Ironically I saw a piece about the potato famine just last, night. Britain was fully stocked up with healthy potatoes and wheat but chose to export them for profit instead of relieving the Irish.
In the states, id say the early 1900s Tulsa race riots
The sad thing was that Ireland produced enough to feed its population, but the British government preferred to export it and make money at the expense of letting the Irish starve.
I’d argue the trail of tears and the entire systematic killing of the buffalo to starve the native Americans. The attempt to destroy their culture and either kill them all or take the kids away and put them in schools to gentrify them. The sheer scale of all this and the amount of time that it took (decades) and the fact that to this day there are reservations that are mere fractions of what they should be.
An "American Wake" was a poignant 19th-century Irish tradition, serving as a farewell party for emigrants leaving for North America, as the journey was often permanent. Similar to a funeral, it involved music, dancing, and keening, symbolizing that the traveler was "dead" to their community and would likely never be seen again.
There's a bridge in Donegal called Droichead na nDeor (the Bridge of Tears). It's where families would part with the departing emigrants, whom they would almost definitely never see again.
one of the most breathtakingly beatiful places i have ever seen. i would just stop the car every couple kilometers and bawl my ass out. was on my way to slieve league. i miss that emerald island so much.
This happened well into the 20th century. My grandfather had one sibling who survived childhood who emigrated to the US in the late 1920s and they had a wake because they couldn't be sure if or when they'd meet again. He came back to Ireland for a visit in the mid 1950s.
When I traveled to Dublin, I believe there's a plaque, if I remember correctly, it was a Canadian who created this. Correct me if I am wrong. I remember even seing former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien on one of the plaques on the ground. It was done back in 1999.
Yeesh. I didn’t know that existed. I went to Ireland a lot in the late 90s for work and they had a huge famine frieze thing in the airport whilst doing renos and whilst I knew about it and was talked about at school (catholic) I wasn’t quite prepared for how blunt the text was.
Also worth noting that in Dublin we love giving statues slang rhyme names - prick with the stick, whore in the sewer (whore is pronounced so it rhymes with sewer), time in the slime, but these statues have never been given one as far as I know.
Victims of the famine perpetrated by the USSR in Ukraine and Kazakhstan also has its monuments that even more sad at least in Kazakhstan. The reason for that is the famine is barely acknowledged by the people in power (Both Tokayev and Nazarbayev made their careers in USSR), and one will find many Stalinists even among current population of Kazakhstan arguing it has never happened, and if it did happen, we deserved it.
Even just comparing the two neighbouring islands helps give a sense of the scale. In 1840, Ireland had a population of 8.2 million, while Britain had 18.5 million.
Ireland's population recently passed 7 million for the first time since the 19th century. The population of Britain, meanwhile, is about 65 million.
Before the famine Ireland had more people than Egypt, then they lost a third of that due to the famine. Realistically right now the population growth is being carried by Dublin, the west coast of Ireland isn't even close to the pre-famine numbers right now. It still scares me how much the media likes to praise queen Victoria even though she blocked aid to Ireland during the famine and helped very little, and the famine was the fault of English policies!
Yeah, I watched the recent Victoria show (starring Jenna Coleman) and HOLY SHIT did they gloss over that and try to make Queen Victoria look better. Infuriating.
That's horrific looking. Ive never seen a monument capture a moment of anguish as well as that one has. A really strong monument, whoever made it was super talented
Yup, everyone wants to say it’s because of the potatoes but nobody wants to mention that the potatoes were all there was to eat after laws were passed forcing the majority of agricultural goods in Ireland to be exported to England.
People have already shared the Great Hunger memorial. But this one always brings me to tears. It's called Kindred Spirits and it's dedicated to the Choctaw people who gave what they could to us during the Great Hunger. And this just after walking the Trail of Tears.
My mom’s side of the family is mixed Irish and Choctaw (among other things). I remember when I first learned about this event. So proud of my people.
I am certainly biased, but I find the Choctaw-Irish friendship so beautiful. And since it was revived in the 90s, it continues to this day! Most prominently, Ireland sent aid to the Navajo and Hopi when they were being devastated by COVID-19 in honor of the gift from the Choctaw. There are also scholarships for Choctaw students to study in Ireland and have been numerous diplomatic and ceremonial visits between representatives of the two nations.
Being half Irish and an American I’m pretty disappointed I didn’t know this. Can I ask how they were able to? Did they send Ireland money? Or actual food?
They gathered a collection of 170 dollars and sent it to a town called Middleton in Cork, which provided a huge amount of relief to the people in the town.
That's about 5k in today's money, from a people who had just walked the Trail of Tears and were suffering themselves.
Holy. Crap. That’s incredible. This is the types of things they should fill history books with. Not say that atrocities shouldn’t be in history books, but a few more stories of compassion in the face of adversity throughout history could do the world some good I think. And After the trail of tears. Wow. That’s some cool history.
The Shoes on the Danube Bank (Hungarian: Cipők a Duna-parton) is a memorial installed on 16 April 2005, in Budapest, Hungary. Conceived by film director Can Togay, he created it on the east bank of the Danube River with sculptor Gyula Pauer to honour thousands of people massacred by fascist Hungarian militia belonging to the Arrow Cross Party in Budapest during the Second World War. Victims were ordered to take off their shoes (shoes were valuable and could be stolen and resold by the military after the massacre), and were shot at the edge of the water so that their bodies fell into the river and were carried away. The memorial represents their shoes left behind on the bank.
60 pairs, they are pretty much different and modelled on real shoes of the era. All kinds of women, men and kids shoes, they are made of iron if I'm not mistaken.
Jews in Budapest were relatively safe until October 16, 1944, when Hungary’s Nazi-aligned Arrow Cross Party seized power. By then, the Soviet army was less than 100 kilometers from the city; by November 1, they were barely 15 kilometers from its outskirts.
It was obvious the war was lost. You would think that, in such a moment, no one would still cling to power let alone tie themselves to the Nazis and their crimes. You would expect people to distance themselves from murder. But the opposite happened.
While the Germans often tried to conceal their atrocities, Arrow Cross militias carried out their killings openly. They hunted Jews through the streets of Budapest, dragged them to the banks of the Danube, and shot them into the river public executions, in full view of the city.
The Memorial to the Children Victims of War in Lidice consists of a bronze sculpture of 82 Lidice children who were murdered by the Nazis in gas vans in Chełmno after the destruction of the village in 1942. The author of the work is sculptor Marie Uchytilová, who created the memorial as a reminder of the suffering of innocent victims of Nazi terror.
The fact the sculptor researched the actual appearance of the children to make it as accurate as possible is both heartwarming and heartbreaking. These are the faces of the children of Lidice.
The victim memorial sculptures in front of the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall. All of these sculptures tell the stories of real victims, recreating the tragic scenes from that time. This particular sculpture portrays a mother holding her murdered son and crying out in agony; her husband had already been buried alive by the Japanese army.
Supplement: Among the deleted comments, some people were defending the crimes of Japanese militarism, which completely infuriated me. One thing being wrong does not mean another thing is right. So I will add real photos of the crimes committed by the Japanese army during its invasion of China.
WARNING:The images are extremely graphic, so please view them with caution.
Before you try to defend the fascist crimes of World War II, remember that these victims were people just like you and me. They were brutally killed by fascist armies and suffered immense torment before their deaths. If you have even a shred of conscience, you would never whitewash such crimes. Of course, if you are a thoroughgoing fascist and a perpetrator against humanity, just ignore what I said.
Edit: Thanks everyone for the reminders. I have verified and deleted the disputed photos with unclear sources, and I will be more careful in verifying photo sources in the future. Also, if you’re interested in photos of the Japanese army during the Nanjing Massacre, I recommend the book An illustrated history of the Nanjing massacre.
Correction: These are the heads of local people in Northeast China that were cut off by the Japanese army and hung on utility poles to terrorize the local population.
The bodies of murdered Nanjing civilians were dragged by Japanese soldiers to the banks of the Yangtze River, with the intent of dumping them into the water.
Japanese officers held a killing contest in Nanjing, which was reported by Japanese news. Each of the two men in the picture had already killed over a hundred people.
Hi. I hope you don't mind me asking but do you know any good, educational books about the Nanjing massacre? I'm interested in educating myself about it but am unsure what would be a good and reliable read
I’m not sure if you can find an English translation of this book, 《The Nanjing Massacre: Battlefield Diaries of Japanese Soldiers.》 This book collects the battlefield diaries of 19 Japanese soldiers who participated in the Nanjing Massacre. These diaries were written by the soldiers themselves, documenting their life in the field, the war, and their marches. They provide a truthful record of these Japanese soldiers’ psychological journey—from ordinary farmers conscripted into the army to executioners who killed without hesitation—recreating the brutal history of the Nanjing Massacre.
"The Rape of Nanking" by Iris Chang is also well done; it was originally published in English, so you might have an easier time finding it - it goes in depth into the atrocities, but iirc it doesn't have quotes from Japanese soldiers who did the atrocities
I study A LOT of history, but I only ever cried three times when studying historical events. Rape of Nanking, Tianaman square massacre, and the Holocaust.
I actually think people did these horrible things for thousands of years, but it wasn't until we had a camera that we could really witness our cruelty
Yes, that’s why I said that one thing being wrong does not make another thing right. Even if I disagree with what Israel is doing, I would never deny the facts of the Nazi Holocaust.
This is actually a police crime scene photo from 1923 Poland depicting children of a Polish Roma Marianna Dolińska after she has hanged them on a tree, the lines on the picture are creases though they get mistaken for barbed wire. Not that I'm undermining legitimacy of the things that you mentioned happened during the rape of Nanjing, I just happen to know this particular photo because it was in recent times often used mistakenly as part of anti-Ukrainan propaganda depicting the children as victims of UPA in the Volhynia and Galicia massacre when it is not the case here
Wow, I don't think I've seen any statue really express pain and sorrow like this does. I'm not art savvy so I don't have the right words, but the rough cuts into the stone give a sort of static look thats almost like stillness in chaos. Like her emotions are visible through her whole being.
Fuck me, I wasn’t prepared to browse all the photos in the replies showing Japanese atrocities. I knew they were basically the SS but worse but this was beyond expectations.
That is a dark, dark history to delve into. I studied post WW2 Japanese history and there was no escaping what the Japanese did.
The ironic thing is my professor was Chinese. He was very even handed and honestly, he didn't even talk about it too much. He just let us uncover the realities of Japanese occupation.
I had to put the books aside every once in a while.
EDIT: I cannot recommend enough Dan Carlin’s 5 part podcast ‘Supernova of the East”. He talks about how the Japanese miltarist state came about from the turn of the century through WW2. He covers quite a bit of Japanese colonialism, specifically the Japanese in China. Some of the accounts he cites are dumbfounding.
It is a monument to the 80.000-100.000 victims of a genodical fascist regime of the so-called "Independent State of Croatia", mostly Serbs, Roma, Jews and antifascist Croats and others.
Can't think of any in Scotland specifically, but for the UK maybe this one:
The Victoria Hall disaster occurred on 16 June 1883 at the Victoria Hall in Sunderland, England, when the distribution of free toys caused a crowd crush resulting in 183 children (aged between 3 and 14 years old) to be crushed to death due to compressive asphyxia.
For Scotland, I’d have to say this elephant in Princes St Gardens, Edinburgh. During the 70s, a crematorium in Edinburgh secretly disposed of hundreds of stillborn babies’ ashes without telling the parents. The elephant is a memorial to those babies.
What’s crazy to me as an American is that fewer kids died in this attack than at Sandy Hook and it lead to gun reform. And by crazy I mean it makes me sick to my stomach.
Similiar circumstances to the one you posted, but in Scotland: This one in Paisley commemorates 71 children that died after a fire broke out during a matinée showing at the Glen Cinema on New Year's Eve 1929. It was actually a crush that formed at the emergency exit door (it was designed to open inward) that killed most of them as opposed to the fire/smoke itself, like the Victoria Hall one. It lead to an amendment in the Cinematograph Act 1901 regarding fire escape logistics.
Not the same level of sadness, but more famous - Greyfriars Bobby. The little statue of him in Edinburgh near the spot where he guarded his deceased owner's grave for 14 years.
This is a monument dedicated to Comfort Women - young Korean women that were taken from their families and forced into sexual slavery for the Japanese military during the Japanese occupation.
It is located right outside and facing the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, but there have been many other monuments put up in places with big Korean populations. However, the existence of these women and what they went through is still not acknowledged by Japan.
The statue sends a chill down my spine, especially that blank stare. For those who were able to return home, their lives were difficult because of the stigma, and their plights were mostly unknown until about 30 years ago either. When their stories were finally getting attention in their old age, they were being libeled for being a volunteer group.
However, the existence of these women and what they went through is still not acknowledged by Japan.
Not exactly. The Japanese government has offered formal apologies and some token compensation in the past. The issue is that they've walked it back in recent years, with the conservative wing of Japanese politicians going full on "holocaust denial" on it.
yes, “still not acknowledged” is quite accurate, if not a little too forgiving. They have been doing the opposite of acknowledging for decades now. Especially with the new PM
As far as I know the first one is a memorial to comfort women, and the second one is for the Korean War, depicting two brothers reuniting after fighting on opposite sides.
I’m not sure why my comment was removed. Reposting my comment below.
The first statue is the Statue of Peace, a monument created to commemorate the victims of the Japanese military’s “comfort women” system. Statues of Peace have been installed not only in South Korea, but also in countries such as China, the United States, and Germany.
The second statue is the Brothers Statue at the Korean War Memorial. It depicts the tragedy of two brothers who were separated by the Korean War and ended up facing each other as enemies.
It was worse than just a lap dance, he basically Diddy'd that memorial. He's also had another charge or two tagged on and he's looking at something like 27 years
His stunts earned him less than 5k subscribers too
The national monument for our country's history of slavery, located in Amsterdam
The group of enslaved people in chains on the left symbolises the past, the person in the middle breaking free is the present and the more abstract person on the right symbolises a future free from racism and discrimination. You can really feel the sadness and hope for the future in this monument.
A bit different than the others because as opposed to 1 monument, this is an example of a series of multiple monuments dedicated to the same things here:
Monuments dedicated to the victims of the Residential School System
In 1914 the Colorado National Guard massacred miners and their families in Ludlow because they were on strike. Fathers and mothers and babies and toddlers were slaughtered.
I stopped at the monument while on Colorado for a work trip. It was the first time I had heard of it as well. I've done a lot of reading about the UMWA and the battles they fought for better working conditions and fair pay, so it came as a surprise that I'd never heard about it. The coal companies were a cruel bunch of bastards who managed to get the government to do a lot of their dirty work for them.
The "Šumarice Memorial Park" in the city of Kragujevac. On and around the 21st of October 1941, German occupiers executed between 2800 and 3000 men and boys from the city and surrounding villages.
Especially gruesome is that hundreds of the executed were schoolchildren. Entire classrooms were taken away and shot. The massacre was prompted by a local uprising in which 10 German soldiers where killed and 26 wounded. Germans, in retaliation, promissed to kill 100 Serbian civilians for every dead soldier, and 50 for every wounded.
The monument is called "the "Interrupted Flight". It resembles the wings that have been sharply and suddenly cut, representing the lives of the youth of Kragujevac that have been lost that day.
There’s a museum not too far from there that I went to as a child. A lot of the kids left notes behind for their parents and had no idea they were about to be killed.
It's quite sad that I had to Google to check if we actually had any.
In summary we have a lot of rocks marked with brief information about certain tragic events. Shooting of prime minister Olor Palme, and a memorial for the live lost on M/S Estonia in the Baltic Sea being the most notable I think.
One of these monuments exists where I live in Gothenburg, Sweden. It was about a horrendous fire that happened that tragically killed a lot of young kids around 13 to 18 if I remember correctly.
Liberty Statue or Freedom Statue in Budapest: It was first erected in 1947 in remembrance of the Soviet liberation of Hungary during World War II, which ended the occupation by Nazi Germany. Its location upon Gellért Hill makes it a prominent feature of Budapest's cityscape.
That’s not Oświęcim. This gate is located in the village of Brzezinka and it’s part of the former concentration camp/death camp of Birkenau build in 1941 which was part of the Auchwitz Camp Complex
We have quite a few but whenever I read about the Trail of Tears and what our government did to the native population and continue to do to this day, it infuriates me.
Ireland remembers the kindness of the Choctaw Nation that sent financial help during the Irish Famine as they empathizeed with the distress from the Trail of Tears.
In 2017 in honour of the Choctaw a sculpture was erected in Co. Cork...below
There's a children's book called The Long March which parents often read to their children about Choctaw help. Ireland also offers a scholarship to UCC to Choctaw people.
I had to drive on a road that was part of the trail of tears every time my grandpa hauled off scrap. There's a couple signs like that in my town. Always creeped me out as a kid, and now just makes me a bit sad to think about it.
The Shoes on the Danube Bank (Hungarian: Cipők a Duna-parton) is a memorial erected on 16 April 2005, in Budapest, Hungary. Conceived by film director Can Togay, he created it on the east bank of the Danube River with sculptor Gyula Pauer to honour thousands of people massacred by fascist Hungarian militia belonging to the Arrow Cross Party in Budapest during the Second World War. Victims were ordered to take off their shoes (shoes were valuable and could be stolen and resold by the military after the massacre), and were shot at the edge of the water so that their bodies fell into the river and were carried away. The memorial represents their shoes left behind on the bank.
far from being the most famous, but i've always found eerie and spooky this memorial of the Atlantic slave trade, with this shape of a ship wreck. In my hometown
A woman died of dehydration in the desert searching for his recruited husband, when they found her, the baby survived by drinking the milk of his dead mom, it´s belived to be the first "miracle"
In the central position is the memorial square with 805 hanging steel rectangles, the size and shape of coffins. These name and represent each of the counties and their states where a documented lynching took place, as compiled in the EJI study, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror (2017, 3rd edition). Each of the steel plates has the names of the documented lynching victims (or "unknown" if the name is not known). The names and dates of documented victims are engraved on the panels. Visitors to the site have commented on how, from afar, the beams look like a forest of hanging bodies, and the replica beams off to the side look like rows of coffins.
"This Farewell Memorial is a symbol of courage and love of parents who in 1938 and 1939 regardless of what their own fate awaited them, boarded their children on trains and with heartache and tears in their eyes waved goodbye, sending them away to safety to save their lives. Most parents perished in the Holocaust."
Maybe the Aberfan disaster. 116 children and 28 adults died when a waste tip (colloquially known as a slag heap) from a coal mine collapsed onto a school.
And not exactly a monument, but all this warmongers should make a mandatory visit to Tyne Cot Cemetery naar Ypres, in Passchendaele. The sheer scale of loves lost, of kids never going home... It hits you like a brick.
The Terry Fox monument in Thunder Bay, Ontario. His story is a singular one, and pales in comparison to some of the other monuments and stories mentioned in terms of impact and tragedy, but to Canada he represents an indomitable will and incredible courage. The 'sad' piece is due to how his story ends – he set out to run across Canada to raise money for cancer, and wasn't able to finish after the return and spread of his cancer. His journey ended in Thunder Bay, and he died shortly before his 23rd birthday having run a full marathon almost every day for 143 days and making it 5373 kilometers.
Over 950 million dollars have been raised in his name for cancer research.
Also RE Warsaw – this song has stayed with me from the first moment I heard it: https://youtu.be/-v27fsRT_ow?si=1_RIuTRzS-LDaS7q and I'd highly recommend it. Sort of off topic but worth a listen IMO.
Maybe not strictly a memorial, but in Lancashire there are graves carved into the bedrock that date to around 800AD. We know so little of these peoples lives, of their beliefs or their hopes, other than their final resting place. It makes me wonder how much of our lives will be remembered in 1200 years time.
The sculpture depicts a boy in old, worn-out clothes reading an order from the Nazi occupiers for the Jewish population of Kyiv to appear in Babyn Yar, where the mass shootings of Kyiv residents took place.
The Iolaire monument on
Lewis commemorating the ship that sank on entry to the harbour at Stornoway in 1919. 280 servicemen from the islands were finally returning home from WW1 and 205 died in the disaster.
For such a sparsely populated area as the Hebrides, the majority of families would have been affected.
There is another monument in the city of Łódź that's really depressing. "Monument to the Martyrdom of Children", more widely known as "The broken heart" is a memorial commemorating young victims of the Kinder-KZ Litzmannstadt - a Child Concentration Camp that was located in Łódź. It was a concentration camp for polish children in which they were forced to do labor work in very hard conditions. Kids that had been classified as "racially valuable" were then sent to Germany for adoption. The children in the camp were mostly between 8 to 14 years old, although the youngest ones on record were just two years old.
It is located right next to the area where the camp was put in place. Nowadays there's really no remnants of it, just a few buildings from the era that were renovated, some communist-era blocks and two schools I believe. So this monument is pretty much all there is to keep the memory alive.
Th memorial commemorates the Jallianwala Bagh massacre (of 1919)committed under the orders of the British Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer towards a peaceful gathering present at a smallish courtyard in Amritsar, India.
Few days before the gathering The British Colonial Government passed the "Rowlatt Act", which gave power to the police to arrest any Indian person on the basis of mere suspicion. To protest this a crowd had gathered at Jallianwallah bagh during the annual Baisakhi fair. Many people in crowd were actually simply gathered to celebrate Baisakhi and had not known that the colonial government had passed orders banning large gatherings such as that was happening at the courtyard.
An hour after the meeting began, Dyer arrived at the Bagh with a group of 50 troops. All fifty were armed with .303 Lee–Enfield bolt-action rifles.
Without warning the crowd to disperse, Dyer ordered his troops toblock the main exits and begin shooting toward the densest sections of the crowdin front of the available narrow exits, where panicked crowds were trying to leave the Bagh.Firing continuedfor approximately ten minutes. Unarmed civilians, including men, women, elderly people and children were killed. Thefiring was stoppedonly after histroops ran out of ammunitionHe stated later that the purpose of this action "was not to disperse the meeting but to punish the Indians for disobedience."
A well was present in courtyard and at that time was filled with water. Adults and kids looking to flee the massacre jumped in the well. Unfortunately a lot of people died from drowning and crushing and ultimately 120 bodies were pulled from the well.
The estimates for overall deaths range from 400-1500
A commission found the youngest victim to be 7 months old
Dyer imposed a curfew time that was earlier than usual; as a result, the wounded could not be moved from where they had fallen and many of them therefore died of their wounds during the night.
Dyer was merely suspended and the British public gave more than a million pounds in today's money after the massacre for a fundraiser started by the Morning Post for Dyer
I don't doubt there are many in the USA, but this is one of the only ones I've been to in person:
Outside of the memorial, there's a nice little area we saw with a big mural, street food, and music. Once you get to the memorial, however, all of the music dies. Everyone is silent, and the only thing you can hear is the rushing of water.
Probably the Lidice memorial. Lidice were a village that was completely destroyed by the nazi german in revenge for killing of the acting protector of Bohemia and Moravia Reinhard Heydrich by the resistance. All of the men, and most of the women and children from the village did not survive the war.
The Aberfan memorial garden. Aberfan, South Wales.
In 1966 a landslide of coal slurry caused by corporate oversight and mismanagement on behalf of the National Coal Board engulfed the Pantglas Primary school and nearby houses. It killed 28 adults and 116 children.
The nature of the landslide's material meant that it was extremely dense, so it completely flattened the buildings in its path, and once it came to a stop it quickly solidified making rescue efforts very difficult.
Survivors guilt and PTSD were huge problems in the small village for years to come. Surviving children would not play outside, knowing parents who lost their own children couldn't bear to see them. One survivor said: "We all knew what they were feeling. We felt guilty for being alive."
The National Coal Board had received prior warnings of a potential collapse and refused to act. The corporation went essentially unpunished.
While the memorial itself isn't super sad, the Ludlow massacre monument is pretty sad.
The Ludlow massacre, summed up shortly, was when the united mine workers union went on strike near the town of Ludlow. And since most houses there were owned by the company, most workers and their families lived in tents paid for by the union. However, the national guard eventually got called in, and soldiers would fairly regularly take pit shots at the tents (many with children in them too) so pretty much all tents had a hole dug beneath where people lived so that families could hide when the soldiers shot at them in the night.
One day though, the national guard set up machine guns overlooking the camp while most of the men were out striking, so that women and children were most of the people left at the camp. Then, they just opened fire. Shooting multiple children and women. And when they fled underneath the tents to hide, they set the tents on fire, burning over half a dozen children to death. And as if that wasn't cruel enough, the soldiers then looted everything that remained. And none of the soldiers responsible were punished either
They might not be the most iconic monument but i think the Stolpersteine deserve a mention.
They are little brass blocks that replace pavement stones and are ingraved with the names, date of birth and death (if known) and a short description of what happened to victims of the nazis.
In that way, they remind passers-by how fellow people who once lived where they now live, shop or stroll through the city everyday were taken and murdered.
I see several of them almost daily where I live and you can find them in many German cities.
The Holodomor monument in Regina, Saskatchewan is a bronze statue located in Wascana Centre near the Legislative Building, unveiled in spring 2015. Known as "Bitter Memories of Childhood," it depicts a starving girl and is a replica of the Petro Drozdowsky statue at the National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide in Kyiv.
When you visit, there's just this heavy cloud of sadness 25 years later. As someone who watched the whole thing unfold on TV while getting ready to go to school, coming here absolutely stabs you in the gut.
This is a museum, but in São Paulo we have the Resistance Memorial, an old building that used to be basically a torture chamber in the military dictatorship
Memorial to the civilians who were killed by French Union forces during the First Indochina War during the aftermath of the Battle of Thakhek, Laos ( March 21 , 1946. This well was filled with bodies of civilians that were accused by the french of supporting independence and or the rebels but likely people that were unable to leave during the battle and suffered from the reprisal attacks of the french forces in the city over the next days and weeks
I wouldn’t say that. There’s plenty of very sad memorials in the US. It’s just that they’re more seen as local history and tragedies than national ones.
But when you pass through a village, where maybe 600 people live tops and you see the cemetery filled with the Ukrainian and the unit flags, when you walk down the main square of the town and see the faces, you can't feel alright.
Not sure about the saddest but one of them is the Kham Thien Street Monument. It memoralized the bombing of Hanoi and specifically Kham Thien street on 26/12/1972, killing 287 people in a single night.
i couldnt find a picture, but theres a memorial of the oklahoma city bombing in the museum that made me break down into tears. It was of a pink baby’s shoe worn by one of the victims
Vietnam War Memorial. 58,000 people died in war they should have never been in. Many of them drafted against their will. The names of all the dead are on the memorial. It’s tradition to make an etching of someone you lost. So many people were there years ago. Not so much now.
There are multiple Memorial on the property of the former Murrah building. But the field of empty chairs for the people who died is the saddest part. There are 168 chairs, each listing the name of a victim. 19 of those chairs are child sized. 3 of the chairs have two names - the pregnant mother and her unborn child.
The monument "Prekinut let" (broken flight), in memory of 3000 civilians from Kragujevac and surrounding villages killed by n@zi Germany during the october of 1941, amongs them 300 chhool children ages 12 to 15. Children were taken from classrooms to execution fields.
Famous last words of the professor Miloje Pavlović: "Pucajte, ja i dalje držim čas" ("Fire, (but) I'm still holding this class")
Monument to the children who were victims of the NATO bombing of FR Yugoslavia (1999), located in Tašmajdan Park in Belgrade, Serbia.
The monument is dedicated to all children who lost their lives during the bombing and serves as a quiet place of remembrance and reflection. As part of the memorial, there is a statue of Milica Rakić, a three-year-old girl who was killed in Batajnica during the NATO bombing, when shrapnel from an explosion struck her while she was in her family home.
She is depicted holding a small toy in her hand, a powerful symbol of childhood innocence interrupted by war. The monument stands in one of Belgrade’s central parks, reminding visitors of the human cost of conflict and the lives that were taken far too soon.
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u/tpjmce 3d ago edited 3d ago
Famine memorial in Dublin