A man convicted for destroying a glass monument to the victims of Auschwitz here in January 1993 has been sentenced to 100 hours of public labor.
Judge F. Salomon said the man, identified as J.R.S., should complete the sentence in the field of art, a positive way to make up for the destruction of the monument.
The glass structure was destroyed the night before an Auschwitz commemoration was to take place.
The district attorney had asked for two months imprisonment for J.R.S., an employee of the company that produced the broken, mirrored plates for the monument.
The monument is made up of six huge mirrors on the ground. A plaque at the top reads in Dutch, “Auschwitz never again.”
Jan Wolkers, one of Holland’s foremost writers, created the monument. Wolkers designed the cracks in the mirrors, which face heaven, to express that Auschwitz violates the heavens forever.
J.R.S. had claimed that his employer offered him money to destroy the monument. There were mistakes in construction in the windows, which would have been obvious at the remembrance, J.R.S. had said. No proof for this claim could be found.
J.R.S. attacked the mirrors with a pickax so intensively that afterward, the glass mirrors looked like damaged car glass.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
