Holocaust Memorial Opening Draws 3,000
Nearly 3,000 Jews, among them concentration camp survivors with numbers inscribed on their wrists, turned out Sunday for the dedication of a memorial to what Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel called “suffering that transcended suffering.”
The monument, a sculpture dominated by a 42-foot-tall bronze hand with human figures climbing it, stands for a tragedy that was “beyond words and beyond imagination, but not beyond memory,” said Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, author and professor who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.
“Not to remember means to betray them all,” he said. “ . . . Not to remember means to kill the victim a second time. Not to remember means to become an accomplice of the enemy.”
The opening of the memorial to the public was postponed until today because of crowded conditions and 83-degree heat. At least 12 people in the crowd were treated for heat exhaustion.
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