In Latvia on Monday, Dec. 15, 1941, thousands of Jewish women and children were taken to the women’s prison in Liepāja. From there, in the freezing cold, they were marched to a nearby beach, forced to strip to their underclothes, taken to the edge of a trench and shot dead. Many of the victims were photographed in their final moments by a Nazi photographer. One such photograph serves as the basis for the Women of the Shoah – Jewish Placemaking monument She Wouldn’t Take Off Her Boots.
North Carolina’s first and only women’s Holocaust monument, an original sculpture by artist, Victoria Milstein, will honor the strength and resilience of all women. She Wouldn’t Take Off Her Boots will be a community placemaking experience in downtown Greensboro’s LeBauer Park for the public, not only to remember the Holocaust, but to have a place for impactful Holocaust education.
Honoring those who perished, the Holocaust memorial will be art that requires social engagement and the participation of its audience: the act of looking through the camera, where the spectator becomes a witness, to see and feel the opposite of what the Nazi photographer was documenting.
