The monument proposal, created with Wodiczko+Bonder, proceeds through two fundamental, complementary gestures—exposure and immersion—which together create a layered, in-depth experience through which visitors discover and interpret both the history of the Holocaust and the memory of the events that drove its survivors to Canadian shores. In this working monument, the underlying bedrock is exposed in order to anchor new meanings, stories, and memories in which visitors can immerse themselves.

Conceptually and formally, the project seeks to:

• Reveal the bedrock beneath the surface of the monument’s designated site in order to anchor Holocaust memory in Canada’s national bedrock, itself a fragment of a global geological formation.

• Provide a rich new soil for this memory and for those uprooted by the Holocaust and now re-rooted in Canada, by importing soil from all sites of former Jewish communities in Europe from which Canada’s Holocaust survivors have come.

• Insert this soil into the bedrock, intermix it with the soil from other provinces and territories of Canada, and then plant groves of Aspen trees as symbolic reference to the cultivation of new life and memory in this mixture of old and new world soil.

• Provide a spatial and time experience of walking along ramps, downward, along and around the bedrock and the grove of trees while learning from the narrative inserts in the bedrock the names of Jewish villages from which the soil was brought; reading along the walls the excerpts from philosophical, poetic, and testimonial responses to the Holocaust, to visit the hall of names of the Canadian Holocaust survivors, see the containers in which the soil was brought from overseas, and listen and watch the eternal flame animated by recorded voices of the Holocaust survivors.