This room welcomes you to the Museum. After passing through security, you will be able to check out your personal audio guide and obtain information to enhance your experience. The Museum exhibits begin with a video featuring Los Angeles native Jack Taylor, who as a U.S. soldier participated in the liberation of a concentration camp.

This room depicts the rise of Nazism and the discriminatory racial policies Hitler’s government imposed. Although Jews were the Nazis’ primary example of non-Aryan groups, the Nazis also targeted for persecution Catholics, Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, political dissenters and others. The display of the slow, step-by-step de-humanization of Jews established the background for Kristallnacht, a main feature of this room.

When victims disembarked from the trains carrying them from ghettos or forced collection points across Europe, they entered an upside down world. The innocent people found themselves  at the mercy of the true criminals. The universe created by those criminals focused not on sustaining life, but on committing murder as efficiently as possible. The Nazis created six camps specifically for this purpose: Auschwitz, Belzetz, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka.
 
Victims were processed in varying ways. People were first separated by gender, thus breaking apart families. The Nazis then divided each group, sending some people to the left and others to the right; one direction meant death within hours. Without their knowing it, children, the sick or injured and older people were almost always sent this way.  They would be separated from their belongings, forced to remove their clothes, and told they had to shower before being sent to barracks. The showers were in fact gas chambers in disguise.
 
In this room, which connects directly to the next one, Labor/Concentration/Death Camps, visitors see displays highlighting many of the countries from which the Nazis deported their victims. 18 interactive terminals provide multi-media information on individual camps. These camps were chosen as examples of the literally hundreds of camps the Nazis created.

The Museum’s main passageways display images of front pages of Los Angeles newspapers from the Holocaust era. The headlines indicate significant information was available to people about the events of the Holocaust as it was happening.
 
For the most part, however, the world chose not to respond to the information available. In the period before Hitler’s invasion of Poland the European and U.S. governments sought to appease, rather than confront, the Nazi dictator. Countries refused to increase the number of refugees they would admit. Hitler gained credence for his view that no one wanted Jews when he allowed the U.S.S. St. Louis to leave, full of people trying to escape. In spite of its efforts to land in many ports in the U.S. and South America, no country allowed it to. The Pope also failed to speak out against the inhumanity, persecution and slaughter.
 
Efforts to oppose the Nazis’ policies were sporadic and isolated. Few countries acted as did Denmark organizing national efforts to save Jews. Few individuals spoke out. One small group of students, known as the White Rose, lost their lives for doing so. Only a handful of diplomats with the power to help did so; several Museum exhibits retell their stories. And while the Garden of the Righteous outside the Museum celebrates the citizens of European countries who acted to save Jewish lives, the numbers of such people are incredibly small in comparison with the millions who did nothing.
 
Some Jews found ways to avoid deportation and formed partisan or resistance groups. Museum exhibits discuss their efforts. The Warsaw ghetto uprising, the only successful citizen revolt against the Nazis, may be the best known.

Art places a significant role in helping us understand the Holocaust. Artists found miraculous ways to capture the events they saw happening around them in the ghettos and camps, or to set down what they recalled afterwards. Such works include stark, unemotional depictions, expressions of the suffering transpiring every day, and a combination of the two. Exhibits presented here, on a rotating basis, feature a broad range of artistic responses capturing and interpreting the Holocaust.
 
This gallery also includes interactive exhibits allowing visitors to listen to music of the Holocaust era, as well as works by those artists considered ‘degenerate’ by the Nazi authorities.
 
Display walls in this room can also be moved to join it to the Survivor Presentation and A/V Room to accommodate large events.
 
Please see “Current Exhibitions” to learn about exhibits on display now.

You are viewing the culmination of some 25 years of planning and preparation, leading to the dedication of this monument on April 26, 1992. It was erected here to honor the memory of the six million who were murdered in the Nazi barbarism between 1933 and 1945.

Construction in the public park, at a cost of some $3 million was made possible by donations of generous, concerned individuals, organizations, foundations and corporations. Its location, on Los Angeles County Park land, allows everyone to view it without cost.

Although it can be seen from many areas of the beautiful Pan Pacific Park, the site is at the North end, apart from much of the ongoing park activities. This affords those visiting the monument a quiet place for contemplation, meditation or to be alone with their thoughts.

Created by renowned Los Angeles artist Dr. Joseph L Young, it contains a great deal of Holocaust symbolism.

As you approach the Los Angeles Holocaust Monument, you first observe the front stairs with railings that resemble railroad tracks. The stairs are black and white, reminding one of railroad ties. Climbing the stairs, along the "tracks" that carried millions in wretched freight cars to concentration camps, you begin a "journey" into what happened to the Jews, Gypsies and others during this period. Handicapped access is available on either side of the monument.

The dominant features of the site are the six 18-foot high, black, triangular granite columns reaching skyward, honoring the six million. In the center of the columns is an "invisible" seventh column, representing us, the living, who must carry on the memory of those who were martyred, urging us to create a better world, devoid of hatred and violence, as we learn to live together. The columns, which also symbolize the crematoria smoke stacks, stand on a base of red granite, depicting the blood of the departed.

The glass floor allows the monument to be lighted at night from below-from the earth giving a sense of new hope. Everyone should try to view this site both in the daytime and at night to gain full appreciation of this magnificent artwork. The hexagon shaped floor leads one to think of a pit of infinity. The abstract triangles can be interpreted in many ways, including the Star of David. The coloring goes from light blue to dark blue in gradations to the center. Many see this as the sky, while others see the flag of the State of Israel. Others see in the rotating floor plan a crazy quilt feeling of hysteria and some see the abstract swastika.

Each of the 18 panels on the columns will contain the history of the Holocaust Era from 1933 to 1945, The artist will integrate bronze bas-reliefs further depicting the era.

Once each year, on Yom Hashoah, the international day to remember the Holocaust as well as on solemn occasions throughout the year, a "Flame of Memory" will be lighted on top of each of the columns, to burn for 24 hours.

On the platform of the monument are names in three concentric hexagons. The outer hexagon lists the countries conquered by the Germans and the numbers of Jews annihilated in each. Moving to the left from the top of the stairs, the countries are listed in the order each fell before the German onslaught.

Along the center hexagon are the names of the concentration camps and the year each opened.

The inner hexagon contains the names of the death camps.

At the back of the monument is a black granite bench with hands held in the priestly symbol of peace or benediction at each end. Although the victims of the Holocaust did not have proper religious burials, many people use this bench to "sit Shivah" (mourning) for relatives or friends lost in the horror.

Behind the bench is a wall where the names of family members lost in the Holocaust can be memorialized. On another section of this wall are the names of those whose contributions made the creation of this monument possible.

Above the back wall is heavy gray granite. This depicts perhaps one of the cruelest of all the camps, Mauthausen in Austria, which was a rock quarry. It is here that prisoners were subjected to the worst of cruelties, Below the granite are strands of barbed wire and the posts that hold it, much as it looked in the camps.

The Monument is a place to mourn loved ones who perished in the Holocaust and have no known graves. At the right and left sides are other "doorways" into the monument. Wing walls on both sides contain indentations for Yahrzeit candles (mourning candles). Many light these candles in memory of individuals they knew. Some place pebbles, a tradition that some observe when leaving a cemetery.

Although this is not a cemetery, there is another accommodation for observant Jews. On both sides there are water fountains for those who observe the ritual of washing the hands following a visit to a cemetery.

Creation of the Los Angeles Holocaust Monument in Pan Pacific Park was made possible through the efforts of the American Congress of Jews from Poland and Survivors of Concentration Camps. This group appointed the Los Angeles Holocaust Monument Committee, composed of civic leaders of all faiths and backgrounds, all committed to making the truth about the Holocaust an imperishable part of humanity’s consciousness.