MEMORIAL DEDICATION

On a Sunday afternoon in October, 1977, over three thousand people crowded between Whalley Avenue and the steep slope leading into New Haven's Edgewood Park.  The space is narrow, much smaller than a football field, but within it about one hundred chairs formed a semi-circle around an elevated speaker's platform.  On top of this platform, behind the speakers' podium, sat a group of about thirty people, many of them wearing yarmulkes and the white Star of David buttons passed out before the event. The podium faced southeast, so that the sheer, golden cliffs of West Rock towered over the heads of the guests of honor in the afternoon sun.  Left of the platform, the autumn-colored trees swayed quietly in the breeze.  The beauty of the scene was matched by its solemnity. Citizens of New Haven had gathered on that day to dedicate the first Holocaust Memorial in America built on public land. 

First to address the crowd was author Jerzy Kosinski, a child survivor made famous by his novel about life in wartime Poland.  Rather than read his own work, Kosinski decided to read two personal accounts of life in Auschwitz.  The first was written by a prisoner and described the daily horrors of camp life: the starvation, violence, and mental degradation faced by inmates approaching their ultimate fate.  

The second account was an excerpt from the memoirs of Rudolf Hess, Nazi Commandant of the camp.  His cold, technical descriptions of the machinery of death provided a chilling glimpse of man's potential for cruelty.  For the audience, Kosinski's readings evoked stark mental images of victims, perpetrators and death factories...so did the Monument itself.  Standing opposite the speaker's platform, behind most of the crowd, it was a simple clean structure of concrete and steel.  It consisted of a stylized barbed wire fence surrounded by a large concrete planter in the shape of the Star of David.  Six small yew trees represented the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis over thirty years before.  In the center of the planter, ashes from the crematoria area of Auschwitz had been interred at the beginning of construction.  At the end of his speech, Jerzy Kosinski lamented the loss of his entire family in the war.  Emotionally, he pointed over the heads of the audience to the concrete base of the monument and exclaimed, "My only family now is there!"

"This tradition is like a Jewish old tradition, through centuries, that they go to visit the cemetery.  We didn't have anything to go to, so everyone observed privately.  Now we do it collectively, together, and we say a prayer for them so they are not forgotten.  It was not a law or anything for us.  We knew that we had to remember.  That's our responsibility.

So remember...not to forget."                                  Shifre Zamkov 

GALLERY

Considering the importance of the Monument today, survivor Helene Rosenberg simply asserts, "Well, at least when we're gone, there's something which is there for the future, for the children and grandchildren and--it's there!  You know? Can't take it away!"