Dedicating Clifton park to young Holocaust victims

Dedicating Clifton park to young Holocaust victims

At the Oct. 16 Clifton City Council meeting, I made a motion to dedicate the field at Richardson Scale Park in honor of all the children who died during the Holocaust after Steve Goldberg of Clifton suggested it during the public portion of the meeting. What a wonderful suggestion! Unfortunately, none of the other members of the council seconded the motion.

Here’s why I thought it was a great idea, and the first step in healing the wounds that the recent controversy about the possible renaming of the park has caused (“Dispute reignites over naming park for anti-Semite,” Oct. 12). According to a web dictionary, a park is “a protected area – set aside for human recreation and enjoyment”; “a social space open and accessible to all people.”

According to the Holocaust Museum, “children were especially vulnerable in the era of the Holocaust … the Nazis advocated killing of ‘unwanted’ or ‘dangerous’ groups in accordance with their ideological views, either as part of the ‘racial struggle’ or as a measure of preventative security.”

It is estimated that 2.5 million children were killed during the Holocaust, including more than 1.5 million Jewish children as well as thousands of Romani (Gypsy), Polish, and French-Polish children, children living in the occupied Soviet Union, and German children with physical or mental disabilities. These children never had the opportunity to play in a park, to kick a soccer ball in a field, or to play in a playground.

None of us, young and old, can ever forget the Holocaust. What better way to remember all the children who were its victims than with a plaque in the field at Richard Scale Park saying “This field is dedicated to all the children who were killed during the Holocaust”? What a shame my fellow councilmen did not think the children who died during the Holocaust should be remembered in this way.

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