Boston Holocaust Memorial

Towers of memory and hope near the Freedom Trail

The six glass towers of the Boston Holocaust Memorial rise along a black granite path along a narrow ribbon park of green grass near the Freedom Trail. 

The haunting yet beautiful towers bring their own messages about persecution and liberty, genocide and human rights, death and survival, despair and hope. 

Boston area survivors of Nazi concentration camps led the effort to create the Boston Holocaust Memorial (officially called the "New England Holocaust Memorial").  Eventually, they received support and sponsorship from more than 3,000 individuals and organizations. 

Completed in 1995, the Memorial is dedicated to the memory of the 6 million Jewish men, women, and children - more than half the Jewish population of Europe - and the other 5 million people murdered by the Nazis before their defeat in 1945. 

What you will find at the Boston Holocaust Memorial

Architect Stanley Saitowitz designed the Boston Holocaust Memorial, mixing symbolism and metaphor with the literalness of concrete words.

Each of the 6 glass towers is 54 feet high.  They are lit from within, and seem to shimmer in daylight and glow at night. 

At a distance, the towers look ethereal and transparent.  Up close, they seem rugged and almost opaque. 

As you walk along the black granite path, you'll see people put their hands up to the glass, as though they're not sure that it's really there.

To the north and the west, Boston's Government Center buildings provide a backdrop to the Memorial. 

Built in the 1960s in the Brutalism architectural style and featuring rough concrete block shapes as the major design element, these massive and rather ugly buildings grate against the rest of the city's architecture.  The rectangular glass panels of the towers frame the buildings, and somehow soften them.

Each tower represents one of the 6 major Nazi death camps: Majdanek, Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Belzec, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. 

At the base of each tower, a grate lies over a 6-foot square pit with warm steam rising from coals that smolder at the bottom. 

If you look carefully, you can see that the flickering coals illuminate the name of the death camp that the tower represents.

The glass of the towers appears slightly frosted.  Look closely, and you'll see that the glass is not actually frosted - it's etched with random numbers - 6 million in all. 

These random numbers represent the registration numbers tattooed on the Jews by force when they were brought to the death camps. And of course, each number carved in the glass represents one of the 6 million people who were murdered.

Does the initial frosting effect symbolize the tendency of our collective memory to grow hazy over time?  The Holocaust Memorial is about remembrance.  It's about not forgetting.

Along the bottom of the glass towers are etched statements about life in the camps from the survivors.

You can also see facts about the Holocaust engraved along the edging of the path between the towers.  You'll learn, for example, that the Nazis murdered as many as one and a half million Jewish infants and children.

At the entrance on the Faneuil Hall side of the Boston Holocaust Memorial is a large black granite cube etched with the key historical events leading to the Nazis' rise to power in 1933 until their defeat in 1945. 

The word "Remember" is carved in English and Hebrew in the pathway at the beginning of the towers, and again in English and Yiddish at the end. 

"Holocaust" and the Hebrew word for it, "Shoah," are engraved in black granite.

Between the two granite blocks is buried a time capsule containing the names of New Englanders' family members who were killed by the Nazis in the camps. 

The Memorial is stunning and moving.  When you're walking through and under the towers, you become so caught up in the experience that you forget that you're in a busy part of the city.

Faneuil Hall Marketplace is on one side, a block of historic taverns on the other, and the huge Government Center buildings and high-rise condos just beyond and above the towers. 

The location seems strange until you realize that this spot next to the Freedom Trail is a fitting place for it because both have to do with liberty and human rights.

The removal of the elevated Central Artery and the surrounding mess of the "Big Dig" in 2006 has opened up this part of the city to a new flow of tourists and locals.  As a result, the number of visitors to the Boston Holocaust Memorial has visibly increased. 

That's a good thing. 

This important Memorial causes us all to pause and think about the corrosive impact of prejudice, hatred, and bigotry, and the importance of speaking out against them. 

Final thoughts from the Boston Holocaust Memorial

At the end of the Memorial is one final granite slab bearing these words by Lutheran minister Martin Niemoeller, sent to a concentration camp for opposing Hitler: 

"THEY CAME FIRST for the Communists,
      and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.

THEN THEY CAME for the Jews,
      and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

THEN THEY CAME for the trade unionists, 
      and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

THEN THEY CAME for the Catholics,
      and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.

THEN THEY CAME for me,
      and by that time no one was left to speak up."

Details and Directions:

Location: Between Congress and Union Streets near Faneuil Hall, on Boston's Freedom Trail.
Hours:  You can visit this outdoor memorial at any time
Nearest T station:  Blue and Green Lines/Government Center; Green and Orange Lines/Haymarket; Blue and Orange Lines/State
Parking: Garages nearNorth End attractions, Government Center, and Faneuil Hall
For more information:  617-457-8755; website