On the sidewalk there is now a carousel made of dark metal and light wood, unmistakably old-fashioned.

And it is stubborn.

Anyone who tries to set it in motion, to get it going, reaps resistance.

You can only get it moving slowly, as if in slow motion, with a lot of force.

It doesn't really want this carousel.

And it indicates losses.

For lost carefree, for lost lightness, for lost childhoods.

And the lost parents, who in the vast majority of cases were never able to meet the children who had fled, who were murdered in the extermination camps.

Alexander Juergs

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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Yael Bartana, an Israeli artist, born in 1970, who now lives in Berlin and Amsterdam, created the monument.

She named it “The Orphan Carousel”, and it was inaugurated with a ceremony on Thursday.

With the memorial on Kaiserstraße, at the transition from the banking district to the station district, Frankfurt wants to commemorate the fate of the children who started a new life here, who could be saved and yet suffered great losses.

The work of art was therefore placed in a line of sight to the main train station: This is where the journey of children from Jewish families into foreign countries and into an uncertain future began.

With a connection to the present

For Yael Bartana, whose works are collected by renowned exhibition houses such as the New York MoMa, the London Tate Modern or the Center Pompidou in Paris and to whom the Jewish Museum in Berlin is currently devoting a major exhibition, the carousel also establishes a connection with the present : "The memorial, which commemorates the separation of parents from their children in 1938, will also deal with today's reality in which children and young people have to leave their families in war zones in order to survive," explains the artist.

The impetus for the memorial came from Renata Harris, who at the time had fled from Frankfurt on one of the Kindertransporte herself: at the end of August 1939, shortly before the outbreak of World War II, the girl, who was then still called Renate Adler, was able to travel to Great Britain.

Her mother stayed behind and was murdered in the Sobibor extermination camp in 1942.

Harris kept silent about her life story for a long time, it was only through contact with the Project Jewish Life Association in Frankfurt that she became a contemporary witness who reported on her experiences.

Music and art to remember

In 2015 Harris expressed the wish that a memorial should be erected in Frankfurt, similar to the previous one in Hamburg, Berlin, Rotterdam, London, Vienna and Gdansk, which commemorates the Kindertransporte.

Harris was supported by others who, like her, had to emigrate from Frankfurt as children.

The idea reached the Frankfurt city parliament through the association Projekt Jüdisches Leben in Frankfurt, and in March 2017 the magistrate gave the go-ahead for the project.

A competition was then initiated and five artists were invited.

In addition to Yael Bartana, Michaela Melián, Anne Imhof, Ella Littwitz and Ernst Stark also develop ideas on how to remember the fates of Jewish children.

Michaela Melián, active as a musician as well as a visual artist, suggested creating a blue-colored concrete floor slab in the form of a twelve-pointed star: a children's choir should then perform on this platform year after year and sing a newly composed piece of music.

The pieces should be composed by students and deal with the music of Siegfried Würzberger, the organist of the Frankfurt Westend Synagogue.

Würzburg's son Karl Robert was also one of the children who could be saved with a Kindertransport.

Three short sentences

Anne Imhof from Frankfurt wanted to install an abstract platform on the street corner and invite the viewer to reflect on their own position on the historical events. Ernst Stark wanted to build an ensemble of three empty chairs on a bronze platform.

Ella Littwitz planned to erect a sculpture out of two cones.

In the end, however, the jury's choice fell on Yael Bartana's carousel, which is difficult to move, which irritates viewers and users, and which vividly shows how quickly lightness can disappear from a child's life.

You can read three short sentences on the carousel: “Goodbye, mother”, “Goodbye, father” and “See you soon, my child”. It hurts to know that the families' hopes that one day they will be able to lead a life together again have almost never been fulfilled.