Lock(er) of Memory: Memorial to the victims of the Jungfernhof concentration camp is a new multi-media, interactive memorial project proposal that uses cutting edge technologies to develop innovative models of memorialization.

Interdisciplinary by design, the Locker of Memory memorial project combines history with art, science, and technology. The title Locker of Memory prompts a variety of associations: private, public, hidden, revealed; locked in / locked out; safeguarding, preserving, and holding memory as an idea, a social construct informing individual and collective identities; ambivalence to remember; national legacies about difficult histories; whose memory; feelings about trust, loss, freedom, and the unknown. 

The project will be developed in three phases: research, online exhibition, and memorialization. Technology and education will be integrated into all three phases of project development. Each phase will be funded independently, allowing the project to progress in a steady and cumulative fashion. In some instances, these phases will overlap, accelerating project development.

Exhibition

The Locker of Memory project will formally open during the first week of December 2021, to commemorate the 80th anniversary of five deportations to the Jungfernhof concentration camp from the cities of Berlin, Nuremburg, Stuttgart, Vienna and Hamburg. A new “Deportation Installation” proposal, currently under review is set to create five synchronous presentations that will take place in the five cities named. The program will convene at either the collection points or train tracks in each city to commemorate the five transports carrying more than 4,000 Reich Jews to the Jungfernhof concentration camp, in early December 1941. We will conclude the program at the camp site, using a 360 degree camera to narrate a comprehensive tour of the camp streamed to the website. The program will close with a dramatic series of iconic images, projected onto the facade of the Skirotava train station, the final destination point for all deportations bound for Riga. 

Using a variety of archival and contemporary images (photos, videos, drawings and data visualizations), plus documents, and maps collected by project historians and scientists to tell the story and recovery of the camp’s history, a short video montage, projected onto the Skirotava train station and streamed to the project website will set the stage for an in-depth online exhibition that follows.  

Workshops: Art, Technology, Community

Following on the heels of The Vienna Project (2013-2014), the first naming memorial in Vienna to memorialize seven groups of persecuted Austrian victims, at the same moment and in relation to each other, murdered between 1938-1945, the Locker of Memory project will use new technologies to advance these ideas to the next level. Working with the same premise “What happens when we forget to remember?” the Locker of Memory project is dedicated to remembering 3984 Jews deported from Germany and Austria to the Jungfernhof concentration camp where they were murdered and selectively forgotten for decades, despite numerous citing’s online and in the archives. Latvia’s first concentration camp lacked public signage and acknowledgement for close to 80 years. The Locker of Memory project is intent upon redressing this history. The project will feature vibrant examples of collaboration and partnership between universities and students in Latvia, Germany, Austria, Israel, and the US. 

Students will attend seminars and workshops to learn about memorial culture and Holocaust history in Latvia, Germany, and Austria. Students will also consider the relevance of this history to a new wave of nationalism, connected to numerous instances of anti-Semitism and discrimination happening in Europe and elsewhere. 

During the spring of 2021, landscape architectural students at the Institute of Landscape Architecture, Department of Landscape, Spatial and Infrastructure Sciences at University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU) in Vienna, will participate in an international research hands-on seminar starting in April 2021. Students will also travel to Riga during the summer of 2021 to see the site firsthand. Meeting on multiple occasions, BOKU students will be invited to design an inventive memorial garden referencing the camp’s history as a slave labor agricultural farm.  Architectural drawings will be posted on the project website.

Starting in the fall of 2021, student researchers in Latvia, Germany, Austria, Israel, and the US will be tasked to search the archives, finding new data to expand our understanding of this neglected history. During the winter of 2022, history students at the University of Latvia will participate in gathering data about the camp and the site, writing historic narratives to be published on the project website. Students will also be invited to participate in narrating tours of Riga’s Jewish community in relation to Latvia’s Holocaust history, and more specifically, to the Jungfernhof concentration camp. 

Starting in the spring of 2022, members of the project team will collaborate with technologists and computer scientists in the MakerLab at Brandeis University, and the integrated media /animation / visual effects studios at Lesley University. We will pursue three main applications of technology and education. First, we will apply augmented reality software (AR) to object-based artifacts (such as letters, heirlooms, jewelry, religious artifacts, diary excepts, poetry), collected as photos from victims’ families. These efforts will be employed as story-telling techniques, enlivening victims’ biographies, and overall presentation of the memorial project. Second, a project Smartphone App will enable audiences from around the world to access content from the Locker of Memory project. The App will present a curated overview of the project on a mobile device. Historians, descendants, artists, educators, scholars, writers, and city officials will use the app for a variety of purposes, most notably, to further ongoing ideas about Holocaust education and memorialization. Third, using virtual and X-Reality software (VR), technologists will work with our team of historians and scientists to create new immersive environments used to engage new audiences with state-of-the-art techniques for recovering Holocaust history. 

In the fall of 2022, art students in Latvia, Austria, Germany and the US, will be invited to develop a portfolio of drawings about the Jungfernhof concentration camp.  Students will also be invited to draw a selection of family heirlooms that will be presented online in conjunction with photos of the objects. Using art to create a relationship to personal objects belonging to survivors and descendant families is likely to stimulate new reflections on Holocaust history and the long-term effects of genocide on families.

Collaboration

Eighty years after crimes were committed, today’s Holocaust memorials are equipped with twenty-first century technologies, stimulating new approaches to thinking about the past. The latest tools programmed to analyze new sets of data, will likely prompt new questions about the human condition and how we understand genocide. In a rapidly changing world, how does the past inform the present and guide the future? Must we ask new questions? How do we find these new questions? 

Conceived as an interdisciplinary project, students will represent different disciplines, most notably history, art, science, and technology, and be invited to participate in memorial development as contributors rather than consumers of a fixed curriculum.  This approach to Holocaust education is a radical departure from a more traditional, discipline-centered approach. Combining action with reflection, student involvement becomes a personal as well as social experience, producing a lively investigation of the data as well as an empathic connection to the past. This approach is also compatible with a 21st century models of memorialization designed to embrace multiple perspectives. The distinction between the different players (i.e. victims, perpetrators, bystanders, eye witness reporters, and rescuers), continues to inform the history. However, new approaches emphasize different vantage points regarding how we remember the past. 

Documentation

While documentation is presented at the end of a project, it begins at the start and continues throughout the project’s lifespan. Installing a memorial at a forgotten camp site becomes an important act of remembrance, a form of documentation regarding the site’s history and the murder of 3,836 prisoners at the camp and in the Bikernieki Forest. 

In a project with so many moving parts, we must consider a series of questions: Is this project about history or memory or both? What lives at the center of the project? Whose voice or voices rise to the top, become the connective tissue that joins history with memory? Is this an international project, a Latvian project, an Austrian or German project? Is it a project about genocide, recovery and legacy, about new developments in science and technology, about 21st century approaches to memorialization or all of the above? What will be the educational takeaway? Will we make one film or a series of videos/films? One publication or a series of publications? An online exhibition, an exhibition in Riga or a traveling exhibition?

Many of the answers to these questions will be determined by funding. Partnerships and in-kind support will also contribute to the overall shape and direction of the project. In my role as the Executive Director, I will articulate a vision that encompasses history and memory, and will consult with experts on our advisory board to refine ideas as the project develops. Project team members representing individual disciplines will also be asked to consider how their work contributes to the larger plan. 

At this early stage, we do not know what lies below the surface, what stories will bubble up from the earth and between people, and what surprises may arise as the work unfolds. The commitment to develop an historically responsible project that restores memory to place will be our guiding principle.