Fred Kormis’ memorial to Prisoners of War and Victims of Concentration Camps 1914 – 1945, Gladstone Park, London. Photograph: Adam Soller

This event is organised as part of the Fred Kormis: Sculpting the Twentieth Century event series. Visit the exhibition page to find out more.

Holocaust memory has become seemingly ubiquitous. New memorials or museums continue to be built, the Holocaust is on the national education curricula in many countries far away from the sites of atrocity, and tens of thousands of visitors flock to sites of former concentration or extermination camps or engage online with new forms of digital interpretation and commemoration.

At the same time a reappraisal of the history of Holocaust memorialisation by David Cesarani and others suggests that while there has certainly been significant growth in the material manifestations of Holocaust memory since the 1980s, a focus on this has tended to overlook the memory work that went on during the Holocaust itself and in the decades immediately afterwards. One such marginalised memorial is the ‘prisoners of war and victims of concentration camps 1914-1945’ in Gladstone Park, located in the suburb of Dollis Hill, northwest London.

Conceived by renowned Jewish émigré sculptor Fred Kormis in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and the Holocaust, the memorial comprises five figures which take the viewer on a symbolic journey through the mental state of a prisoner of war or concentration camp victim.

Unveiled in 1969, a decade before the contentious campaign for what would eventually become the Hyde Park Holocaust memorial, Kormis’s life and work illustrates how Holocaust memory has a history and a geography, a geography understood as imaginative and well as material.

This talk will argue that reconstructing the biography of the Dollis Hill memorial as a site of creative and disruptive practice helps us understand the long, complex, and ongoing histories of Holocaust memorialisation in the UK, including the soon to be completed Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre near the Houses of Parliament.

About the Speaker

Dr Steven Cooke’s work focuses on cultural heritage and difficult histories. Over a thirty-year career in academia and professional practice, he has authored over 40 scholarly publications, including three highly commended books on the memory of war and genocide. After a PhD on Britain’s memorial landscapes of the Holocaust, Steve spent five years in higher education in the UK, first as a Research Fellow at the University of Stirling then as a Lecturer in Historical and Cultural Geography at the University of Hull.

In 2002, he moved to Australia and worked in high level management positions in some of Victoria’s most significant places, including the Melbourne Maritime Museum – home of Polly Woodside and the Shrine of Remembrance. In 2011 he returned to academia at Deakin University where he was an Associate Professor of Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies and served as course director for the Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies Programs. He was appointed as Expert to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Memorials and Museum Working Group by the Australian Government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in 2015. In 2024 Steve was appointed as CEO of the newly redeveloped Melbourne Holocaust Museum. He is an Associate Fellow of the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies at the University of London.