DESTRUCTION  

The first panel represents “Kristallnacht”, “The Night of Broken Glass".  Shattered glass falling from the Magan David symbolizes the Nazi pogroms on Nov 9th, 1938, which destroyed Jewish owned synagogues, homes, and stores.   This is the point in history when repression of the Jewish People changed to outright organized violence and genocide. 

The golden surface behind the star changes to destructive flames, and the broken glass pieces fall into the concentration camps.  Millions of people are seen rounded up and imprisoned, then stripped of their identity, and are now standing still in striped uniforms.  The images of the prisoners are sculpted and painted in a manner that appears to go back into infinity, while also fading upward towards the sky. This expresses the magnitude of the event, while simultaneously representing the souls that vanished in the camps. 

The stripes from the uniforms are actually carved into the sculpted surface, as the artist expresses the weight of their ordeal.  Visually the lines are pulling the viewer down into the the camps, graphically showing the horrifically engineered apparatus.  The atrocities that need to be remembered, including the railroad tracks leading to the camp, the barracks, and crematoriums.  The cold, dark, still nature of this panel is in stark contrast to the final panel, at the Western Wall, full of life, color, and vivacity.  

The tattooed numbers have been superimposed over the eyes of the prisoners. Not only does this show their identities were reduced to a number, but it also forces the viewer to see what was done to them through racism, persecution and hatred; we can no longer look at them soul to soul. Survivors and others try to put the past in the past, yet the consequences affect the present and future.  Other non-Jewish prisoners are represented here in the striped uniforms, without the sewn on Star of David.

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