Memorials

Passing through Eastern Europe has afforded me the opportunity to see many memorials. Some memorials have been built to commemorate hard fought victories. Others have been dedicated to mighty and effective rulers. Some of the memorials have been built by ineffective rulers in hopes of creating a distorted new reality. One commonality that all memorials share is that they offer an insight into not only the group of individuals that are being memorialized, but also the creator of the memorial. The following are three memorials dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust from Vienna and Budapest that I found interesting not only for how they look and the meaning they convey, but also for the circumstances in which they were created.




Vienna- The dedication of this memorial in 1988 of a Jew scrubbing the ground created a firestorm in Vienna. It was originally intended to depict how Jews were forced to do humiliating tasks at the hands of Nazi oppressors. According to the text Jewish Vienna, in March of 1938, “thousands of Jews had been forced to scrub the pavements with brushes and even toothbrushes to the general amusement of the onlookers” (Feuerstein and Milchram 82)..Several members of Vienna’s Jewish community (among them Simon Wiestsenthal, the famous Nazi hunter) argued that the memorial itself was a further humiliation of the Jews and that a different memorial for Vienna would be much more appropriate.



Vienna- In response to what many viewed as a humiliating monument, this monument was commissioned and dedicated in 2000. Roughly 65,000 Austrian Jews were killed during the Holocaust. The picture that I took doesn’t do the memorial justice. If you look closely at the building, what from a distance appears to be bricks is actually concrete in the shape of books with the pages facing out. This was intended to demonstrate that the Jews who were killed were an educated people that were concerned about knowledge and learning. It also mourns the lose of knowledge (hence the books being turned inside out) that occurred when the Austrian Jews were murdered.

In addition to marking the lost of knowledge, the front of the memorial has doors without any knobs. The memorial also doesn’t have any windows. This was intended to symbolize that the typical Austrian Jew had little to no opportunity to escape the Nazi slaughter. The places where Vienna’s Jews were slaughtered are marked in the base of the monument.



Budapest- The memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust from Budapest is in the form of a tree. Each leaf on the tree has the name of a victim engraved on it. The rationale behind the memorial is that just like branches and leaves that are connected to the truck of the tree, Jews from Budapest that were killed by the Nazis all shared a commonality; they died because they were Jewish and dared to live normal lives.