Deathgate

35 How to turn the weight of horror, shock, guilt, blame, anger, and profound sadness of the Holocaust into something that is a tangible transmission of emotion? Dan Elborne is not Jewish nor does he identify with one of the tragic minorities who were rounded up for slaughter. But he is a human being who feels the burden of caring and the responsibility of remembering. The big picture is huge: beyond rational comprehension. So he started small and symbolically. In 2015 Elborne was artist-in-residence at Ateliers Fourwinds Art Centre near the town of Aureille in France. It was here he began to plan the project and develop a sympathetic process. The first ceramic stone was made there on 28 June 2015 and the project was completed in Toowoomba, Australia on 21 November 2018. The time frame of three years, four months, and twenty-four days is significant because it replicates the time span from the first mass killings of prisoners in the gas chambers at Auschwitz on 3 September 1941 to the liberation of the Auschwitz camps on 27 January 1945. The clay “stones,” each touched, worked, caressed, and left with a fingerprint are a human intervention. They are largely made from recycled clay and carry with them remnants of a previous existence. The colours are matched to those of the stones piled around the sleepers of the railway tracks leading into Auschwitz II (Birkenau). Elborne’s weekly output of 10,000 pieces fired in a kiln mirrored the maximum number of people simultaneously killed in the Auschwitz gas chambers. The stones also salute the symbolism of those laid on the graves in Jewish cemeteries. They do not fade and die as flowers do but remain constant and as such they are a compelling trope for the permanence and preservation of memory. Memorialization, the preservation of memory, can be a balancing act. While acknowledging heroic acts, events of historical significance, and certainly past atrocities, memorialization can also be seen as a vehicle for political manipulation to force a specific ideology on society. It has been suggested, too, that there is a danger of the site becoming the glorification rather than the memorialisation of an event. 6 In some cases memorialization has been used to lay blame on one group at the expense of another. The way forward here seems to be to avoid a single narrative or point of view and concentrate instead on a broader perspective that promotes critical thinking and offers a forum for discussion. 7 Another side to memorialization is that it can contribute to the construction of a culture of victimhood in which martyrdom demands a certain justice. The materialization of memory questions agency, the capacity for individuals to make independent choices, as well as questioning the legitimization of decisions dictated by social structures such as Nazism. 8 All these considerations make memorialization something of a contradictory process. Handled with sensitivity and compassion as Elborne has done, memorialization becomes a strategy for grief management, a healing process, but one that does not deny the conflicting tensions that arise when considering the position of the victim and the role of the perpetrator. In the case of crimes against humanity time and distance replace the demand of justice for the victims and the survivors with something that is purely about remembrance. 9 Memorials themselves are very often site-specific from the road side memorials for accident victims to those like Auschwitz II (Birkenau) and other concentration camp locations that mark the horror of mass extermination. Some, including the Srebrenica-Poto č ari Memorial Cemetery, act as permanent reminders of campaigns of genocide and their human cost. Others such as the Sarajevo Roses take a slightly different approach. The siege of Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia- Herzegovina was the longest attack on a capital city in the history of modern warfare. Continued overleaf REMEMBER