Unveiling 'Razzia Monument'

It will be on Friday, November 10 Razzia Monument unveiled by Mayor Aboutaleb in the park on Parkkade. The Marine Band will play from 14.50:15.15 PM, after which the program surrounding the unveiling will start at XNUMX:XNUMX PM with speeches and a laying of flowers. The artist, raid veterans, family members and those involved are present. 

You are very welcome to attend the unveiling ceremony outside on location. Due to the expected interest, you are requested to be present at Parkkade at 15.00 p.m. Please note that shelter on the quay cannot be organized for all visitors in stormy and wet weather.

Visual artist Anne Wenzel designed it Razzia Monument, in which unity and division are central. The statue consists of a man and a woman placed at a distance from each other. The figures were once one whole, but the raid separated them. Just as lovers were brutally torn apart by the raid, the image makes this cruel separation palpable.
The wound caused by the divorce is literally and figuratively visible – in color and shape. The woman symbolizes all the women who stayed behind and had to wait to see if their loved ones would return, and if so, when. The man represents all the men and boys who were taken away. The emotional power of the image is great: you feel and see the heartbreaking pain of those left behind and the despair of the deportees. Despite their vulnerability, they are not broken, but full of confidence and strength.

Anne Wenzel: “Public art is deeply anchored in society and plays the role of sparking conversation.”

About the raid
On November 10 and 11, 1944, the Nazis, meticulously prepared and unexpected, deported 52.000 men between the ages of 17 and 40 from Rotterdam and Schiedam. Most of them are taken to Germany as forced labor. They have to leave their loved ones behind in fear and uncertainty for months. Due to exhaustion, illness, poor care, accidents, bombings and attempts to escape, more than 500 men did not survive the horrors.

Anne Wenzel
The Rotterdam artist Anne Wenzel (1972) is internationally known for her impressive images. Construction and destruction go hand in hand, beauty and destruction meet. These qualities are important for a monument that wants to commemorate an almost forgotten and repressed traumatic event.

Park quay
With the Razzia Monument Rotterdam has been given a permanent place where there is room for commemoration, for example to come together and feel the memory of the city. The location on Parkkade is central to the collection points where the men were herded together for transport, mainly to Germany.

Initiative
Razzia Monument Rotterdam Foundation Together with BKOR, a program of CBK Rotterdam, we started the process to develop a monument. Anne Wenzel's design was unanimously chosen from a long list. During the annual roundup commemoration in 2021, initiators René Versluis and Jan Willem Cleijpool of the Razzia Monument Rotterdam Foundation presented the draft design, which was unveiled by Mayor Aboutaleb. Anne Wenzel and her team worked with Luigi Zuliani in close contact with the initiators, BKOR and the municipality of Rotterdam on the realization of the monument.