Ohio’s Holocaust and Liberators Memorial should serve to remind future generations of what evil can be and serve also as an inspiration for hope, speakers said Monday at a dedication ceremony.
The monument remembers the millions who died in the Holocaust — 6 million Jews and another 6 million people from other groups, including the mentally ill, homosexuals, gypsies, developmentally disabled and political dissidents. It also honors survivors and liberators who chose Ohio as home.
Gov. John Kasich proposed the memorial in 2011, saying he’d seen the national Holocaust memorial museum in Washington but thought that wasn’t enough for Ohio.
“We need to have a remembrance in the Statehouse,” Kasich told those gathered in the Statehouse Rotunda for an annual observance of the Holocaust.
Holocaust-memorial-kasich.jpgOhio Gov. John Kasich, left, and sculptor Daniel Libeskind posed for pictures with visitors to the new Ohio Holocaust and Liberators Memorial following a dedication ceremony Monday.
The memorial on the Statehouse grounds would teach people about man’s inhumanity to man so that lawmakers and the public “will be able to understand not just the history of a time when people wouldn’t stand, the fact that it’s today we must stand against evil,” he said.
He reiterated that message Monday.
To survivors, he said, “please tell your story in as much detail as you can. … Our young people have to know about the injustice.” He made a similar plea to American soldiers who liberated people held in concentration camps. “We need to know their stories,” he said.
That becomes important, too, as that generation ages. The youngest soldiers in World War II who helped liberate concentration camps are in their later ’80s today.
Both survivors and soldiers were represented in the ceremony.
Barbara Turkeltaub of Canton, who is believed to be the last Holocaust survivor in Stark County, had a role, as did Donald Jakeway Sr. of Johnstown, a soldier who parachuted into Normandy and later helped rescue a family hiding from the Nazi in Holland.
“The purpose of this monument is to honor those who perished,” Kasich said during the ceremony. “An added purpose is for people to look, to reflect, to meditate, and to ask ‘What can I do?’ ”
Monday’s ceremony had a somber tone, beginning with the tolling of the Ohio Bicentennial Bell, rung 12 times in memory of an estimated “12 million who were murdered in the Holocaust.”
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