ABOUT THE COLUMNIST
Gracie Bonds Staples is an award-winning journalist who has been writing for daily newspapers since 1979, when she graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi. She joined The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2000 after stints at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Sacramento Bee, Raleigh Times and two Mississippi dailies. Staples was recently promoted to Senior Features Enterprise Writer. Look for her columns Thursdays and Saturdays in Living and alternating Sundays in Metro.
50th Anniversary of the Memorial to the Six Million
11 a.m. April 19, Greenwood Cemetery, 1173 Cascade Circle SW, Atlanta, GA 30311; and 2:30 p.m. at the William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum, 1440 Spring St NW, Atlanta, GA 30309. 678-222-3700
He was just 32 but Ben Hirsch knew in his heart of hearts that he’d never again feel so at peace, so fulfilled.
It was April 1965, the Passover season, and Hirsch had just witnessed the dedication of the Memorial to the Six Million at Greenwood Cemetery.
At home, he looked at his wife Jacquie and said, “I feel like I’ve accomplished the ultimate, what do I do now?”
It’s a strong tradition in Judaism to go to the gravesite of loved ones, between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but because remains of Holocaust victims were scattered across Nazi Europe, there were no grave sites.
Now, thanks to him, those six million, which included Hirsch’s parents and two youngest siblings, the young architect and other Holocaust survivors had a place to go to remember their loved ones.
In the 50 years since that first dedication, survivors have held an annual Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, ceremony there. This year will be no different.
Come April 19, hundreds of Atlantans are expected to mark the 50th anniversary of the memorial.
Hirsch, as in previous years, will recite the Kaddish or mourner's prayer and native son, Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat, a former U.S. Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, will deliver the keynote address later that day at the William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum.
Hirsch and other Holocaust survivors and their descendants will be there but I get the feeling that all of Georgia and the world ought to be there, too. I get the feeling that the world has gone crazy, and that maybe this could be one of those moments when we remember “never again,” and mean it.
Julio Cesar Strassera, the man who coined the term after winning a conviction against leaders of Argentina’s dictatorship in 1985, died in February. But there’s no reason why we shouldn’t do all we can do breathe life into his words.
If memories of the Holocaust and slavery are too far in the recesses of your mind, if you think our capacity to commit such heinous crimes against humanity has ended, remember Rwanda and more recently ISIS.
Hirsch told me he had no preconceived plan to build a memorial. He had graduated from Georgia Tech in 1958 and had just gotten his architectural license in 1962 when he saw a short article in The Southern Israelite, predecessor of the Atlanta Jewish Times, announcing the formation of a group of Holocaust survivors to discuss the building of a memorial.
He remembered the last time he saw his mother, when she had secured passage for him and his four older siblings on a Kindertransport to Paris. The train left Frankfurt on Dec. 5, 1938, less than a month after Kristallnacht when Hirsch, then 6, watched his family’s Freidberger Anlage Synagogue torched and ransacked. Later that day, Nazi police arrested his father, a dentist, and sent him to Buchenwald concentration camp. His father was murdered in Auschwitz in 1942. The following year, his mother and two younger siblings, who had been too young for Kindertransport passage, were executed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
And so Hirsch, who’d settled in Atlanta in the early 1940s, knew he had to be at that meeting. He listened intently as organizers talked about their plan and unveiled a 6-foot-wide by 3-foot-tall marble tombstone with “6 million” inscribed on each side.
“That was going to be it,” Hirsch said.
After the meeting, he introduced himself.
“You don’t know me but I’m a survivor,” he told organizers. “I’m also an architect and I’d like to design something that is more meaningful.”
They gave him two weeks to come up with an alternate concept.
Hirsch couldn’t sleep that night. Idea after idea whirled through his head until finally at 4 a.m. he sat up on the side of his bed, grabbed a pad and pencil, and started sketching. At his office the next day, he built a model from clay and cardboard and called the organizers.
Over the next few weeks they met with prospective donors to show Hirsch’s design – four stone walls, creating four entrances to a space of meditation. The entrances were wider at the outside, to be inviting, and funneled inward to a narrower opening inside, to create privacy.
He hoped the message that this space was open to all people from the four corners of the earth was clear.
“I was so excited,” Hirsch told me. “I really wanted to do this.”
And he did, creating the second memorial to the Holocaust and its victims to the Jewish slaughter in the United States.
Hirsch has designed hundreds of buildings and exhibits, including the Breman Museum's Absence of Humanity, since then. Because of its rarity, the Holocaust monument was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2008, seven years before the requisite 50 years.
He told me he wanted the memorial “to be something that would attract attention so people would come and learn about it.”
And so it has. May it always cause us to think “never again” in this life.
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