I used to walk past the Holocaust Memorial Miami Beach when it was still being built in the late 1980s, just a few blocks from where my mother and I shared a small apartment.

Back then, little more than scaffolding was visible as the giant bronze sculpture at the heart of the memorial, the Sculpture of Love and Anguish, took shape. Slowly, the 42-foot, outstretched arm tattooed with an Auschwitz number began reaching for the skies over Miami Beach, while dozens of emaciated human figures clung to it and each other; a naked woman holding onto her baby; a man’s face contorted in agony; scores of desperate Jews grasping, clawing, straining toward the heavens. 

The sculpture shocked me when I first gazed upon it in its entirety as a 10-year-old boy. Thirty-four years later, I still cannot forget that tattooed arm. To my mind, it is the most haunting, beautiful, visceral, and emotionally devastating memorial in America today to the Holocaust’s six million martyrs.

The memorial was conceived in 1984 by Holocaust survivors who had rebuilt their lives on Miami Beach, and brilliantly designed by architect Kenneth Treister. He said the arm represented his portrayal of a scene from hell frozen in bronze; the final reaching out of a dying person, according to the memorial’s website. 

“One day, a man or a woman will enter this sanctuary of remembrance and wonder: Was it all true? Were the killers really that cruel? And the victims that helpless? That lonely? That abandoned?” Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor Eli Wiesel said at the dedication ceremony when the memorial opened in 1990.

“Will this museum, or any other, bigger or smaller, make a difference? I hope that visitors will bring their children. I hope they will look at the pictures. Pictures: Old, emaciated grandparents lying in the street. Naked mothers shielding their children. A group of SS men enjoying themselves while tormenting an old man, who looks like my grandfather, and everyone else’s.”

Wiesel continued: “Look at his face. Look at all the faces. Look and you will realize that there existed a suffering that transcended suffering. Woe unto us, for the tragedy which this museum is trying to integrate is beyond words, and beyond imagination, but not beyond memory. And only those who were there know, will know, what it meant being there.” 

For decades, the upstretched arm has stood as a warning about what can happen when anti-Jewish hatred — humanity’s........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)