Physical memorials are the built form of public commemoration. They are also the form of memorialisation that has produced the most public argument. Where a memorial sits, what it looks like, what it asks of the visitor, and what it commemorates are decisions that have rarely been settled without controversy. The pages in this cluster address the principal Holocaust memorials and the questions their construction has raised.
The principal memorials
The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, designed by Peter Eisenman and opened in 2005, occupies a 19,000-square-metre site near the Brandenburg Gate and consists of 2,711 concrete stelae of varying heights arranged on undulating ground. The memorial is the most-visited single Holocaust memorial in Europe. Its construction was preceded by seventeen years of public argument inside Germany about whether such a memorial should be built, where it should sit, and what it should commemorate.
The Treblinka memorial in Poland, designed by Adam Haupt and Franciszek Duszeńko and unveiled in 1964, occupies the site of the former Treblinka extermination camp. The memorial consists of 17,000 jagged stones, each representing a community whose Jews had been killed there, arranged around a central monolith. The Treblinka site is one of the few extermination-camp memorials at which substantial physical traces of the original camp infrastructure are not preserved (the camp was systematically demolished by the Germans in 1943); the memorial therefore stands as the principal physical evidence of what happened there.
The Sobibor memorial site in eastern Poland, redeveloped substantially between 2017 and 2020 with Polish, Dutch, Israeli and Slovakian funding, occupies the site of the former Sobibor extermination camp. The redevelopment included a new memorial wall listing the names of around 80,000 of the approximately 170,000 Jews killed at the camp, and a new museum building with extensive use of artefacts recovered from the site through archaeological work.
The proposed UK Holocaust Memorial at Westminster, first announced by Prime Minister David Cameron in 2014 and the subject of substantial planning controversy since, has been the most contested British Holocaust commemoration project. The page on the proposed memorial addresses the project’s history, the planning process, and the wider argument it has produced.
The questions memorials raise
The decisions that produce a Holocaust memorial are decisions about what the memorial is for. A memorial at the site of a killing centre commemorates what happened there. A memorial in a national capital commemorates the victims and the responsibility of the nation in whose capital it stands. A memorial that names individual victims (the Berlin Stolpersteine, the Yad Vashem Pages of Testimony, the Sobibor wall) does work that an abstract memorial cannot do. A memorial that does not name individuals (the Eisenman stelae, the Whiteread Nameless Library in Vienna) does work that a list cannot do.
The pages in this cluster address each of the principal memorials in turn, and address the wider questions of what memorials can and cannot do that the documentary record alone cannot.