National Solidarity Monument

On the cannon hill, the highest point of the old citadel, a flame burns that is never put out. This is the National Monument of Luxembourgish Solidarity, the country's memorial to the dead of the Second World War, to the resistance against the Nazi occupation, and to the way a small people held together under it.

The date of its unveiling is the point of it. On the 10th of October 1941 the German administration held a census in which every Luxembourger was asked three questions — nationality, mother tongue, ethnicity — and expected to answer "German" to all three. They answered "Luxembourgish", three times over, in such numbers that the census was abandoned. It was the country's quiet, collective refusal, and it cost people dearly afterwards. When Prime Minister Pierre Werner set up a commission in 1968 to give the war a national monument at last, the design chosen — by the painter François Gillen and the architect René Mailliet — was built between May and October 1971, so that it could be inaugurated on the 10th of October, thirty years on.

It is not a statue. In front of it the flame burns; behind, an inner courtyard of paving stones, no longer open to the public, stands for the prisons, the concentration camps and the barracks. Inside the chapel is a single rough, unworked stone for the victims, and an urn of earth from Sonnenburg, the prison camp in Brandenburg where, in the last winter of the war, the SS shot the inmates, ninety-one Luxembourgers among them.

Every October the country's National Commemoration Day is held here, with the Grand Duke, the flags and the wreaths — which is why the photographs of it are almost always of a ceremony. The rest of the year it is a quiet place on the edge of the cliff, and it is meant to be.