The Memorial to Victims of the Injustice of the Holocaust in New York City is a sculpture by Harriet Feigenbaum, on the side of the Appellate Division Courthouse of New York State, at Madison Avenue and 25th Street in Manhattan, United States.
The Memorial to Victims of the Injustice of the Holocaust in New York City is a sculpture by Harriet Feigenbaum, on the side of the Appellate Division Courthouse of New York State, at Madison Avenue and 25th Street in Manhattan, United States.
Presiding Justice Francis T. Murphy, and Clerk of the Court Harold J. Reynolds conceived the idea of creating a Holocaust memorial monument at the Appellate Division courthouse. [1] Several members of the court were concerned by what they viewed as an increasing indifference to injustice, which could undermine the court system. The justices believed a Holocaust memorial could symbolize these concerns, and a private committee of lawyers raised $200,000 in funding. [2] Ms. Feigenbaum won the 1988 competition to design the memorial, with a proposal to feature a replica of an aerial photograph of the Auschwitz concentration camp taken by American planes as they bombed German oil factories nearby on August 25, 1944.
The sculpture is titled Memorial to Victims of the Injustice of the Holocaust. The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs describes it as "a six-sided half column rising 27 feet above its base. The five-sided concave base extends one story below ground level, the overall height of the Memorial being 38 feet. Carvings of flames along the length of the column recall the flames of the gas chambers at Auschwitz. They appear to blow in the direction of the courthouse as if to threaten the symbol of Justice. A relief of an aerial view of the main camp at Auschwitz is carved into the base at eye level...On the base under the relief is a giant flame extending below ground level as a final reminder of Crematorium 1 at Auschwitz." [3] The words "Indifference to Injustice is the Gate to Hell" are engraved around the image. Justice Murphy and Mr. Reynolds wrote the inscription. [1]
Feigenbaum's carving noted five of the specific points within the Auschwitz camp that were visible in the original photograph: Torture Chamber [identified in the photograph as Block 11], Execution Wall, Gas Chamber and Crematorium 1, Commandant's House.
Feingenbaum was born in the United States in 1939 and lost relatives in the Holocaust. In a 1990 interview with the New Yorker, she described the sensitivity of creating the artwork as someone who had never visited Auschwitz, saying “Being a Jew alive in this time, when there are still Holocaust survivors, makes Holocaust art hard to do.” Explaining that while she could have visited Auschwitz as part of her preparation, she decided against it. "This work is made by someone who didn't live through it - I had to keep the truth of that. Then I saw an aerial photograph of the camp from 1944, reproduced in the Times, and I decided to use it as a plan for the relief. There's a certain mystery about it; the aerial view gives it a certain vagueness. If I had gone there, and looked at the camp as it is today, I'd be too literal, and some of the mystery would be gone." [2]
The photo was first shared with the public in 1979, [4] as part of a report released by two Central Intelligence Agency analysts who said they used new technology and eyewitness accounts to interpret photos taken in 1944. [5] The photos were taken as part of reconnaissance and bombing by the Allied forces of the I.G. Farben petro-chemical plant, located less than 5 miles from the Auschwitz camp. [6] The photos are significant because of the Auschwitz bombing debate as they demonstrate that U.S. planes had the ability to bomb the death camp. [7] The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs website for the memorial indicates, "by the selection of this photograph, the artist is saying that the Allies must have known of the camp and they took no action." [3]
Auschwitz concentration camp was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II and the Holocaust. It consisted of Auschwitz I, the main camp (Stammlager) in Oświęcim; Auschwitz II-Birkenau, a concentration and extermination camp with gas chambers; Auschwitz III-Monowitz, a labour camp for the chemical conglomerate IG Farben; and dozens of subcamps. The camps became a major site of the Nazis' Final Solution to the Jewish question.
Nazi Germany used six extermination camps, also called death camps, or killing centers, in Central Europe during World War II to systematically murder over 2.7 million people – mostly Jews – in the Holocaust. The victims of death camps were primarily murdered by gassing, either in permanent installations constructed for this specific purpose, or by means of gas vans. The six extermination camps were Chełmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Extermination through labour was also used at the Auschwitz and Majdanek death camps. Millions were also murdered in concentration camps, in the Aktion T4, or directly on site.
Sonderkommandos were work units made up of German Nazi death camp prisoners. They were composed of prisoners, usually Jews, who were forced, on threat of their own deaths, to aid with the disposal of gas chamber victims during the Holocaust. The death-camp Sonderkommandos, who were always inmates, were unrelated to the SS-Sonderkommandos, which were ad hoc units formed from members of various SS offices between 1938 and 1945.
The Holocaust—the murder of about six million Jews by Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1945—is the best-documented genocide in history. Although there is no single document which lists all Jewish victims of Nazi persecution, there is conclusive evidence that about six million were murdered. There is also conclusive evidence that Jews were gassed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Operation Reinhard extermination camps, and in gas vans, and that there was a systematic plan by the Nazi leadership to murder them.
The Auschwitz Album is a photographic record of the Holocaust during the Second World War. It and the Sonderkommando photographs are among the small number of visual documents that show the operations of Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the German extermination camp in occupied Poland.
The Auschwitz Protocols, also known as the Auschwitz Reports, and originally published as The Extermination Camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau, is a collection of three eyewitness accounts from 1943–1944 about the mass murder that was taking place inside the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland during the Second World War. The eyewitness accounts are individually known as the Vrba–Wetzler report, Polish Major's report, and Rosin-Mordowicz report.
Czesława Kwoka was a Polish Catholic girl who was murdered at the age of 14 in Auschwitz. One of the thousands of minor child and teen victims of German World War II war crimes against ethnic Poles in German-occupied Poland, she is among those memorialized in an Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum exhibit, "Block no. 6: Exhibition: The Life of the Prisoners".
The issue of why the Allies did not act on early reports of atrocities in the Auschwitz concentration camp by destroying it or its railways by air during World War II has been a subject of controversy since the late 1970s. Brought to public attention by a 1978 article from historian David Wyman, it has been described by Michael Berenbaum as "a moral question emblematic of the Allied response to the plight of the Jews during the Holocaust", and whether or not the Allies had the requisite knowledge and the technical capability to act continues to be explored by historians. The U.S. government followed the military's strong advice to always keep the defeat of Germany the paramount objective, and refused to tolerate outside civilian advice regarding alternative military operations. No major American Jewish organizations recommended bombing.
Holocaust trains were railway transports run by the Deutsche Reichsbahn national railway system under the control of Nazi Germany and its allies, for the purpose of forcible deportation of the Jews, as well as other victims of the Holocaust, to the Nazi concentration, forced labour, and extermination camps.
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The Höcker Album is a collection of photographs believed to have been collected by Karl-Friedrich Höcker, an officer in the SS during the Nazi regime in Germany. It contains over one hundred images of the lives and living conditions of the officers and administrators who ran the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp complex. The album is unique and an indispensable document of the Holocaust; it is now in the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, D.C.
Wilhelm Brasse was a Polish professional photographer and a prisoner in Auschwitz during World War II. He became known as the "famous photographer of Auschwitz concentration camp." His life and work were the subject of the 2005 Polish television documentary film The Portraitist (Portrecista), which first aired in the Proud to Present series on the Polish TVP1 on 1 January 2006.
The Portraitist is a 2005 Polish television documentary film about the life and work of Wilhelm Brasse, the famous "photographer of Auschwitz", made for TVP1, Poland, which first aired in its "Proud to Present" series on January 1, 2006. It also premiered at the Polish Film Festival, at the West London Synagogue, in London, on March 19, 2007.
The Majdanek State Museum is a memorial museum and education centre founded in the fall of 1944 on the grounds of the Nazi Germany Majdanek death camp located in Lublin, Poland. It was the first museum of its kind in the world, devoted entirely to the memory of atrocities committed in the network of concentration, slave-labor, and extermination camps and subcamps of KL Lublin during World War II. The museum performs several tasks including scholarly research into the Holocaust in Poland. It houses a permanent collection of rare artifacts, archival photographs, and testimony.
The Sonderkommando photographs are four blurred photographs taken secretly in August 1944 inside the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland. Along with a few photographs in the Auschwitz Album, they are the only ones known to exist of events around the gas chambers.
Maurice Rossel was a Swiss doctor and International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) official during the Holocaust. He is best known for visiting Theresienstadt concentration camp on 23 June 1944; he erroneously reported that Theresienstadt was the final destination for Jewish deportees and that their lives were "almost normal". His report, which is considered "emblematic of the failure of the ICRC" during the Holocaust, undermined the credibility of the more accurate Vrba-Wetzler Report and misled the ICRC about the Final Solution. Rossel later visited Auschwitz concentration camp. In 1979, he was interviewed by Claude Lanzmann; based on this footage, the 1997 film A Visitor from the Living(fr) was produced.
Harriet Feigenbaum is an American ecofeminist artist and sculptor. Many of her works are publicly displayed or in collections in New York. Her later work focused on reclamation projects, often of old mining cites, in Pennsylvania. Robert Stackhouse's work has been compared to Feigenbaum's.
Ester (Estusia/Esterka) Wajcblum (1924–1945) was a Jewish resistance fighter in the Auschwitz underground and one of four women hanged in the Auschwitz concentration camp for her role in the Sonderkommando revolt of October 7, 1944.