Memory by Number

MEMORY BY NUMBER Representation, Abstraction, and Scarring at the New England Holocaust Memorial Prepared in part for “Contested Grounds: Space and the Politics of Memory” Professor Mabel Wilson Columbia GSAPP To Commemorate the 10th International Holocaust Memorial Day and 70th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau

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left on a society by an event in which a great number of fatalities occur is frequently indelible. The human need to comprehend, dissect, categorize, and even relive the greatest losses, finds physical form in the memorials constructed to the events that leave the deepest scars. Perhaps the deepest of all scars is the Holocaust. The utter depravity of the actions that took place under the Nazi regime leading up to, and during World War II is hard to comprehend.

Though today it has been compacted to a single phrase, The Holocaust, which quickly brings to mind some key elements and players of that terrible epoch of human history, this simple packaging of the multitudinous and complex emotions and ideas that the Holocaust engenders does not help to understand why memorials to the events of that time are still being constructed today. Truly comprehending this requires the recognition that the Holocaust was significantly more horrifying than the simplified version most people have become accustomed to. Holocaust memorials exist all over the world, frequently in places that seem rather illogical. One such place is the New England Holocaust Memorial in Boston, Massachusetts.

Constructed in 1995 and designed by the San Francisco-based architect Stanley Saitowitz, the memorial is relatively new and its treatment of that which it memorializes is comparable to other young memorials such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in the District of Columbia, and the National September 11 Memorial in New York. The New England Holocaust Memorial is unique among its peers in the scope and complexity of its expression and the ways in which it systematically tackles and makes tangible the tragic events it contends with.

The New England Holocaust Memorial

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Above: The Memorial in plan with Boston City Hall at lower right.

Bottom left: Section shows pits from which light and steam eminate. Bottom right: latitudinal elevation.

The New England Holocaust Memorial implements a broad range of architectural and graphic tools to represent to varying degrees specific elements of the Holocaust. Most important is its ability to function monumentally at various scales and shifting grades of spatial relationships. As a memorial, it also approaches the ideas of representation and scarring in ways that while sometimes kitschy, are also incredibly effective, evocative, and masterfully tread the line between overly exaggerated direct representation and abstraction to the point of meaninglessness. In so doing, the memorial has found a way through very simple architecture to explore a great range of issues and ideas that stem from the Holocaust. In comparison to the massive monuments in the District of Columbia, the nationwide memorialization of the Rwandan massacre through the preservation of massacre sites, or the time and money that has gone in to memorialization efforts at the World Trade Center site in New York, Boston’s memorial is a rather diminutive one. However its ability to decipher and make experiential so much of the Holocaust through a collection of a few, specific and carefully thought-out architectural decisions, has made it as effective if, not more so, than any of these.

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One of the most fundamental questions to be asked when exploring the Memorial’s treatment of the Holocaust, is why a memorial is necessary at all? In a way that has nearly been bred into us, it is almost instantly logical that Berlin, Jerusalem, London, the District of Columbia, and numerous places across Europe should have Holocaust memorials.

Whether these memorials take the form of retrospective apology and are an attempt at healing, or exist to simultaneously commemorate both a nation’s involvement in ending the Holocaust and those put to death at the hand of the Nazis, they fit into a cultural understanding of the need for Holocaust memorials in such places.

Why do we almost intuitively understand these places to be logical or perhaps even requisite memorial locations? Such an investigation involves a consideration of our collective cultural need to attempt to contend with the Holocaust in numerous of ways. In a rather illogical manner, rather than trying to forget tragedies and the suffering associated with them, we memorialize them so that forgetting becomes an impossible act. Unlike buildings, memorials are constructions without explicit function, however they do posses an implicit emotional programming. They are most immediately places to grieve, particularly in cases of genocide where families have no marked grave to turn to for this. Depending on their location, they can also have an apologetic purpose. Such is the case with Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum and Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the

Murdered Jews of Europe, both in Berlin. These are an admittance of a nation’s shame and guilt, like an older sibling apologizing for a crying baby on a train. Memorials can also have a slightly more selfish governmental message. One of the clearest examples of this is the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Simply its presence in the U.S. capitol makes it as much a memorial to those who lost their lives, as it is to the U.S’s involvement in the war. The Memorial Museum’s siting in D.C. is a constant reminder that the Holocaust was ended thanks, in large part, to the U.S’s efforts. In this way, it is as much a self-aggrandizing monument to the United States as it is a memorial to the lives lost.

Recognizing that memorials often bear messages other than those they purport, the New England Holocaust Memorial stands out specifically because its sole purpose is as a site of remembrance. The architectural journal Crit published an essay by Jeff Szeto in 2003 in which he categorizes the New England Holocaust Memorial as one of the three “Places of Loss” that he takes into consideration, and notes that “the New England Holocaust memorial takes on the particular task of bringing the experiences of the victims back to life through powerful imagery” (Szeto 28). Its ability to maintain an emotional focus is made possible partially because unlike many large memorials that are built with government money and therefore are open to becoming imbued with a variety of irrelevant political agendas, Cyrus Dahmubed

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the New England Holocaust Memorial was conceived and funded by a group of concentration camp survivors who now reside in Boston.

Despite the donation of the narrow strip of land on which the Memorial is sited by the city and its placement steps away from Boston’s Government Center, the memorial is highly depoliticized and resultantly ensures that its focus remain entirely on the emotional experience of and reexperience of the visitor.

The design of the Holocaust Memorial is central to its ability to manipulate the emotions of those who experience it at varying distances and scales. At the largest scale, that of the city, it has become a landmark in its own right. Though not designed as a monument, it has a distinct monumentality. The row of six glass columns that make up its core and most distinctive element can be seen from quite a distance and stick out against the primarily brick and concrete background of Boston’s cityscape. This composition at a closer vantage grows in monumental nature as the 54-foot tall columns change in scale to towers and the visitor realizes that the ground floor of each can be walked through, collectively creating a path. Detailsbecome crisper as the ground underfoot changes from cobblestone to black granite and the steam that rises from a subterranean space beneath each tower begins to become apparent.

Short walls of black granite come intermittently to neck-height with personal statements from concentration camp inmates about their most harrowing experiences.

Etched into the ground at the edges of the walkway are the terrifying statistics of the Holocaust. Death tolls, massacres, stories of ghettos and concentration camps, and gruesome details are all recounted in their most quantifiable terms.

The Memorial seen as urban landmark (above) and architectural composition (below).

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The first tower nears. It is not a tower, but an extermination camp.

At the foot of the tower: “CHELMNO”.

The granite pavement gives way to metal grating as one enters the physically abstracted, emotionally hyper-real camp. Each tower is a camp. First CHELMNO, then TREBLINKA, MAJDANEK, SOBIBOR, AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU, and finally BELZEC. The steam rises through the grating. On winter days it is a relief, at first warming and then, in the moment of resistant realization, terrifying.

Column, tower, extermination camp, crematorium – looking up and seeing the vapor rise through the shaft and then down to where lights twinkle among rocks like embers among coal one recognizes their progression to and through the space to have been allegorical to the entering, comprehending, and eventual unavoidable dying that so many experienced in the camps. After a moment of saddening realization and understanding, the eyes adjust to eye level and are confronted with accounts of the Holocaust as emotional as those on the edges of the pathways are quantifiable.

In his article on the site, published Comprehension is facilitated by a scalar in the Italian journal, Architettura, progression of design elements.

Pierluigi Serriano describes the scalar progression found at the New England Holocaust Memorial as “a ceremony of passage which turns into a ritual of violent emotional burden” (Serriano, 280). This progression is a masterful one, taking the visitor from happy, outsider tourist backward in time and space to the most visceral details of being inside the camps. The final step comes in the form of yet another perceptive transformation. What previously seemed only to be the opacity of the glass is revealed to be a pattern etched into it: numbers, each of seven digits. The dehumanizing tattoos with which extermination camp inmates were marked cover every inch of the towers.

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The opacity of the glass is revealed to be the numerical record of six million deaths.

A total of six million numbers are presented as the fragmentary, translucent, remnants of murdered souls as ephemeral as the steam that attends them. This element is the Memorial’s most successful.

Contemporaneously representation, abstraction, and scarring, the numbers more successfully achieve each of these esthetic goals precisely because they are not fully any of them. Considering some precedents of the implementation of these esthetics it is possible to deconstruct the complex significance of the use of the numbers.

Authors Sunil Bald and Nicholas Mirzoeff consider the memorialization and representation of the bombing of Hiroshima and the Rwandan Genocide respectively. Bald addresses Kenzo Tange’s design for the reconstruction and reconceptualization of Hiroshima around the skeletal remains of the Genbaku Dome. He writes, “the dome building…has become a record of the effect of atomic force on architecture” (Bald 6). Though much of Hiroshima was swept clean in the attempt to rebuild the city, the dome was left and has become a scar of the city’s trauma. As a means of representation, the allowance for the preservation of the scar sends a multifaceted message. It simultaneously memorializes the calamitous events that surround the scar’s creation, preserves a monumental structure – particularly in the case of the dome – whose halfextant architecture creates an unmistakable bridge between memory and 6

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future, and establishes a symbolic groundwork upon which the city can move forward. As Bald notes, “Hiroshima not only acknowledges the scar, but employs it, although not to remember the nationalist past, but to enter an international community” (Bald 6). The idea of including scars in memorialization is a curious one.

In Rwanda it has taken the form of massacre sites being left precisely as they were at the time of the massacre, resulting in churches and schools full of bones and bullet holes.

The dome at Hiroshima and bones in Rwanda are very literally scars where the evidence of the tragedy is presented without obfuscation; at the memorial in Boston, however, the numbers etched in the glass function in a similar, though less graphic way.

Featuring the names of the deceased, as at Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial or the memorial at the World Trade Center in New York, is a very direct way to represent those who died. However, in both of these cases, the rest of the story is largely abstracted to the point of loss. Apart from the rare visitor who may actually know one or two of the names written at the Vietnam Memorial and World The Jewish tradition of placing small stones Trade Center, the use of names at a grave site is architecturalized as a moat conveys very little other than an surrounding the Memorial. understanding that the people presented all died. To the average visitor, this may sometimes be moving but essentially explains nothing about the circumstances that led to the deaths.

At the New England Holocaust Memorial the numbers are representation, abstraction, and scar. Additionally, in tandem with the progressive, representational nature of the rest of the memorial, the numbers explain to the average visitor with no connections to the Holocaust vital and moving information.

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Upon realization that each number represents a person, and that they are etched to the full height of each tower, the sheer number of numbers suddenly becomes staggering. Without knowing that there are one million per tower, it is clear that there are a lot. The cumulative effect of the numbers is to make the death toll a phenomenally quantifiable thing, and in the process evoke deep, unsettling emotions in visitors. The numbers perform less as representations of distinct people as – in the context of the Holocaust – they are the people. The dehumanization of extermination and concentration camp inmates by tattooing them reduced them to the numbers emblazoned on their flesh in the eyes of the Nazis. The reproduction of these numbers at the New England Holocaust Memorial makes this dehumanization tangible and inescapable to its visitors. In the eyes of the Holocaust, these numbers are the dehumanized Jewish men, women, and children who lost their lives. Forcing the comprehension of this is how the memorial achieves its goal and purpose of emotional augmentation. Each number’s function as a scar is understood even more tangibly upon the recognition of the fact that the marring of flesh by the act of tattooing is itself a scarring. The etching of these scars into the glass of the memorial is the recreation of the scarring that could never be in Boston in the same way that Hiroshima’s dome and Rwanda’s massacre sites are in their countries.

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The numbers line the full height of each tower creating an unavoidably explicit illustration of the staggering loss of life.

In addition to their roles as scars, the numbers at the memorial are the contrasting abstraction to the rest of the memorial’s representational and metaphorical design. The numbers exist in an interstitial esthetic space between the pure representation embodied by the use of names and the unavoidably visible and blunt nature of the scar created by the preservation of the evidence of tragedies. In this way the numbers are abstractions: although they are perhaps the most visceral way to understand and reexperience the scars that they are, in their memorialized form they are as removed from the flesh upon which they were originally placed as is possible. The result is a divorce from the physical and a placement not in flesh but in the space of our collective and cultural memory. This positioning is precisely what makes the full understanding of the numbers’ meaning so suddenly shocking and tragic. We understand that these are the people, the collective exterminated souls. It is not a case of individual death and tragedy as has been the form of memorialization at the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial and the World Trade Center. In those cases one can go find the name of a loved one and mourn. The New England Holocaust Memorial is a place of emotional severity, but it is not about individual mourning. Rather, it suggests that for each number etched into the glass there is a story just as heart wrenching as the two written on the lowest panels of each tower. The memorial addresses the great and

small, abstract and explicit, representational and unclear and forces the visitor to contend with more than just an over-taught retrospective of events of the Holocaust. Instead, it combines the quantifiable, comprehensible view of the one of human society’s darkest moments with a soul-boring visceral explicitness that, by creating the reliving of a trip to an extermination camp by the visitor, provokes a deep-rooted emotional reaction.

The New England Holocaust Memorial’s architect, Stanley Saitowitz has had this to say of his great project:

Six pits are dug and lined with black concrete. At the bottom of each is a pit of glowing fire. Six glass towers are raised above. Once completed, many meanings attach to the memorial. Some think of it as six candles, others call it a menorah.

Some a colonnade walling the civic plaza, others six towers of spirit. Some six columns for six million Jews, others six exhausts of life. Some call it a city of ice, others remember a ruin of some civilization. Some speak of six pillars of breath, others six chambers of gas. Some sit on the benches and are warmed by the fire, others are tattooed by the shadows of numbers as they pass through the towers. Some think of it as a fragment of Boston City Hall, others call the buried chambers Hell.

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Some think the pits of fire are six death camps, others feel warm air rising up from the ground like human breath as it passes through the glass chimneys to heaven. (Saitowitz, Holocaust Memorial, Boston).

The memorial’s ability to serve all these functions at once, to appear to its visitors as so many things and lead them deeper into their own emotions as they progress physically down the path from one tower to the next is its crowing achievement. By blurring the lines between abstraction, Visitors place small stones on granite blocks representation, and scarring and bookmarking the Memorial, indicating that it has sometimes functioning as all three of been accepted as a place of rememberance. these, the various elements of the memorial come together to create an experience replete with physical expression, emotional upheaval, and graphic, quantitative, and historical understanding of past events. Whether or not a visitor fully comprehends the complexities of the change in their emotional state as they pass through the memorial, the collection of small stones at one of the short walls at the end of the path through the towers is evidence that despite the lack of any real demarcation of a recognizable individual’s death, visitors find themselves to have experienced an emotional shift that reveals to them the significance of the tragedy at the individual, communal, and world levels. The scalar relationship from column, to tower, to camp, to crematorium along with the experience of being inside each tower is a representational one. The use of inmates’ numbers is neither fully scar nor abstraction, but as a median between both, the numbers manage to evoke a dual reaction that feeds off itself. Somewhere between graphic, visceral, explicit quantification and the ephemeral stroking of heart strings lies a sweet spot wherein emotions of the past and present, the public and private, and owned and borrowed, mix to create a subliminal experience like that which has been crafted at the New England Holocaust Memorial.

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