October 27th, 1995
By Leonard Fein
As the time drew near, I overheard the electrician reassuring the manager: "It's simple,"
he said; "I'll just do a backward 3-2-1 count, and then the lights go on. Just like the Christmas
tree at the Prudential center."
Since the lights in question were those that would illumine the six glass towers that are
the heart of Boston's memorial to the Holocaust, the analogy was good for a chuckle, perhaps the
only chuckle on a stormy night of rain during which patrons and benefactors, planners and other
special guests gathered to celebrate the successful completion of a project first proposed a full
ten years ago. By morning, the memorial would be opened to the whole of Boston, and its formal
advent would be marked by the public heavyweights - the Governor of the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts, the Mayor of Boston, the Archbishop of Boston's Catholic diocese, Bernard
Cardinal Law, and Eli Wiesel, premier spokesman of the survivors. And such public ceremonies
were entirely appropriate, not only because the Holocaust, as we have come to understand it, is
an event in general history and not just in Jewish history, but because this particular memorial is
situated in the very heart of downtown Boston, hard-by Boston's fabled Freedom Trail, between
City Hall and Quincy Market, just across from (you should excuse the expression) the Union
Oyster House.
For the eve of the opening, there was still time for more private celebration – elegant
printed programs, fancy food and drink at the buffet supper in City Hall just before the ceremony
and again after, all a jarring juxtaposition to the solemnity of the proceedings themselves, still
more to the reading of the names of the dead that began once the towers were lit and continued
until long after the last guests had left for home.
There's a couplet in Chaim Nahman Bialik's "In The City of Slaughter," a monumental
poem written in the wake of the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, that captures, in far larger terms, the
discomfort of such juxtapositions: "And God called forth spring and slaughter together; the
slayer slew, the blossom bloomed, and its was sunny weather." So also here.
No single moment of the evening's program was more affecting than the procession of
survivors and liberators, each carrying a memorial candle, with which the ceremony began. Old
people all by now, it was not possible to watch them without wondering what they were thinking,
they who by virtue of their connection to the most wretched of times and places were now a
guard of honor in historic Faneuil Hall, the cradle of liberty where the Sons of Liberty debated
America's relationship to England back in the 1770s: from the grave to the cradle, as it were, a
guard of honor presenting memorial candles, our flag.
In this same hall, back in 1903, the Jews of Boston met to protest the Kishinev pogrom.
By contemporary standards, that pogrom didn't amount to very much – 45 Jews killed, 200 or so
wounded, perhaps 1500 homes and shops sacked. Back then, when the world was less congested
by such depravities, the event begat reactions heard 'round the world. (The Bialik poem cited
earlier was one such reaction.)
One can, I suppose, take some comfort from the fact that at the dawn of the new century,
we met to protest a fresh pogrom, whereas at century's dusk, our meeting was to encourage a
memory that might otherwise grow stale. Yet the evidence of collective violence, of racial and
religious and ethnic hatreds, is all too current. Were it not, it is doubtful that community energies
could have been mobilized to construct the memorial. And, indeed, all but one of the speakers at
the evening ceremony and again the next morning at the public ceremony made the obvious
segue from the memorial and what it memorializes to the indecencies, actual and threatened, of
our own time.
The one exception was Steve Ross, a survivor and the one person whose obsession with
remembering was the starting point, ten years ago, of the memorial. For Mr. Ross, no lessons
need be derived; his concern is with the deniers, whether by malice or by forgetfulness. I don't
know whether Steve Ross can ever be said to be "happy," so haunted does he appear to be by his
own fevered memories. But there's a world of difference between happiness and satisfaction, and
this week, Mr. Ross walks very, very tall with satisfaction. Yet note: No one in Boston's Jewish
community has been more indignant, hurt, by the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. The connections,
even (especially?) for those haunted by the Holocaust are inescapable.
I went late last night to see whether, 12 hours after all the hoopla of the dedication, the
memorial was "alive." Indeed it was: Even late, a steady trickle of visitors, mostly an overflow
from nearby Quincy Market and its restaurants and bars, entering the pathway through the towers
perhaps out of no more than idle curiosity, suddenly rendered somber, pausing long enough to
read the words etched in the glass, quotes from those who lived and from those who were killed,
exiting in silence, some with tears. Now a policeman, now a couple of German tourists, but
almost all exactly the young people for whom this was built, the young people of whom we so
fervently hope that their minutes here will serve them as an enduring caution. The Holocaust
Memorial is for them, and for Steve Ross and the survivors.