Gilad

This poem, ‘Everyone Has a Name’, is read at every Holocaust memorial service in Israel. We are not numbers, we are names. People. Death gave us names. In every school and city in Israel there is a wall of names. The names of fallen soldiers, sons of the community who died during military service, are engraved for eternity on a wall of memory. Every year new names are added, shiny and freshly engraved, as the old ones start to decay with the passing of time. This act of engraving names in stone or metal is a way of personalising collective memory. Heroes become people, sons and neighbours. But before long the engraved names start to show the effect of time. Weathered memories go back to being collective, rather than remaining personal. How long will it be before a name on the wall is recognised by no-one? 

In order to undertake further study of these walls of memory, I went to my homeland, Israel, to ‘collect’ them. I wanted to copy their tangibility, their materiality – their texture. Every town or city in Israel has its own memorial site. In my home town, this place is called the Garden of Heroes. It is a very small park, opposite City Hall, with a paved square. The town’s memorial ceremonies are held in this square every year, on the Memorial Day of the Fallen Soldiers. 

During my schooldays I attended the ceremony every year, as an active member of a youth group. I even continued to attend the ceremony for a few years after graduating from high school and leaving my home town, as a kind of reunion, a gathering, a chance to meet up with old school mates. 

When I was about fifteen or sixteen years old, I participated in the Memorial Day ceremony itself. I was my youth group’s representative at the honorary guard for the ceremony, where a representative from each part of the community and all the youth and community groups stand in front of the Wall of Names45 during the ceremony. As a ceremony participant I needed to attend rehearsals, and on the day itself stand still throughout the ceremony, in front of this Wall of Names. As part of my research project, I wanted to go and ‘collect’ textures of walls of names. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t remember if my home town had one of those walls. I had no recollection of this place. Eventually, I called one of my childhood friends to ask if she remembered such a wall in our town. She reminded me of the Garden of Heroes: I had completely forgotten the place existed. So I went and copied the wall’s texture. This was my first attempt to do so, and I went in the dark, to avoid anyone thinking I was vandalising or desecrating the wall: these walls are untouchable. 

After this first attempt, I decided to go to The Armored Corps Memorial Site and Museum. Every army corps in Israel has its own memorial site, but the Armored Corps Memorial Site is the most popular, possibly because of its fairly central location, or maybe because visitors are able to climb on tanks there. It is a tourist attraction. I remembered school field trips to this place. I also remembered the massive wall of names at the site. Before I left Israel I tried, unsuccessfully, to contact the site management. As it is a closed site, there was no chance of visiting unnoticed, in the dark. Instead, I travelled there one morning, paid the entrance fee, and went straight to the wall. It was as large as I had remembered. I started setting up my rubbings materials, attaching pieces of fragile tissue paper to the wall very carefully, starting to go over them with my pencil. There were a few soldiers passing by and I could hear rehearsals for some kind of military ceremony. Just when I was thinking it a bit strange that no one had approached me (for all they knew I could have been spraying a swastika on the wall) a man shouted, “What the hell do you think you are doing?” I stopped, and saw a civilian with a site worker’s identity tag approaching me. I tried to explain to him I was an art student, doing research on memorials, and would not do anything to harm the wall. The man was very upset, and ordered me to first take down my paper and only then answer him. I did so and explained how I had tried to contact the site authorities before visiting, and did not mean to offend anyone or anything. He said that on arrival I should have immediately headed to the management office. He would not accept my response that I was not aware that management offices were located at the site. Apparently he was the site manager, the CEO of the Armed Corps Association, the managing association of the memorial site (it was obviously my lucky day) and the wall was sacred to him: no-one could do anything with or to the wall without his prior approval. According to him, the soldiers on military duty on the site did not dare approach the wall without first checking that their uniforms were in order and that they looked spotless. After a few minutes of conversation he eventually softened, agreeing to listen to my account of who I was and what I was doing. I explained what my research was about and mentioned that I had come to Israel specially to work on this particular wall, and that I was leaving for London the next day. Eventually he said although he was busy, if I waited an hour or two he would see me. He showed me where the office was located and went on his way. So I waited. Two hours later I walked into his office, only to find out he intended to book me in for a meeting the next morning. 

I went back the next day, anxious to see if he would let me do the rubbings. I waited another hour for him. I was getting a bit stressed, as I had a flight to catch in a few hours, but tried to stay calm. Finally we sat down to talk. I apologised again for the misunderstanding of the day before. Gilad (we were now on a first-name basis) emphasised there was no misunderstanding: there was simply a lack of judgment on my part. We moved on and he asked what my exact intentions were, and how I would benefit from doing rubbings. We had a long conversation about my research interests and I explained in a very respectful way why I wanted to copy the wall’s texture. Gilad again explained the importance of the wall to him, emphasising its holiness and the respect I should show towards it. He stressed the respect that the soldiers on duty at the site show towards the wall and the importance of the wall to those families whose loved ones’ names are engraved on it.

Gilad told me that he usually has a duplicate of the last plate of the wall stored away on site. Whenever there is a new casualty, which unfortunately happens too often, they engrave the new name on the duplicate, change the plates over quickly, then engrave the new name on the other plate as well, keeping that one as the duplicate, ready for the next name to be engraved, and so on. He was willing to let me do rubbings of the duplicate plate, out of public view, but unfortunately (or maybe in my case fortunately) the duplicate plate was not there: it had been sent away for chemical testing. Apparently, families had complained about the visibility of the passage of time on the wall. They noticed their loved ones’ names had started to show signs of decay and wanted them to look fresh and new forever, just like the wounds in their hearts. So Gilad had sent the duplicate plate to a specialist, who was trying to find a solution to the visible passing of time.

We had a very long discussion. I pointed out that at the opening of the 9/11 memorial in New York, pencils and sheets of paper had been offered to families of the victims, encouraging them to make rubbings of their loved ones’ names. Gilad said he was familiar with this, and also mentioned rubbings were also encouraged at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. However, he saw things differently, and did not agree with the “activity” of making rubbings. In his view we should not follow the example of America, but aspire to be more like Japan, where apparently the culture is more deferential and civil. 

Eventually, after much discussion, I finally understood what was bothering Gilad the most about my deed: I had covered the wall, even though it had been only a small part, with white paper. We found a compromise: I would cut my paper down into smaller A4-sized sheets, I would not tape anything to the wall, I would only hold up one sheet at a time, I would block the view of the covered wall with my body and I would make sure that no groups of people approached the wall at the time. Only then I could do the rubbings. After this was settled, Gilad explained to me his view on memorialisation and the tangibility of memory, and he offered me a guided tour of the museum. 

The memorial part of the museum, The Archive of the Fallen, started with a dark corridor. Projected onto the walls were portraits of the fallen soldiers of the armed corps from the time the State of Israel was first established to the present day, randomly ordered. Every portrait was accompanied with the name of the soldier, his rank, the date he was born and the date he died. Gilad mentioned that there were two more rooms where the full profile of the soldier, details of his death and stories that his family wanted to be included could be seen. As we continued to walk, the corridor led to something at the museum that Gilad wanted to show me after our discussion of my work, the Tower of Tears.46 

The museum building itself was a Tegart fortress from The British Mandate era, and the tower we entered was the fortress tower. Today, it holds an installation by Israeli artist Dani Karavan. As I walked in, I was amazed. The crumbling walls were covered with tints of brown and red from rusty steel. Gilad explained that Karavan had designed the walls to be covered with steel from tanks damaged in earlier wars. He wanted the walls to cry: tears would roll down them, collected under a glass floor to create a pool. The tears would not start from the top of the tower but would start to roll halfway down. Soon after the completion of the installation the steel walls began to rust. Small rivers of tears started to form. Today the steel has decayed to the point where pieces have completely fallen off. Gilad said he was astonished by the responses of the visitors. The rusty walls created a strong emotional reaction, compared by the visitors to ‘bleeding’ walls. According to Gilad, this was the most moving part of the museum. 

After this personal tour, I could now start my rubbings. I held the paper to the wall and started going over it with my pencil. I made sure no one was coming: I had to stop a few times as people were approaching the wall. It was a sunny public holiday and there were a lot of visitors at the site. I worked very quickly, but could still only manage to do a very small part of the wall. When I decided I had done enough rubbings for my research, I returned to Gilad’s office to say goodbye. Gilad was very happy to find someone as passionate as him about the culture of commemoration and asked me to keep in touch.