Museum Transformations

This is a quality that is present in all of Safdie’s Yad Vashem work. Earlier, when the Polish government had given Israel one of the box cars that had transported prisoners to Auschwitz, Safdie embedded it in an installation – the Memorial to the Deportees (1995) – that suspended the box car on a broken track that hovered over the edge of a cliff. And even earlier, in 1985, Safdie had completed the Children’s Holocaust Memorial, his first Yad Vashem project and possibly the most intensely affecting of this triad of his emotive architectural forms.

In 1976 the Yad Vashem authorities had first approached Safdie to design a museum that would narrate the fate of the children who had perished in the Holocaust. Safdie had a counterproposal: visitors who had already been through the main history museum, he felt, would not want to read more documentary facts. Instead, he proposed a space that would create an emotional experience. He would burrow into the ground to make a darkened chamber which would be lined with dark mirrors. Five memorial candles would burn in honor of the dead children, but reflections in the mirrors would make an infinity of flames. In the darkness, photographs of a few of the child victims would stand for the 1.5 million murdered; and a recorded voice would name each child, as well as the place and the age at which he or she had died. Today, this kind of assemblage is immediately identifiable as an installation, with strong resemblances to Christian Boltanski’s work, but when it was proposed it was too far ahead of its time. The authorities feared the dark mirrors and pinpricks of light would look like a discotheque, and the project was shelved for 10 years until a donor couple who had lost a child at Auschwitz underwrote its construction.

Once it was built, the Children’s Holocaust Memorial became one of the most highly visited displays in Yad Vashem. Its appeal to visitors’ emotions has been appreciated by many, but it has also been criticized by some. The Hebrew University professor of philosophy Avishai Margalit’s criticism is trenchant. His essay “The Kitsch of Israel” is a broad-ranging discussion of emotional manipulation in popular cultural representations of Israeli statehood. For Margalit, this phenomenon reaches its apogee in the Children’s Holocaust Memorial. Describing the darkened chamber and the flickering flames, he says:

The real significance of this room is not its commemoration of the single most horrible event in the history of mankind – the systematic murder of two million children, Jewish and Gypsies, for being what they were and not for anything they had done. The children’s room, rather, is meant to deliver a message to the visiting foreign statesman, who is rushed to Yad Vashem even before he has had time to leave off his luggage at his hotel, that all of us here in Israel are these children and that Hitler–Arafat is after us … Against the weapon of the Holocaust, the Palestinians are amateurs. (Margalit 1988, 23)

For Margalit the Children’s Holocaust Memorial is kitsch because it encourages “a vicarious sentiment: it comes not out of the person’s direct involvement with the object of feeling but rather out of a derivative excitement” (1988, 20), born of the desire to be included in someone else’s emotion. But what Margalit criticizes others may admire. Surely it was precisely this quality of Safdie’s architecture – its ability to deliver a heightened experience of an aestheticized emotion, by sweeping the viewer into a sentimental identification with the represented subject – that made Badal weep, and then ask for one “just like this” for his own community.

But what made Badal want a monument “just like this” for the Sikhs? What made him want to mark the tercentenary of the Khalsa in an elegiac rather than celebratory tone? And what was this suffering of the Sikhs that Badal was equating with the suffering of the Jews? To understand this, we need to turn now to a brief overview of the turbulent history of the Sikhs.

As a faith, Sikhism derives from a lineage of 10 gurus who lived and preached in south Asia between 1469 and 1708. Its founder, Guru Nanak, was a visionary who stressed the common humanity of man and built bridges between the Hindu populace and their Muslim rulers. The four gurus who succeeded him led relatively peaceable lives and preached a syncretic faith to a diverse congregation. But the fifth guru, Guru Arjan, offered shelter to the reigning Mughal emperor’s rebel son and was executed as a result. This event set the Sikhs on a course of conflict with imperial authorities. Guru Arjan’s son took up arms against the Mughals and was imprisoned by them; the ninth guru was arrested and executed by the Mughal emperor, and the tenth and last guru Gobind Singh embarked on full-scale military conflict with the Mughals and was assassinated by Mughal agents shortly after he had learned of the deaths of all four of his sons at Mughal hands. It is the period immediately after Guru Gobind’s death that is remembered as a time of most violent repression, when Sikhs were hunted down like vermin on the orders of Mughal governors. Tales are told of living Sikh captives who were hacked to pieces and left to bleed to death; of Sikh prisoners who refused to cut their unshorn hair (an emblem of Sikhism) and had their scalps peeled off instead; and of Sikh mothers who were forced to wear garlands made from the body parts of their slaughtered babies.

Today the history of this eighteenth-century persecution is reiterated daily by pious Sikhs in their standardized prayer, or ardas , which enjoins the community to remember those “who were torn from limb to limb, scalped, broken on the wheel and sawn asunder” (Fenech 2000, 43). These tortures are also common themes in Sikh popular visual culture, in which the followers of Guru Gobind Singh are depicted in an iconography borrowed from Catholic martyr imagery. These tales and images are reproduced in every catechism given to Sikh children to teach them about their faith.

Curiously, tales of this eighteenth-century persecution and resistance did not circulate among the Sikh community until more than a hundred years after the events had occurred. In his study of martyrdom in the Sikh tradition, Louis E. Fenech shows that the memorialization of Sikh suffering intensified in the early twentieth century through the influence of the Singh Sabha movement, a powerful reform movement which strove to produce a purified Sikhism that would be visibly distinct from Hinduism as well as from the multitude of Sikh subsects. 5In Singh Sabha discourse, Sikhs who lost their lives – whether in battles defending their gurus, in clashes with rival sects, as the hapless prisoners of cruel rulers, as professional soldiers fighting in modern armies, as participants in the Indian freedom struggle, or as victims of the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan – were all configured as martyrs. 6Martyrs die for a cause. In Singh Sabha rhetoric, the cause for which all of these “martyrs” died was “the protection of their faith”: any other kind of motivation was swept aside (Fenech 2000, 19). As Joyce Pettigrew observes, this retrospective interpretation in which all Sikh martyrs “died for the faith” actually did the crucially important work of producing a faith worth dying for. Narratives of a long history of martyrdom provided evidence for the prior existence of a form of community that was in fact under construction at the time (Pettigrew 1991, 37).

At about the same time, Sikhs began to speak of themselves as a qaum – a Persian word that can connote both “community” and “nation.” A few decades later, as British colonial rule drew to an end in India and plans for Partition were drawn up, there was talk for a brief while of dividing the territory into not just Hindumajority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan but also a Sikh-majority state called Sikhistan or Khalistan. However, this plan was only briefly considered by the British authorities and, faced with vociferous opposition from Indian politicians, it was discarded. Some years later, when Partition riots broke out and Sikhs were a large proportion of the millions killed or displaced, the lost opportunity for an independent Sikh homeland became one more chapter in the long history of Sikh suffering.