Description
This monument was commissioned by a group of survivors living in Florida who did not want the Holocaust to be forgotten. It was created by Kenneth Triester and was inaugurated in 1985. The main feature of the monument is a massive outstretched human arm with a death camp tattoo at the wrist that rises out of the ground and soars thirty feet into the sky, with miniature figures of naked Holocaust victims desperately clambering up the arm. It evokes an awful image of what transpired within the gas chambers in the final moments of blind panic after the victims realised that they were not in a shower and frantically climbed over and upon each other in a futile attempt to rise above the poisonous gas that was being released all around them. The arm is surrounded by several figures clustered around its base.
Abigail has situated the arm of the monument and two figures of Jewish suffering at its base in a biblical desert landscape. The first figure is a mother attempting to console and protect her two young children; and the second is an old lady seated on the ground in the posture of the eichah (Lamentation) assumed on the day Tisha B’Av, the 9th of Av, which commemorates the anniversary of the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem. Tiny angels flit about these figures suggesting a spiritual presence. Above the arm in the heavens Abigail has painted spirit forms of the naked and emaciated bodies of the Holocaust victims rising slowly upwards through cloudy forms to their state of gilgul (reincarnation) in the heavens. They are being ushered by further flitting angel figures. At the apex of the work two guardian angels flank a pair of large hands, presumably those of G-d, that are cradling a peacock with fanned plumage, a symbol of resurrection.
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