Why Is It So Hard to Build a Holocaust Memorial in London?

On the short spring night of May 11, 1943, Szmul Zygielbojm—a Jewish Polish exile in despair—sat down and typed three letters in his flat, overlooking Porchester Square, near Paddington Station, in London. Zygielbojm was forty-eight years old, a pale figure with a small mustache. Two fingers were missing from his left hand, the result of a brief boyhood training as a carpenter. Zygielbojm’s true calling was as a union organizer. Before Germany invaded Poland, in September, 1939, he had been a prominent member of the Bund, a Jewish socialist political party. He wrote and edited under the pen name of Artur.

In January, 1940, Zygielbojm escaped from Warsaw, leaving his wife, Manya; an ex-wife, Golda; and three children under Nazi occupation. For three years, he travelled and lectured, telling the world about the murder of the Jews. Zygielbojm became a conduit for messages, smuggled out by Bundist comrades, about the scale of the killing. In May, 1942, he gave the Daily Telegraph a list of murder sites and an estimate that seven hundred thousand Jewish civilians had died. The story was not widely believed. Zygielbojm wrote to Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. He did not hear back. He broadcast on the BBC. In the fall of 1942, Zygielbojm told a Labour Party rally in Caxton Hall, not far from the Houses of Parliament, that the Nazis had used “poison-gas” to kill forty thousand people outside the town of Chelmno. He urged the Allies to “stop the greatest crime in human history.”

By May, 1943, Zygielbojm knew that he had failed. The Warsaw Ghetto, where his family lived, had risen up and been destroyed. Zygielbojm’s last letters—his final entreaties—were to the Polish government in exile, two Bundist friends, and to his brother, Fayvel, who was living in South Africa. Zygielbojm was tired, defiant, and haunted. He confused passersby in London for people he had left behind in the ghetto. “All the joy in me is stamped out. A sadness, round like the full moon, wraps around me,” he wrote to Fayvel. He left a final note, apologizing to his landlady, and took an overdose of barbiturates. “Through my death, I wish to express my deepest protest against the inaction with which the world is watching and permitting destruction of the Jewish people,” Zygielbojm wrote, in his best-remembered paragraph. “I am aware how little human life means, especially now. But since I couldn’t achieve it in my lifetime, perhaps my death will shake from lethargy those who can and who should act now, in order to save, in the last possible moment, this handful of Polish Jews who still remain alive.”

Zygielbojm’s body was cremated, in accordance with his wishes. Manya, Golda, and his two younger children, Artek and Rivka, were all killed by the Nazis. In 1959, Zygielbojm’s surviving son, Joseph, found his ashes stored in a shed in a Jewish cemetery in Golder’s Green, in North London, and took them home, to America, for burial. For decades, there was no marker of Zygielbojm’s life and protest in Britain. In 1991, Majer Bogdanski, a Polish friend from before the war, suggested to David Rosenberg, a left-wing writer and tour guide in London, that there should be a memorial to Zygielbojm in the city. Rosenberg, who had been fascinated by Zygielbojm’s story for years, agreed. “I just said yeah,” he told me recently. “I’ll help to make it happen.”

That was when the work began. Rosenberg formed a campaign group, the Zygielbojm Memorial Committee, and asked Westminster Council to put up a green commemorative plaque outside Zygielbojm’s former apartment—as it does for notable residents of the borough. The campaigners wrote to the occupants of his old building, No. 12 Porchester Square, to ask permission. Four residents agreed, but a fifth, a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, refused, afraid that the building would become a target for antisemites. Rosenberg asked David Cesarani, one of Britain’s best-known Jewish historians, to intercede, but to no avail. “This guy was a very traumatized and nervous person,” Rosenberg said. Next, the committee switched its attention to a garden behind the apartment, but it was informed that the location was not suitable for “racial, religious, political or memorial” purposes. Zygielbojm couldn’t get a spot on the local library wall, either. His campaigning—in the form of lectures and articles—did not qualify him as an author.

The fiftieth anniversary of Zygielbojm’s death came and went. For Rosenberg, the bureaucratic obstacles to commemorating him mixed with other concerns that were harder to articulate. “At the back of our mind was, Why? Why hasn’t the Jewish community here done something about Zygielbojm before?” He said, “And to me, that’s a big question.” In the end, a sympathetic official from Westminster Council helped to find a vacant patch of wall for the plaque, on the corner of Porchester Road, at the end of Zygielbojm’s street. (The plaque says that he lived “nearby.”) At the unveiling of the plaque, in May, 1996, Zygielbojm’s final letter was read out in English and Yiddish. Rosenberg gave a speech, describing how his death cast “an uncomfortable shadow” over Britain’s military decision-making in the Second World War. The crowd was larger than expected. People stood in the road, blocking the traffic, to hear the speeches.

Memorializing the Holocaust in London has never been straightforward. The murder of six million Jews—and the question of whether the British authorities could have done more to save them—complicates an otherwise ennobling story of the country’s heroic stand against Nazism, its finest hour. “The British won. They don’t regard the Holocaust as their problem,” Frederic Raphael, the British American novelist, told Stephen Brook in the book “The Club: The Jews of Modern Britain,” from 1989. “Your bad foot is not my bad foot. I may be sympathetic, I may give you a hand across the street, but I don’t limp.” Insisting on a different history—or a challenging monument—did not come easily to a Jewish population that was, for centuries, intent on conformity. “In Britain, the Shoah has no reality, not even to the Jews,” George Steiner, the literary critic and essayist, told Brook. “Those who speak and write about it, and raise the crucial questions of how Auschwitz has altered our perceptions, our theology, are considered bombastic.” The result was that, for a long time—after Germany, after Poland, after Israel, after France, after Canada, after the U.S.—the U.K. had no explicit national memorial to the Holocaust at all.

In the summer of 1979, after pressure from the Yad Vashem Institute, in Jerusalem, Michael Heseltine, a minister in the new Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, did offer a space for a memorial. The location was canonical: on Whitehall, opposite the Cenotaph, Britain’s most important monument to its war dead. But the project was hemmed by compromise. Heseltine informed Greville Janner, the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, that any memorial would require “very simple, restrained treatment.” In return, Janner suggested that it could be dedicated to all victims of the Nazis, rather than to Jews in particular. “A tribute, a reminder and as a memorial to some eleven million murdered people, of whom perhaps six million were Jews and five million non-Jews,” he wrote.

Janner’s framing didn’t make much difference. According to recent research by Rebecca Pollack, an art and architectural historian at the Foundation for International Education, in London, Heseltine’s colleagues privately rebelled at the idea. “The Memorial has nothing to do with Britain,” Lord Carrington, the Foreign Secretary, told a Cabinet meeting, flatly, in November, 1981. Thatcher couldn’t stand the idea of an eternal flame, which had been mooted. Francis Pym, the Secretary of State for Defence, suggested building a monument to Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India, opposite the Cenotaph instead. The position remains unfilled.

Britain’s first national monument to the genocide ended up in a quiet corner of Hyde Park. The Holocaust Memorial Garden consists of two granite boulders, on a bed of gravel, surrounded by a stand of birch trees. One of the rocks bears an inscription from Lamentations, in Hebrew and English. There is no reference to numbers of the dead, or to the murder of Jews. The memorial exists on the edge of being noticeable. In a speech to mark its completion, Janner expressed his hope that it would simultaneously “blend into the park and into the lives and memories of people, Jews and non-Jews alike” and also serve as “a flare of warning for the future.”

When I visited recently, on a bright morning in November, the garden was almost touching in its modesty. But as a memorial, it fails. “There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument,” Robert Musil, the Austrian philosophical writer and antifascist, wrote in 1927. “They are no doubt erected to be seen—indeed, to attract attention. But at the same time they are impregnated with something that repels attention.” The Hyde Park memorial has always been undecided whether it wants to be seen or not. A couple of trees had been cut down recently, either to increase the visibility of the stones, or to improve security. But everything about the site asks you to keep walking. About a hundred yards away, construction crews were busy, applying the finishing touches to Hyde Park’s annual Winter Wonderland attraction. The Holocaust Memorial Garden was close to the Green Gate entrance, which advertised itself as “ideal for the Bavarian Village.” After the opening ceremony for the garden, in June, 1983, some guests complained that they had missed the service, because they could not find it. Within weeks, antisemitic vandals covered the stone’s inscription with black paint, obscuring the words:

For these I weep
Streams of tears flow
From my eyes
Because of the destruction
Of my people.

For almost ten years, successive British governments have been trying to redress the inadequacy of the Hyde Park memorial with a new, showstopping monument next to the Houses of Parliament, in Westminster. In January, 2016, David Cameron, the former Conservative Prime Minister, announced that the new structure would be built in Victoria Tower Gardens, a slender triangular park, overhung with forty-four plane trees, that follows the banks of the River Thames. The park contains other monuments: a statue of Emmeline Pankhurst, the suffragette leader; a cast of Auguste Rodin’s “Burghers of Calais,” a sculpture recalling the bravery of the city under siege, in 1346; and the Buxton Memorial, which was built to mark the emancipation of slaves throughout the British Empire, in 1834. The plan for the new Holocaust memorial, as recommended by a commission that included Britain’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, was for it to be a “new focal point” for British memory and include a “world class learning centre” and a campus, where visitors could meet, reflect, and learn. “It will stand beside Parliament as a permanent statement of our values as a nation,” Cameron promised.

The memorial was due to open in 2017. Seven years later, there is nothing to see. The project has been beset by delays, legal challenges, rocketing costs, and the emotionally complicated spectacle of very old Holocaust survivors speaking both in favor and against it. Depending on who you ask, the memorial complex is either a bad idea, an ugly thing, pushed through by well-meaning but incompetent (and mainly non-Jewish) politicians, who talk in bromides about British values and “the need to fight hatred and prejudice in all its forms,” or a powerful new landmark, a venue for difficult conversations about the Holocaust and the current climate of antisemitism, catalyzed by the war in the Middle East. In 1993, James E. Young, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, published “The Texture of Memory,” a searching book about Holocaust memorials and their often contested origins. “Memory is never shaped in a vacuum,” he wrote. “The motives of memory are never pure.”

The winning design was by Adjaye Associates, a firm led by David Adjaye, the architect of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History, in Washington, and Ron Arad Architects. The U.K.’s National Holocaust Memorial, if it is ever built, will consist of twenty-three bronze fins, cutting into a raised grass slope. Approaching from the south, through a sunken courtyard, visitors will see the jagged fins—the tallest some ten metres high—against the Victorian Gothic backdrop of the Palace of Westminster. “All the while, Parliament reigns supreme in their vista as a beacon of democracy,” Adjaye noted, in a planning document submitted in 2020. Each year, an estimated million visitors will descend, in single file, through the twenty-two ravine-like passageways—to denote the number of countries in which Jewish communities were destroyed during the Holocaust—into the learning center, which will consist mostly of audio-visual displays. The intention, according to Ron Arad Architects, is to reflect on “the dramatic contrast between the day-to-day routine of a safe life in a sound democracy, and the slow and insidious creep of intolerance, sedition and hatred and where those could lead.”

Martin Winstone, a historical adviser at the Holocaust Educational Trust, who has been helping to design the content of the learning center, assured me that the exhibition would be anything but comfortable. “Everybody in Britain who could read knew the Holocaust was happening whilst it was happening,” he said. “And so that then raises questions about, How does Britain respond?” The learning center will explore the period from the early thirties, and the rise of Nazism, until the late forties, and will include Britain’s messy colonial legacy in Palestine and the foundation of Israel. The life and death of Zygielbojm will play a central role. “If people come away from this and they are reflecting on Szmul Zygielbojm and the issues which were raised by his story, then that I think would be a great achievement,” Winstone told me.

Opponents of the memorial have myriad concerns. They are worried about everything from security risks, flooding, traffic, tree damage, and the vacuity of its messaging. They point out the similarity between the design and another Adjaye Arad proposal—for a Holocaust Memorial in Ottawa, which was rejected in 2014. Does the number twenty-three, or twenty-two, for that matter, mean anything to anyone? Over all, critics fear that the memorial is simultaneously too big for Victoria Tower Gardens—and will displace attention from its other monuments—and yet too small to ever be a meaningful gathering place or campus, as originally envisaged by the government.

The underground learning center will be smaller than the Second World War and the Holocaust Galleries at the Imperial War Museum, which are less than a mile away, and reopened, a little more than three years ago, after a thirty-million-pound refurbishment. (The Holocaust Commission originally suggested that the I.W.M. Holocaust Galleries and the learning center should be combined.) Although the estimated cost of the memorial has spiralled—from fifty million pounds of public funding, in 2016, to a hundred and ninety million pounds, in 2024—other smaller organizations and grassroots efforts devoted to Holocaust education and the history of Jews in Britain have struggled to pay the bills. Eighteen months ago, the Jewish Museum London, which occupied an idiosyncratic, homely town house in Camden, where my wife and I used to take our kids on rainy weekends, closed its doors for lack of funding.

“It does not hold unanimous support, because nothing does, particularly nothing in the Jewish community, right?” Daniel Finkelstein, a Conservative peer and columnist at the Times of London, told me. Finkelstein’s grandfather, Alfred Wiener, founded the Wiener Library, London’s most important Holocaust archive, and Finkelstein served on the commission that recommended a new memorial. “It’s essentially an argument of doing nothing versus doing something. And I’m in favor of doing something,” he said. In 2021, the government of Boris Johnson approved the plans—over opposition from local residents—only to have the decision quashed in court because of legislation, dating from 1900, which forbids further construction in the park. Since 2023, a new law has been making its way through Parliament, to allow the memorial to be built. But the delay has allowed for only more occasions for the plans to be scrutinized and questioned.

Giving evidence in the House of Commons, last January, Richard Evans, the author of a three-volume history of the Third Reich, and one of Britain’s foremost historians of the Nazis, described the new learning center—“the proposed small shoebox”—as a potential national embarrassment. Louise Hyams, a Conservative councillor in Westminster, who is Jewish, said that the local planning committee had unanimously rejected the memorial because it was “too large, too imposing. It did not really, I think, get over the message that a Holocaust memorial should.” Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a ninety-nine-year-old who, as a girl, was not killed in Auschwitz because she could play the cello, inveighed against generic platitudes aimed at stopping genocides everywhere. “Everybody wants to be a big success and get a gong in the Parliament, etc. I know how these things work,” Lasker-Wallfisch told M.P.s, who were too scared to answer back. “It is a completely idiotic idea and it is almost an insult to think of a learning center. What are we learning now that we have not learned in eighty years? What are we learning: We should not kill each other? Good idea.”

In the middle of October, I sat in a grand blue-wallpapered committee room in the House of Lords, while Baroness Ruth Deech convened a meeting of the loose campaign group Save Victoria Tower Gardens, which is opposed to the current plans. Deech, an eighty-one-year-old Jewish lawyer, academic, and bioethicist, is the prime mover against the memorial. Deech’s mother, who was born in Glasgow, was made stateless by the British authorities when she married Deech’s father, a Jewish refugee from Poland, in 1942. (Her grandmother was refused entry to the U.K. and died in the camps.) “So I have mixed feelings about Britain and the Holocaust,” Deech told me. “I have a very personal interest in it.” Deech is formidable. She describes the new memorial as a toast rack. She has no time for Adjaye, who was accused of sexual misconduct against three female employees last summer. (Adjaye denies the claims, but he has since stepped away from design work on the memorial.) Because the new law, which is intended to allow the construction to go ahead, is backed by both the Conservative and Labour Parties, it is almost certain to be approved by Parliament. And yet Deech enjoined her supporters to keep fighting. “What’s troubling is that a lot of people just don’t know what’s going on,” she said. “They don’t know where it is—they don’t know what the design is. So don’t be put off by some sort of blackmail and how sacred it is and all that.”

Deech has warned of rising antisemitism on British university campuses for more than a decade. She describes the country’s new Labour government, which has imposed controls on the export of some weapons to Israel to be be used in Gaza, as the most anti-Israel of her lifetime. She fears, on a gut level, that the new memorial—expensive, disruptive, unfocussed, somehow self-congratulatory—will make things worse, not better, for Britain’s Jews. A couple of weeks later, on a gray afternoon, we took a turn around Victoria Tower Gardens. Deech picked her way carefully through the fallen leaves, leaning on a stick.

I asked Deech if she could express why the possibility of the new memorial bothered her so much, and I understood, from her answer, that it was ultimately the fear of abandonment, of abandoning the Holocaust to the past when she was still afraid of the present. “Ministers, you know, when they’re told that Jewish children are being attacked and swastikas going up,” Deech said, “they will say, ‘Oh, we built your Holocaust and learning center. Job done.’ ” In “The Texture of Memory,” Young observes that physical memorials can sometimes shoulder the memory work that communities should be doing instead. “Perhaps the more memory comes to rest in its exteriorized forms, the less it is experienced internally,” he writes. “For once we assign monumental form to memory, we have to some degree divested ourselves of the obligation to remember.” As Deech looked over to where the bronze fins are set to rise, she paraphrased the title of Dara Horn’s 2021 collection of essays about contemporary antisemitism. “Everybody loves dead Jews, the living not so much,” she said. “I think that sums it up.”

The co-chairs of the advisory board overseeing the building of the memorial are Lord Pickles, a Conservative politician, and Ed Balls, a former Labour M.P. who is now a podcaster and TV presenter. Neither man is Jewish. Pickles is a devout Christian and the chairman of the Conservative Friends of Israel, in the House of Lords. Since 2015, he has served as the U.K.’s Special Envoy for Post-Holocaust Issues. In May, Pickles published a report examining the German occupation of Alderney, one of the Channel Islands, where around a thousand slave workers died, while building Nazi fortifications.

Like Deech, Pickles has an office in the building overlooking Victoria Tower Gardens. When we met, he explained that work on the memorial had paused while the new law was making its way through Parliament and, potentially, a new planning process, after that. In the vacuum, misinformation was spreading. “We are subject to either people thinking we’re going to go super-woke, or they think we are going to go imperial, triumphant,” Pickles said. “And we are not. We are not going to do either.” Pickles expressed his admiration for Deech. “Ruth, bless her. I love her a lot,” he said. “But she is inventing castles in the air, and she’s asking me and others to go and live there.” Pickles’s best guess was that the Holocaust memorial will open in 2027. I asked him, on reflection, whether it had been a mistake to say that the project would somehow embody British values. “It’s not an unhelpful label,” Pickles replied, slowly. “I think British values are always full of contradictions.” ♦