Walking down a tree-lined street in the Poble Sec neighborhood of Barcelona, one might easily miss a small bronze square set into the sidewalk. Stamped into the metal in the regional language of Catalan are the words: “Here lived Francesc Boix Campo, born 1920, exiled 1939, deported 1941, Mauthausen, liberated.”
Holocaust memorials like this one – which honors a Spanish Nazi concentration camp survivor – are part of a project that started in Germany but has expanded over the past few years across Europe and the United States.
These unassuming memorials hide a mighty purpose – making the victims of a traumatic past a visible and permanent part of the modern landscape.
