Obj. ID: 58086
  Memorials  Holocaust Memorial at California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, CA, USA, 1984

Name of Monument

The Holocaust 

What/Who is commemorated?

Six million Jewish Victims of the Holocaust, including one and a half million children.

Description

George Segal's public sculpture, "The Holocaust," sits in Legion of Honor Park in San Francisco overlooking a beautiful view of the Pacific Ocean. The sculpture group of eleven white figures is installed on the incline below the turnabout of the Legion of Honor parking lot. The sculptural group is spread across a square, roughly 7 x 7 meter  (20 x 20 feet) bare concrete platform and is open to the sky. The work in its entirety is usually first viewed from a walkway above from where the entire composition can be seen, though not fully understood.

In San Franciscos foggy weather the memorial can look gray and forbidding, and the white shapes of bronze figures, coated with a white patina, can seem as ghostly apparitions. In bright sunshine, the white figures reflect the light and can appear diminished, lost in the vast land and seascape visible from the monument’s overlook.

The viewer descends a few steps and finds oneself in front of the barbed-wire fence and looking in at the group.  The spectator becomes a witness.  Still, there is a sense of voyeurism in the viewer-subject arrangement.  

Behind the viewer now, but in front of the man whi stands by the bard wire, is a low wall with built-in benches. This face the front of the sculpture and  the standing figure of a survivor, who looks out toward the vast Pacific Ocean below. Three raw poured concrete walls create palisade around the rest of the space, enclosing the sprawled figures of the dead and creating a more intimated space that can be seen as a stage, a tomb, or a sanctuary.

James Young described the memorial as a “Tableau of 11 cast white figures behind a barbed wire fence. 1 tattered, plaster white figure modeled on the Israeli survivor stands looking out from behind the fence, his left hand resting on the wire. Behind him, 10 bodies lie splayed in a pile, rife with: both biblical and formal illusions a woman with her head against a man's rib, a partly eaten apple in her hand.” (Young, Texture of Memory, p. 312). The essential figure of the man standing at the fence is derived from Margaret Bourke-White's famous Life Magazine 1945 photograph of the liberation of Buchenwald.

Leo Bersane and Ulysse Dutoit decribe the relationship of the figures and the associations their posture evoke: “Each of the figures on the ground touches (or very nearly touches), either directly or through the relay of another body, the central male figure. The human solidarity thus figured in Segal’s sculpture is far more than a merely consolatory note in this spectacle of devastation. It is, rather, the visual metaphor for a solidarity that erases spatial, conceptual, even human uniqueness (these bodies from our time also go back in time, to evoke, for example, the crucified Christ). In so doing, it prevents us from seeing in the Holocaust an alien horror we can view and read “from above,” confident of being able to transform it into an object of knowledge—and of memory. (Bersane and Dutoit, 1999).

On the low concrete wall behind and above the memorial from where the visitor looks down on the ghostly scene, “as from a cliff over a beach” (Young, p. 317), are affixed four markers. The first is about the monument, and the three interpretive panels (added later?) about the Holocaust.

Inscriptions

"THE HOLOCAUST"

By George Segal

We will never forget the genocidal slaughter of 6,000,000 Jews, including one and a half million children, in the Nazi Holocaust of 1933 - 1945. 

We will never forget the cruel apathy of a world which allowed that Holocaust and the deliberate murder of millions of other people to happen. 

We will never forget the martyrs of that evil abyss in human history. Nor will we forget those Jews and the righteous of all faiths who resisted and fought that evil.

In the memory of those martyrs and fighters, we pledge our lives to the creation of a world in which such evil and such apathy will not be tolerated. It is with that memory and that resolve that we dedicate this memorial.

בזיכרונה סוד הגאולה 

IN REMEMBRANCE IS THE SECRET OF REDEMPTION

Dedicated

November 7, 1984

San Francsico

Text from first panel:

The enormity of the Holocaust cannot easily be grasped. The

names of these concentration camps and killing centers

provide some dimension. They also serve as a symbolic

memorial for the survivors, their families and others in our

community, whose family members were murdered at

these sites.

AUSCHWITZ – BIRKENAU

BERGEN BELSEN

LWOW – JANOWSKA

JASENOVACA

KLOOGA

BUCHENWALD

PONARY

RAVENBRUCK

DRANCY

STUTTHOP

CHELMNO

BELZEC 

SOBIBOR

TRANSNISTRIA

WESTERBORK

WARSAW

DACHAU

MAUTHAUSEN

MAJDANEK

THERESIENSTADT

TRTEB LINKA

BREENDONCK

BABI YAR 

Text from second panel:

This memorial stands as eternal testimony to the Holocaust

perpetrated against the Jews by Nazi Germany and its

collaborators from 1933-1945.

The Holocaust began with the passage of restrictive laws and

a campaign of brutal anti-Semitism, continued with the forced

confinement in ghettos and mass deportation of

Jews to concentration and death camps, and culminated in

slave labor, mass executions and gas chambers.

The systematic slaughter of millions of Jews and other

victims who perished was abetted by a world that stood idly by.

In the aftermath, those rare brave individuals who

defied the Nazis and risked their lives to rescue Jews were

designated as "righteous among the nations."

The Nazi campaign ultimately failed. Yet two out of every

three Jews in Europe perished and thousands of Jewish

communities were destroyed.

Text of the third panel:

The sculpture before you is a tribute to the indomitable

spirit of an ancient people who rose from the ashes of near

extinction and passed on the gift of life to future

generations.

Crimes of such immensity must never be forgotten.

זאג ניט קיין מאל אז דו גייסט דעם לעצטן ווען

NEVER SAY THERE IS NO HOPE
(Song of Jewish Resistance Fighters, 1943)

Commissioned by

Committee for a Memorial to the Six Million Victims of the Holocaust

City of San Francisco