Shoah Memorial

The sculpture is called Kaddish, after the prayer said by mourners.

It stands here, on Boulevard Roosevelt between the cathedral and the old convent of Saint Sophia, because the first synagogue in Luxembourg stood close by. It was inaugurated on the 17th of June 2018, and that date was not chosen for convenience: on the 17th of June 1943, seventy-five years earlier to the day, the last deportation train carrying Jews left this city.

The numbers behind it are these. Around 3,700 Jewish people were living in Luxembourg in 1940, roughly one percent of the country. Some were Luxembourgers whose families had been here since the thirteenth century; many had arrived fleeing Germany. Between October 1941 and June 1943, seven transports took 658 women, men and children to the ghettos and camps. About 2,500 of the 3,700 survived. The synagogue was destroyed in the autumn of 1943.

The sculptor was Shelomo Selinger. He was born in 1928 in a Polish town a few miles from Auschwitz, deported at fifteen with his father, who was murdered three months later. He survived nine camps and two death marches, and was found still breathing on a pile of corpses when the Red Army reached Theresienstadt. He had no memory of any of it for the next seven years. He carved this in grey-pink granite, aged ninety.

A plaque in the railway station, unveiled after this one, marks where the trains left from.