The New England Holocaust Memorial

The New England Holocaust Memorial in Boston is dedicated to the six million Jewish men, women, and children murdered by the Nazi Third Reich between 1933 and 1945, while also recognizing that nearly eleven million people of many races, religions, and nationalities were killed, including Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, political dissidents, homosexuals, and the mentally and physically disabled. It places the Holocaust within a history in which the Nazi Party took power in Germany in 1933, stripped civil liberties, established Dachau, imposed the Nuremberg Laws, carried out Kristallnacht, forced Jews into ghettos and slave labor, organized the Final Solution, and operated death camps including Majdanek, Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Belzec, and Auschwitz-Birkenau until U.S. and Allied forces defeated Nazi Germany and liberated surviving prisoners in 1945. The memorial presents the Holocaust as an attempt to erase Jewish life from history and memory, preserves the voices of survivors, witnesses, and liberators, recalls acts of resistance and rescue, including the Danish rescue of Jews and revolts in ghettos and camps, and warns that wherever prejudice, discrimination, and victimization are tolerated, such evil can happen again. It also records that on April 18, 1993, Holocaust Remembrance Day, survivors of the Nazi death camps, their children, and liberators buried a time capsule containing names submitted by New Englanders of family members and loved ones who perished, and that Carmen Park honors William Carmen for his service to the community and his vision and leadership in creating the memorial.

Cambridge, Massachusetts · United States