poignancy

 

The "lost items" -- a baby shoe, teddy bear, glasses, a suitcase, a broken violin -- strewn along a cobblestone walk leading the Oregon Holocaust Memorial evoke a sense of sadness. Built in 2004, the back wall of the memorial is engraved with the names of people who died in the camps, followed by the names of their surviving relatives in Oregon. The memorial features a stone bench beside an area simulating a town square. During the Holocaust, many Jewish families were gathered in town squares before being loaded onto trains and taken to concentration camps. The cobblestone walkway with inlaid granite bars, simulating railroad tracks, leads to a wall of history panels. At the end of the wall is the soil vault panel with interred soil and ash from six killing-center camps of the Holocaust - Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Majdanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau.

 

I have visited Holocaust Memorials in various states but this one brought chills like those experienced when I visited Dachau.

 

Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future. -- Elie Wiesel

Oregon Holocaust Memorial
Portland, Oregon
10.16.2014

Elie Wiesel