Students plan memorial to
remember Holocaust
Pear trees adorned with
black ribbons serve
as memorial
By Jenny Schuster
Staff
Writer
For many, the word "memorial" conjures images of
a static monument, a larger-than-life statue of a historical figure
or a wall listing names of those who lost their lives in a war.
For students in HONR 199K, "Telling the Holocaust",
a memorial is more than that. They believe it should be interactive
and dynamic so that it remains in a memory long after a visit.
From noon to 1:15 p.m. today, as their final project,
students in HONR 199K will tie black ribbons around the pear trees in
Academy Park to memorialize the lives lost during the Holocaust.
According to Dino Felluga, assistant professor
of English and the class' instructor, the memorial's goal is to extend
class lessons into a public form of present-day, future-oriented memorialization
as an expression of a commitment to fight against the dangers and oppressions
that still exist.
"The class had several ideas for a memorial, but
this was the most feasible and interesting," Felluga said. Academy Park
was chosen as the memorial's location because it honors past teaching
at Purdue. "Our memorial is designed both to commemorate our class on
the Holocaust and to make a statement about how important it is to continue
our learning process beyond the classroom," Felluga said.
"We wanted to do something that would create awareness
of the Holocaust but wasn't permanent, and would also get the whole
school thinking about it," said Jennifer Meyers, a freshman in the School
of Liberal Arts. "We thought of a few ideas, and (the ribbons) were
our best choice. We want to have people asking why they're there."
In order to make the memorial interactive, Felluga
said that the class wanted to invite the University community to remove
the ribbons as an act of remembrance for past injustices and as a declaration
of commitment to fight oppression in the future.
To prepare the memorial, the class traveled to
Chicago earlier this semester. "We analyzed two Holocaust memorials,
the Avenue of the Righteous in Evanston (Ill.) and the Zell Holocaust
Memorial in downtown Chicago," Felluga said.
The class was also visited by Robert Sovinski,
associate professor of landscape architecture, and by memorialization
expert James Young, who was recently appointed by the German government
to make the official decision about Germany's national memorial to Europe's
murdered Jews, which is now under construction.
"The class decided against a traditional Holocaust
memorial. For example, a permanent rock or tombstone because such static
objects threaten to stand in the place of memory and obviate your active
participation in the act of remembering and of resisting future oppression,"
Felluga said. "The class wished instead to create what Young termed
in his lecture a 'counter-memorial.'"
HONR 199K, an interdisciplinary class exclusively
for freshman honors students, is supported by a $10,000 grant from the
Lilly Retention Initiative. The idea behind the class, Felluga said,
is that history is not about the past but about struggles in the present
and, more specifically, about a just relation to the future.
"If a cultured, educated, democratic, advanced,
industrial, religious society like Weimar, Germany, could have been
led into the atrocities of the Holocaust within a single decade, how
exactly can we claim immunity?" he said.
Over the course of the semester, the students have
analyzed books, films, music and histories relating to the Holocaust.
"We've studied cultural and political representations of the Holocaust,
how much truth they can portray and how they affect people who are studying
the events," said Michele Purdue, a freshman in the School of Liberal
Arts. "To what extent can that event be captured in a book, a film or
a memorial?"
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