered for being of a ‘different’ race (Brosnan, 2018). This paper will discuss debates and challenges surrounding the representation/memorialization of the Holocaust. It will discuss the role of monumental sculpture, sites, and artifacts of the murdered at concentration camps and international sites of remembrance. The paper also argues that representing the Holocaust differs according to national contexts.
The most well-known and arguably controversial memorial is the Warsaw Ghetto Monument, built by Nathan Rapoport. It commemorates the resistance of the Jews during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising but also commemorates the vast extermination of Jews at Treblinka as well as at other concentration camps. Young (1989) discussed the memorial’s relationship with past history but also revealed its ‘new’ role in current history. The Warsaw Ghetto was a largely Jewish area of Warsaw but during the Second World War, the Nazis transformed it into a transit center for Jews. After the Great Liquidation (between July and September 1942 when 310,322 Jews were gassed) the anti-fascist Jewish Fighting Organisation revolted against the Nazis on 19 April 1943, the same date as the Jewish Passover (Young, 1989). Originally the monument was located at the site of the uprising but now it stands in a public square, which perhaps diminishes its link to the past event. However, as Young (1989) argues, memory is not continuous because there are few Polish Jews in Warsaw and some Polish people believe the monument represents the Polish Uprising. Thus, it becomes a national figure of resistance that dilutes the Jewish memory of the Holocaust.
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Holocaust memorials in the country of the perpetrators use different forms of representation. In Germany, the challenge is how to remember or forget the crimes which the Nazis committed or were responsible for (Schulze, 2005). The Gerzes’ counter-monument in Harburg, Hamburg, is a good example. Young (1993) argued that the counter-monument was an anti-fascist monument against war and was built for peace and human rights. It was erected in a prominently working-class area of Harburg in 1986 and consisted of a 12m high pillar of lead. People wrote their names or messages onto the pillar and as a section filled up, the counter-monument was gradually lowered into the ground until it eventually disappeared in 1993. Unlike traditional First World War Memorials that aimed to console the bereaved, this counter-monument aimed to provoke a reaction from the public. As Young (1993) argued, it caused the public to reflect on the tragedy and memory of the Holocaust that was thrown back onto the people. In doing so, the people would be forced to rise up against fascism. However, the pillar has swastikas and other types of racist graffiti (Young, 1993), which perhaps challenges how society responds to the past.
There are also many controversial debates surrounding who should be represented at death camps. Smith (2000) argued that geographies are moral creations that reflect (and construct) judgments about who controls space. At Auschwitz-Birkenau, Charlesworth (1994) argued that representation of the Holocaust involved a conflict over space between communists, Polish nationalists, Catholics, and Jews. He believed that because of Auschwitz’s western location and high deaths (about 1.6 million), communists were able to de-Judaise the site and express their solidarity to the Soviet Union. Furthermore, the first declaration of the death camp in 1947 emphasized those who were killed on behalf of the Polish nation, which expressed Polish nationalism (Charlesworth, 1994). Catholicising the site was also part of a larger set of geopolitical considerations. Catholic renewal and evangelism aimed to convert Jews to Roman Catholicism. Sister Teresa Benedicta (Edith Stein) converted from Judaism to Roman Catholicism and died at Birkenau (Charlesworth, 1994) but also there were disputes over nuns in the Carmelite convent, which lasted from 1984 to 1993. Jews were offended by the Catholic presence close to the former Birkenau concentration camp. Along with masses held at Birkenau by the Pope, catholicising the site obscured the former tragedy and ignored the fact that 87% of the victims at Auschwitz were Jewish (Charlesworth, Stenning and Paszkowski, 2006). Despite these debates, the re-dedication of Auschwitz in 1978 acknowledged the Jews who died, which transformed the site into a landscape of international collective memory.
Charlesworth and Addis (2002) have argued how management regimes of former death camps can impact visitors’ encounters. At Plaszow concentration camp in Kraków, for instance, there is little evidence left of the former death camp, it is overgrown and is used as open space by locals. Visitors may view this site as disturbing and even disrespectful. If the site remains unregulated a piece of Holocaust history could be erased. By contrast, Auschwitz and Majdanek have conserved their historical remains for visitors through museum exhibits and have preserved features of the built environment, such as the railway tracks at Auschwitz which transported the victims. These memorial sites have attempted to replicate their former death camps and it is critical that visitors behave inappropriate ways that respect the memory of the dead (Dury, 2019). Furthermore, Charlesworth (2004) argued that exhibits tend to focus on the victims rather than the perpetrators. Artifacts of shoes and hair showed en masse can be effective at representing the scale of human deaths but they do not reveal the individual stories or identities of those who lost their lives (Dalton, 2009). It is up to the visitors to answer these moral questions by reinterpreting the meanings and creating private memories (Webber, 2004).
In Israel, ‘Yad Vashem’, meaning ‘a monument and a name’, is a significant global memorial site that commemorates the Jewish people who died in the Holocaust. As it is removed from the sites of genocide, the memorial uses another kind of representation (Schulze, 2005). In its Hall of Names, Jewish martyrs are remembered by name and are recognized as citizens of the state (Krakover, 2014). Jewish memory is therefore united both locally and globally. One and a half million Jewish children who died during the Holocaust are also commemorated at its Children’s Museum. Goldman (2006) also noted that a Holocaust survivor provided an account for the Transport Memorial (a railway car) and their experience resonated with many survivors worldwide. Education, research, and international relations are also important aspects of remembrance at Yad Vashem in order to prevent future genocides.
There is no one way to represent/memorialize the Holocaust. Commemoration is multi-dimensional (Schulze, 2005) and varies according to national contexts. The monumental sculpture, artifacts/sites of the murdered, and international sites are fraught with a range of political and moral difficulties and therefore, the Holocaust remains a crisis of representation.
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