Wish you were here…

The sun is out and our gardens are looking beautiful. We’ve been tending to them lovingly during lockdown, ready for the day we can welcome you back.

These white rose memorial gardens provide a peaceful and picturesque setting for you to reflect on the stories of dehumanisation in our award-winning exhibitions. Individual roses are planted in memory of individual victims of the Holocaust. This is our way of helping to re-humanise them. The Nazis sought to exterminate them as faceless and worthless. In the words of our founders James and Stephen Smith, the gardens “are not shaped by historians or curators, but somewhere for victims and survivors to have a little dignity. As Mike and Christine Hogg say of Mike's grandmother, who was murdered in Treblinka, “Planting the rose for Malie helped to give her back her identity”.

At the garden's entrance, you will also see a children's memorial. We invite all children who visit us to place a stone, with painted messages if they wish, to remember each of the 1.5 million child victims of the Holocaust. This is in keeping with the Jewish custom of placing a stone on a person’s grave, to show you remember them. The significance of a stone is that it is permanent.

Hundreds of beautiful white roses stand tall, framing the Path of the Righteous leading to the museum exhibitions. Why white roses? The Smith family chose this flower as it was the symbol of a non-violent intellectual resistance group to the Third Reich. Its student leader Sophie Scholl was guillotined by the Nazis in 1942. She was 22.

The gardens are also home to sculptures by world-renowned sculptors and survivors of the Holocaust. You will discover them nestling in the grounds, the peace interrupted only by the soothing sound of the waterfall that drops into a pretty pond inhabited by carps.

If you would like to pay respect to an individual or family who perished in the Holocaust, you can dedicate a rose. Or you may want to donate an amount to the Centre to help us keep these grounds in the pristine condition which these victims deserve.

Again in the words of the Smith brothers, it is a beautiful and meaningful way for each of us “to make memory”.

Thank you for your support.