Free (and Almost Free) Summer Activities for Middle Schoolers in Boston, MA: the New England Holocaust Memorial

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This is not a “fun” activity to do with children, but it does engender many deep conversations with your middle and high schoolers. The New England Holocaust Memorial should definitely not be missed on a visit to Boston! This is especially true if you have middle school children with you, since, at least in some Massachusetts school districts, Holocaust literature is part of the middle school English Language Arts curriculum.

Own Work Copyright 2014

The New England Holocaust Memorial is located in Carmen Park, a little rectangular green island bordering the streets that separate the Haymarket T station’s back entrance, the steps that lead up to Government Center’s City Hall Plaza, the North End, and the Quincy Market. The entrance on the Haymarket T station side is marked by a stone with an inscription of a quote by Lutheran Pastor Martin Niemoeller.

A memorial stone that tells the facts of the Holocaust marks the entrance on the Quincy Market side; visitors to this Memorial often leave a small rock (a Jewish tradition) or a flower (a Christian tradition) on top, to mark their visit.

 A low chain fence, punctuated by rhombuses, reminiscent of the barbed wire that surrounded the Nazi death camps into which Jews and other “undesirables” had been herded, also marks this entrance.

 The Memorial itself is really a pathway through tall glass tunnels inscribed with numbers, in memory of the tattoos that the Nazis placed on each concentration camp prisoner’s arm. Each structure is built over a steel grate and each structure is dedicated in memory of one of the camps. From these steel grates steam often comes up, to remind us of the horrid conditions in which concentration camp prisoners lived...and of their ultimate ghastly fate.

 

I am old enough to have been a pre-teen myself when the New England Holocaust Memorial was first inaugurated. Back then, the trees had just been planted, saplings, so there was no canopy over the glass structures of the Memorial. I was there on a very sunny summer day and, as I walked into the first glass structure, my entire hand and arm were suddenly covered in gray-ish black numbers (the effect of the sun’s rays shining through the Memorial’s glass panels). I was rooted to the spot, transported in time to World War II and in place to Auschwitz-Birkenau or, perhaps, Treblinka, the “children’s” camp. I could not breathe. I have never forgotten: the experience definitely left an impression on my psyche. As grateful as I am for the shady canopy that now exists in Carmen Park, I wonder whether it wouldn’t be better for the future of humanity to cut them all down and begin again, so that my children’s generation can not only study and learn about these “acts of inhumanity that can stem from the seeds of prejudice” but feel their effects as well.