Miami Holocaust Memorial 
A Series of Vignettes
At the end of the Lonely Path, bronze figures express the mixed emotions of terror and compassion. This particular sculpture is of a small child reaching out for help, showing that even the youngest victims faced unspeakable horror.
The Memorial Wall
The Memorial Wall is a reminder of the human souls whose lives were extinguished in the Holocaust. In addition to the many thousands of names already etched into the wall, more names are being accommodated as they are submitted.
The Final Sculpture
The final sculpture depicts the same mother and two children who started the journey, now dead, framed by the words of Anne Frank: “Ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us only to meet the horrible truths and be shattered.”
Additonal Pictures
About
In 1984, a small group of Miami's Holocaust survivors joined in developing the idea of building a permanent memorial to the memory of six million Jews who perished at the hands of the Nazis. It fitted that a community with one of the largest Holocaust survivor populations in the world would erect a Holocaust memorial that would stand as a permanent reminder to future generations of Nazi persecution, as well as a symbol of the world's indifference to genocide.
History
The Holocaust Memorial took over four years to be built, reaching its final state at dedication ceremonies on Sunday, February 4, 1990, with Elie Wiesel, Nobel laureate as guest speaker.
A Message From Elie Wiesel
Open your eyes, visitor, and gather your inner strength; what you will see here may put your mental sanity and
moral quest in peril.
You will see here all that cannot be seen anywhere else: the infinite ability of tormentors and also their
victims' endless agony.
How could human beings first imagine then commit such inhuman actions against other human beings?
Is it that here it was human to be inhuman?
In this place of ultimate malediction, the human condition entered its ultimate metamorphosis, with the
enemy inventing new ways of torment, torture and murder, unprecedented in recorded history.
More than one-and-a-half million Jewish children were murdered during the Shoah together with
their grandparents; some of them were thrown in ditches of flames and burned alive.
Selections, hunger, humiliation, crematoria: in this place evil attained the dimension of damned divinity – its
killers came from prestigious institutions and families whereas their victims were sons and daughters of an
ancient people, the only one of Antiquity that survived Antiquity.
Not all victims were Jewish in this place, but all Jews were victims.
Those masses who were brought here from all over occupied Europe and were not annihilated upon arrival,
found themselves in a universe parallel to ours today, with its scientists and labourers, believers and
non-believers, theoreticians and artists, poets and merchants, rich and poor, ignorant and learned, speaking
all languages and practising all trades. In this place, one witnessed an antinomian ingathering of the exiled.
Death in gas chambers replaced Redemption.
Open your heart, visitor. And your mind. And your soul. As you walk through the exhibition "SHOAH" and.
are enveloped by the sights and sounds of the past, hear the voices of the victims, see the drawings of the
children, touch the names of the murdered. Be this place's messenger. Take with you a message that only the.
dead can still give the living: that of remembrance.
Elie Wiesel
- Information about the Memorial taken from Holocaust Memorial Miami Beach website. Picture taken and edited by me
