Ten years after it was first announced, Britain's Holocaust memorial has still not been built. Why?

Yahoo

27-01-2025

Last January, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a 98-year-old Auschwitz survivor, addressed a House of Commons committee about the proposed new Holocaust memorial in Victoria Tower Gardens, next to the Houses of Parliament.
Born in 1925 in Poland, Ms Lasker-Wallfisch was sent to the concentration camp when she was 18 and only spared because she could play the cello, becoming part of the Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz.
She banged the table in frustration as she decried the proposed monument – a collection of 23 large bronze 'fins' jutting out of the ground – and subterranean ''learning centre', which she said was 'almost an insult.'
'What are we learning now that we haven't learned in 80 years?' she said. 'We shouldn't kill each other? Good idea'.
Today is Holocaust Memorial Day, celebrated every year to commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz. Eighty years after the end of the Second World War, Ms Lasker-Wallfisch, now 99, is one of Britain's last living links with the Holocaust.
Against a background of war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, and international fury at Benjamin Netanyahu's leadership of Israel, anti-Semitic attacks in the UK are at record levels according to the Jewish security charity the Community Security Trust (CST). The need to remember the Holocaust has rarely been more urgent. So why has the proposed monument, more than a decade in the planning, become one of the most fraught schemes in government?
Despite enjoying cross-party political support, the proposal has been the target of concerted opposition, including a successful judicial review. This prompted a new law, the Holocaust Memorial Bill, to facilitate the construction of the memorial and underground learning centre. The estimated costs have more than tripled, from £50m to in excess of £150m, including at least £75m of public money.
Critics argue that the proposal, designed by the scandal-hit architect David Adjaye, will take the wrong form in the wrong place at the wrong price, carried along by political inertia. At worst, they warn, the memorial could even misrepresent Britain's relationship to the Holocaust, or increase the risk of anti-Semitic attacks.
But supporters, including Sir Ephraim Mirvis, chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, contend the memorial is essential. Last summer, Mirvis said the 'moral duty to preserve the lessons of the Holocaust could not be greater'.
'This [monument] … sends a timely message, not only about our national undertaking to remembering this dark period of our history but, more importantly, about the kind of future we want to create together,' he said.
Britain's relationship to the Holocaust is complicated. The Kindertransport, in which the UK took in nearly 10,000 mostly Jewish children from across Nazi-occupied Europe, was a compromise brought about by Parliament's reluctance to accept adult refugees. Other celebrations of Britain's resistance to Nazi Germany can be complicated by the sense that more could have been done to help.
It was not until 1979 that Michael Heseltine, as Margaret Thatcher's environment secretary, announced that there would be a permanent memorial to the Holocaust, opposite the Cenotaph on Whitehall. But nobody could agree on what exactly to put there. Lord Carrington, the foreign secretary, who won the Military Cross as a tank commander, objected that the memorial had 'nothing to do with Britain.' The space on Whitehall is still empty.
In the end, a Holocaust memorial was built in Hyde Park, at the east of the Serpentine, and unveiled in 1983. It comprises two boulders on a bed of gravel, surrounded by a little copse of silver birch trees. On one of the boulders is an inscription, in Hebrew and English, with a quote from the Book of Lamentations: 'For these I weep. Streams of tears flow from my eyes because of the destruction of my people.' Although it is elegant, there is no denying that it is out-of-the-way and little visited. A statue at London's Liverpool Street station, meanwhile, commemorates the Kindertransport.
Nevertheless, the Holocaust is hardly ignored in the UK. The Imperial War Museum in Lambeth, less than a mile from Parliament, has a widely admired permanent Holocaust exhibition, which receives more than 600,000 visitors a year and has just been spruced up as part of the museum's £33m refurbishment. There is a National Holocaust Museum Centre and Museum in Nottinghamshire; Holocaust Centre North in Huddersfield; and the Wiener Holocaust Library in London's Russell Square.
The saga over a new monument began in 2014 when then-prime minister David Cameron launched a Holocaust Commission to establish whether the UK needed to do more to preserve the memory of the Holocaust.
The commission reported back the following year and recommended a 'striking and prominent new National Memorial', along with a visitor centre which would teach tourists about the Holocaust. The report also argued that the British memorial should be located near the centre of government, echoing the prominent memorials in Berlin, Washington DC and Jerusalem.
They settled on Victoria Tower Gardens, a peaceful little Grade II-listed park by the Thames on the southern side of Parliament. Cameron said the memorial would stand beside Parliament 'as a permanent statement of our values as a nation'. The monument would cost around £50m and open in 2017. Seven years later, nothing has been built, after a litany of complications.
The location was controversial from the start. Victoria Tower Gardens is small and popular with local residents. There are already three memorials in it: the Emmeline & Christabel Pankhurst memorial, the Buxton Memorial Fountain to the abolition of slavery, and Rodin's sculpture, The Burghers of Calais. The winning design, by David Adjaye, comprised 23 large bronze fins, creating 22 spaces to represent the countries most affected by the Holocaust, along with a visitor centre. The fins would loom over these other memorials and occupy a large percentage of the park's open space.
In an interview, Adjaye said 'disrupting the pleasure of being in a park is key to the thinking' behind his plan. In a further complication, in 2023 Adjaye was accused of sexual assault and harassment by three women who had worked with him. He denied the accusations but stepped back from the Holocaust memorial, among other projects.
Mirvis, for his part, refers to the creation of the memorial as a 'sacred task'.
'I appreciate that there are some detractors,' he wrote in Jewish News in 2020. 'There are some people who are opposed to this idea.
'I respect their views [...] but I beg to differ. I differ with them in the strongest, most passionate way. Locating this particular initiative and development in Victoria Tower Gardens is an inspirational choice of venue. It is a wonderful location.'
Residents have been less enthralled. 'I'm Jewish, and it's wonderful that there's a proposal to have a Holocaust memorial in the capital,' says Louise Hyams, a Conservative councillor on Westminster Council. 'But the one that's proposed is too large and overpowering. This was the ugliest of the proposals.
'More than that, the local residents value the park as somewhere they can go. In that area, there's a lot of social housing and people don't have gardens. They were very upset that this park would be taken away. It was the wrong monument in the wrong location. The atmosphere of the park would obviously change if there was a Holocaust memorial in it.' Others argued that the memorial would damage the park's flora, and increase the risk of flooding.
Hyams adds that the park will cause 'congestion' and might attract hostile as well as respectful visits. 'It is just going to cause trouble in that location,' she says. 'I don't want it to cause the opposite of what it wants to achieve. I don't want it to cause anti-Semitism.' She believes the Imperial War Museum, with its existing Holocaust exhibition and large open spaces, would be a better location for any new memorial.
Perhaps the most concerted opposition to the memorial, however, has come from Baroness Deech, a Jewish crossbench peer whose father fled the Nazis to Britain. She queries the value not just of the selected design, but the whole concept of a memorial.
'There was a report recently that found around half the people in the world hold anti-Semitic views, even in places where there are no Jews,' she says. 'There are in the world over 300 Holocaust memorials and nobody seems ever to have carried out an impact assessment. Do they do any good? The answer is obviously, 'No, they don't'. I think in part this is because they are more and more politicised, but also because they all place the Holocaust in a sort of box. 'This happened 80 years ago, it was the Nazis, the Germans, we're frightfully sorry, full stop'. Nobody seems to draw the dotted line from then until now. It's as if they sanitise it, saying 'It was all a long time ago', it's hermetically sealed.'
She adds that the site next to Parliament, which has been chosen for political purposes, is also likely to make the memorial a target. In April 2024, police covered up the Hyde Park memorial out of fear vandals might deface it.
'[The new memorial] will be the focal point for vandalism, protest and worse,' Deech says. 'All the [pro-Palestine] marches that go on at the moment will converge on Victoria Tower Gardens.' This is one of the reasons Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, the Auschwitz survivor who addressed the House of Commons committee last year, opposes the memorial, together with a fear that it will whitewash Britain's failure to accept adult Jewish refugees.
'I've studied this, and abstract memorials are more prone to being defaced than figurative ones,' continues Deech. 'The Kindertransport memorial in Liverpool Street has remained untouched. But abstract ones like this one, which don't have any meaning, no appeal to the heart, will immediately get red paint all over them and worse.
'The ruination of the park, which is inevitable, will be blamed on the Jewish community, most of whom don't want it. It has been largely [organised] by non-Jews and imposed on the Jewish community whether they want it or not. The Holocaust survivors I've been in contact with don't want it, because they can see it's pointless.'
The proposal has carried on regardless. After a public enquiry, planning permission was finally granted for the memorial in July 2021. Four months later, the High Court allowed a legal challenge against that permission. Opponents argued that a London County Council Act from 1900 prohibited building in the park. The High Court overturned the planning permission the following April, a decision further upheld by the Court of Appeal. To build the memorial, Parliament would have to pass a new law. In February 2023, the government introduced the Holocaust Memorial Bill for this purpose. With cross-party support, it has passed easily through Parliament, despite the objections.
'It is perceived as risky for politicians to oppose it,' says Prof Richard Evans, one of the world's leading historians of the Second World War and a long-standing opponent of the scheme. Not only is the memorial 'rather ugly', he says, but the proposed study centre is 'really second rate.'
'There are better ways of commemorating the Holocaust,' he says. 'We need the best we can get. The proposals are not adequate. They run the risk of making this country look ridiculous.'
For Evans, part of the problem is the nature of the memorial itself, which he says risks distorting Britain's history with the Holocaust. 'I'm concerned it may give a misleading impression of Britain's response to Nazi anti-Semitism, which was not entirely laudable,' he says. 'There were many barriers put up to the emigration of Jews from Nazi Germany, although of course some very good things were done, like the Kindertransport. But to say that Britain was preserved because of democracy is seriously misleading. After all, it was the Weimar Republic's democracy that let in and was destroyed by the Nazis, leading to the Holocaust.'
Britain's acceptance of Hitler's Anschluss with Austria, and the appeasement exemplified by the Munich Agreement, also helped create the conditions for the Holocaust, he adds.
Evans also believes that the memorial risks distracting from the serious business of educating people, especially young people, about the Holocaust, especially important given the rise in anti-Semitism since the Gaza war began on Oct 7 2023. 'The rise of anti-Semitism has been very shocking and rather depressing,' he says. 'But the ways we can counter it, speaking as a historian, are to give more publicity to the Imperial War Museum and to support the Holocaust Education Trust in its efforts to educate people. Certainly, to equate the appalling and shocking behaviour of the current Israeli government in Gaza with the genocide of the Holocaust is quite misleading.'
Seemingly undeterred by the opposition to the project, successive governments have continued to support it. After Sir Keir Starmer was elected Prime Minister in July, he doubled down on the plan.
'We will build that national Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre and build it next to Parliament, boldly, proudly, unapologetically,' he said, addressing the Holocaust Education Trust in September. 'Not as a Jewish community initiative, but as a national initiative - a national statement of the truth of the Holocaust and its place in our national consciousness, and a permanent reminder of where hatred and prejudice can lead.'
Last autumn Cameron, now Lord Cameron, reiterated his support. Speaking in the House of Lords in his first public address since he stood down as foreign secretary, the Conservative peer defended the project as an 'unapologetic national statement' amid growing anti-Semitism. He acknowledged the project's critics, but said there was 'real power' to having the memorial 'at the heart of our democracy.' Although he knew that some approved of the 'concept but not the location,' he thought it was 'a good idea in part because of the location.'
Ed Balls, the former Labour schools minister and shadow chancellor, is co-chair of the board steering the memorial's construction, and has been involved in the project for over a decade. He remains committed to the design as it is. This messiness is part of the point. He emphasises that the learning centre will be a 'warts and all' look at Britain's history with the Holocaust.
'Our goal has always been, in the shadow of Parliament, to have a memorial to events which started off in a parliament through a democratic process which became undemocratic,' he says. 'In Britain, America and other countries around the world, the political and democratic process found it very hard to engage with something that became the catastrophe of the 20th century. It was a difficult time when Parliament faced big dilemmas and didn't rise to the challenge.'
Given the momentum behind the Bill, there is little risk it will not make it through the Lords this year. Construction of the memorial seems likely to follow soon after. The builders need to get a move on. Otherwise, the dwindling number of Holocaust survivors may not live to see it, whether they want it or not.
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