It looks like a toast rack. Credit: Adjaye Associates
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It is Holocaust Memorial Day on Sunday, a treacherous time when Jews are told, by some, that they gather all victimhood for themselves. Jeremy Corbyn tried to rename Holocaust Memorial Day as Genocide Memorial Day for this reason, but we are told that this is no longer Labour Party policy, and that is gratifying.
Instead, a new Holocaust Memorial will be built next to parliament, in Victoria Palace Gardens. It was ordered by David Cameron and chosen by competition – Memorial Idol? The winning entry looks, to me, like a giant toast rack containing toast.
I went through the entries yesterday, in a facetious rage – what’s your favourite Holocaust Memorial? It is hard to forgive the architects, however well they mean, their professionalism. It’s a job, inciting meaning with sculpture in small spaces, and their metaphors screech at me. And so, alongside Toast Rack, I found Massive Alien Baby, Hill on Its Side, Metal Sandwich, Toast Rack Slightly Different, Triangle, Something About Aeroplanes, and – and this is just lazy – Circle.
I hate most Holocaust memorials. I hate the one in Berlin, which is a series of concrete blocks. It’s so unimaginative, only a German could have built it. I watched a woman place a handbag on a block, saw an emergency exit twinkling, and left. I hate the one in Vienna too, which is a prison cell, surrounded by cafes. Is it a memorial or a tiny re-enactment? I won’t go to Auschwitz either. All that chip throwing, and children being dragged around unwillingly, and bad reviews on Trip Advisor – look them up, people complain they aren’t moved, and they flew in to be moved – and, in the past, anti-Semites with tape measures lurking, trying to prove it’s all a hoax.
My favourite memorial is Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. It’s an archive too, busy with historians. If you want proof, for instance, that Jews were not complicit in the murder of their fellows – a popular myth on the far Left, who love the anti-Semitic play Perdition as much as Ken Loach does – you email Yad Vashem, and they rebut it with evidence. They have collected all the names of the dead they can find. It is in Israel, which is the only memorial to the Holocaust that means anything, because it holds the possibility that it will not happen again, not because people type hash tags that say #NeverAgain and post them on Twitter, but because there is an army. That is why Jews mind Right-wing anti-Semitism, which is not anti-Zionist, less that Left-wing anti-Semitism, which is anti-Zionist. Sticks and stones will break my bones. Leave us the guns.
There is a canyon in the grounds of Yad Vashem, made of golden stone. On the walls of this canyon are written the names of the settlements in Europe which were emptied of Jews. The size of the letters depends on the size of the settlements. You find names in Hebrew and English of places you have never heard of written in small letters in the walls, and then you come to the great pre-war centres of Jewish culture and they are huge: Warsaw. Krakow. Vilnius. There is also a children’s memorial where, with candles and mirrors, the effect is conveyed of infinite points of light. I like this less, because it is comforting, and I won’t be comforted. They make the children seem eternal when they did not even have even a natural life-span.
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