Memorializing the Holocaust Janet Jacobs, author of
Memorializing the Holocaust: Gender, Genocide and Collective
Memory , discusses the memorials and monuments to the Holocaust
at Ravensbrück, Germany. Sixty six years after the end of World
War II, the observance of Holocaust Memorial Day stands as an
important cultural marker of the tragic and violent genocide
that has, for more than half a century, shaped the collective
consciousness of post war Europe. This act of public
commemoration has emerged out of a memorial landscape that since
the 1950s has provided the memory frames through which death,
suffering and ethnic terror are remembered. Just as Holocaust
Memorial Day brings the past into the present, memorials and
monuments preserve the collective narratives of loss, shame,
guilt and despair that are the ever present reminders of the
Nazi regime. Among the most moving of these memorials is the
national monument at Ravensbrück, Germany, a concentration camp
site that was originally conceived and built to