Nederlands Holocaust in Europe After 1945

Keeping the Memory Alive

The large-scale publicity surrounding the Adolf Eichmann trial in 1961 in Israel contributed immensely to the post-war public awareness about the holocaust in general and about Auschwitz in particular. Also books - from the receptive Diary of Anne Frank to the piercing memoirs of Primo Levi - contributed to this awareness, just like films and TV series.  At the end of the 1970s for example, the 3-part American TV series, Holocaust, put the spotlight throughout Europe and particularly in Germany on the suffering of the Jews. Elie Wiesel, a survivor of Monowitz and author of many books about the Holocaust, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. There are many museums and memorial sites in Europe and in Israel, and even in the United States that keep the memory of the Holocaust alive.  Yad Vashem, established in 1953 in Jerusalem, is Israel's official memorial to the Holocaust. Approximately 2 million people visit Yad Vashem each year. In 1993, the United States holocaust Memorial Museum was opened in the centre of Washington D.C. and it attracts more than 1.5 million visitors annually. And in 2005, the large holocaust Mahnmal (monument) was unveiled in the centre of Berlin. Within one year morethan 3.5 million people visited the Berlin memorial.


32_Yad_Vashem 32_US_HM_museum 32_HolocaustMahnmal
  1. Yad Vashem in Jerusalem is the official Israeli monument for commemorating the victims of the Holocaust. Photographer: David Shankbone
  2. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum, on the National Mall in Washington DC, attracts more than one million visitors per year. Photographer: Mark Pellegrini
  3. The Holocaust Mahnmal in the German capital Berlin. A large site covered with 2711 concrete blocks, arranged in a grit pattern on a sloping hill, giving a feeling of disorientation and isolation, which is symbolic for the experience of the Jewish people during the Nazi regime. Unknown photographer Source: commons.wikimedia.org
Glossary
persecution
mass murder
perpetrators and victims
camps
auschwitz
sobibor
after 1945
timeline
guest book
trials
initial silence
keeping the memory alive
holocaust denial
demjanjuk trial