Sculptor Gizel Berman was commissioned by Washington State's Jewish community to create a memorial to keep alive the memory of the six million Jews who perished during the Holocaust. Her bronze sculputre took nearly a year to design, and represents the six Hebrew letters in the Biblical command: "Thou Shalt Not Forget" (Deuteronomy 25:19). The 13-foot tall spire at the center symbolizes the cremartoria chimneys of the concentration camps, and around the base are names of some of the most infamous wartime camps and extermination sites-Auschwitz, Bibi Yar, Bergen Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Maidanek, Mauthausen, Riga, Stutthof, Theresientstadt, Treblinka, the Warsaw Ghetto.

Thou Shalt Not Forget

 Berman's memorial was dedicated in November, 1981, and stands outside the Jewish Community Center of Greater Seattle.

I am older now, but once I was a wild, unruly, joyous girl.  It was my first life. 

Later, I endured the Nazi ghetto and death camps. It was my second life. 

Still later, I emigrated to America, and experienced great happiness as a wife, mother and a professional artist. It is my third life. 

Altogether, my three lives have filled me with memories of great horror and great beauty. Many years after arriving in this country, I wondered how I could make sense of them all. Then I understood: as a sculptor, I would bring together all three lives by creating in bronze a monument to the Holocaust. A memorial, a “preservation of memory”.  From clay and molten metal, I would give form to my feelings about the dead, to my feelings as a Holocaust survivor, to my feelings of one who had committed herself to do more than survive. 

But what did I want to say to the loved ones I had lost? What did I want to say to all those millions of others I had never known but also mourned?  What did I want to express to those generations who would come to look at this work, long after I was gone?

I wanted to say, “Never forget”!

I wanted to say, “Never forget, but never despair.”

I wanted to say, “Never forget, but live in hope.”

I didn’t want my monument to portray emaciated bodies twisting in agony, or faces hideously distorted with fright and pain.  I had seen such memorials, and I had no wish to produce another.  Stark horror was not the theme of my mother’s life, nor my brother’s life.  That was not their truth, and it wasn’t mine.  No, as the last survivor of my family, I wanted to create a monument that acknowledged our suffering, yet also proclaimed our dignity.  I wanted a monument that would say Lo Tishkach (never forget) in Hebrew letters; a monument whose graceful shapes would bring to mind the slender chimneys of the Auschwitz crematorium, where the smoke from my mother’s ashes had risen.

When it was finished, the bronze took everything out of me.  I was depleted; mentally, physically and emotionally.  When a Seattle TV station called for an interview, my first impulse was to refuse.  Let my art speak for itself. Then I thought again.  So, for the next 15 years, I began been using words to tell my story of my three lives.  It began with a high school class in my community. Uncertain what to expect, I agreed to tell these very young people of events which had happened long before they were born. 

Some, as I feared, were indifferent.  Others seemed disbelieving.  But the vast majority had sat in rapt attention, with deep understanding in their eyes. Moved, I spoke to more classes.  I felt almost compelled to share myself.  I would recount the horrors, of course, yet I would always manage to speak of the good things too. 

Yes, I told them, even amid the greatest of miseries, there are good things that can keep us going – memories of kindness and hope and love and even laughter.  I told them how I had played the clown in the concentration camp to keep up people’s spirits.  I told them how I had sneaked food and bread past the guards, and the grim joy I took in doing it.  I told them how, even under the threat of each moment, to find a purpose for living by helping others. The young people would listen – laughing, crying.

Though I never sounded bitter, someone always asked if I hated the Germans.  When I said no, I don’t believe in hate, many would shake their heads in bewilderment.  But hate has never played any part in my life.  Perhaps that is why I not only survived but went on to live productively.  Today, people of all sorts, not only camp survivors, take great pride in portraying themselves as victims.  I see it differently.  Anyone can be a victim.  The honor lies in refusing the role.

Year after year, I had seen my words having an impact.  I accepted invitations to speak in front of groups of many kinds.  I found that adults responded as intensely as young people did.  After my presentations, people often asked if I had written a book. The very idea struck me as outlandish.  I was a sculptress, not a writer.  I worked in metal, not words.

But the suggestion was like a seed.  It buried itself in my mind, germinating through a long winter.  And eventually I began this book.  As I wrote, the dead came back to life for me, just as they had done when my hands shaped the bronze. When people ask about my life, I smile and say, “Which one?”  In fact, I have lived three lives, each utterly different.  There was my sunny childhood and youth, then the Holocaust, then a kind of rebirth in a new world.  There is no way to tell it all, but I have done my best to choose what was most important and most characteristic.

Soon my living hands will no longer be here to work, and my voice will be still.  But at least there will be two “preservations of memory”; one in words, the other in metal.  I very much want one or the other to survive. Lo Tishkach.

 Gizel Berman