Sacred Display for Holocaust Remembrance
By: Ziggy Ross; Tourism Editor
Colorado Mesa University designates a week each year to Holocaust awareness efforts. This year the week of remembrance was held April 3 to 7. Events were held each night for students and other members of the public to attend and learn more about the tragedy that took the lives of 6 million Jewish individuals and millions of others. Throughout the week, a display of flags stood in the center of CMU’s campus.
The Field of Flags is a display of roughly 2,500 flags that exists on the field between Wubben Hall and the University Center. It is dedicated on the day after it is put up, making it an area of sacred ground on campus. The field is made up of eight colors, and they each represent a group of people. Each flag represents 5,000 individuals. The color and group it represents is as follows:
- Yellow- Jewish individuals
- Blue- Soviet citizens
- Orange- Poles
- White- Disabled
- Brown- Roma
- Green- Freemasons
- Red- Communist/Socialist
- Pink- Homosexuals
- Silver- Jehovah’s Witnesses
The remembrance series is put together by many people in the history department at CMU, including Dr. Vincent Patarino. Dr. Patarino is passionate about popular culture, how history and film interact, and how forms of stereotypes and racism affect popular media.
“The Field of Flags represents all of the different groups that were targeted by the Nazi regime,” Dr. Patarino said.
The CMU Holocaust Awareness Week has been held on campus since 2004 and has brought many people to campus in hopes to spread education to the students and the public. The series was first started by Dr. Patarino as he still directs it today.
“We’re in our 20th year, and the series is dedicated to both education and social awareness to try to actually think about what sort of steps can we really take to keep things like genocide happening again.”
-Dr. Patarino
Dr. Patarino is passionate about teaching others the importance of remembering the Holocaust but knows it doesn’t just stop there.
“We give it a lot of credence to never again, but we don’t actually think about what we have to do to make that possible,” Dr. Patarino said.
Dr. Patarino first began this series after finding antisemitic rhetoric printed on flyers being distributed around Grand Junction. Similar flyers were found around Grand Junction this past year in December in plastic bags that included crayons.
Antisemitism has been on the rise in the US in recent years. The Field of Flags is just one-way Grand Junction reminds those that the Holocaust was less than 100 years ago and puts an image to the idea of “millions of lives” and “never again.”
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