Bikernieki Memorial

Bikernieki Memorial
German War Graves Commission
For The Holocaust victims
Unveiled	November 30, 2001
Location	56°57′46.7″N 24°12′37.2″E / 56.962972°N 24.210333°E / 56.962972; 24.210333
Designed by	Sergeys Rizhs
Total burials	≈20,000
Earth, don't cover my blood. Let my cry have no place to rest.

Bikernieki Memorial (Latvian: Biķernieku memoriāls) is a war memorial to The Holocaust victims of World War II in Bikernieki forest (Latvian: Biķernieku mežs), near Riga, Latvia. Bikernieki forest is the biggest mass murder site during The Holocaust in Latvia with two memorial territories spanning over 80,000 square metres (860,000 sq ft) with 55 marked burial sites with around 20,000 victims still buried in total.

The memorial was initially planned and construction started in 1986, but was delayed after Latvia declared independence in 1991. The construction was revived in 2000 by German War Graves Commission with the help of local Latvian organisations and several German cities. It was financed mostly by German government and organisations, Austrian State Fund, and involved city donations. It was designed by Sergey Rizh and opened on November 30, 2001.

The architect of the memorial is Sergey Rizh (Russian: Серге́й Рыж), who worked for 15 years on the design of the memorial, saying it was "his human obligation" to devote his career to this. The memorial is located in the Bikernieki forest, next to the Bikernieku Street (Latvian: Biķernieku iela) passing through the forest. There are two memorial territories – 6,550 and 79,630 square metres (70,500 and 857,100 sq ft) wide on both sides from the road. In addition to smaller forest pathways, there are two roads leading to the memorial's central square – a historic road used to bring the victims and the main central road paved with concrete slabs and marked with a concrete arc exiting to Bikernieku Street.

The centre of assembly houses a black granite cube – a symbolic altar with engraving from Book of Job 16:18 "Earth, don't cover my blood. Let my cry have no place to rest." in Latvian, Russian, German, and Hebrew languages. The immediate area is surrounded by 4,000 granite stones arranged in a grid of forty-five 4-by-4-metre (13 ft × 13 ft) squares, and resembles a traditional Jewish cemetery. The unique rough-hewn 0.2-to-1.5-metre (0.66 to 4.92 ft) high granite stones of black, gray, and reddish colors come from Zhytomyr region in Ukraine. The stones are carved with European city names representing the home towns of the victims. The entrances to the memorial and other grave sites in the forest are marked with concrete pillars with symbols representing various groups of the fallen – Star of David representing Jews, Crown of Thorns representing war prisoners, and Christian cross representing civilians. Historians from the New Synagogue Berlin – Centrum Judaicum, educational establishment House of the Wannsee Conference, and historians from the member cities have documented the names of over 31,000 victims, published in Book of Remembrance: The German, Austrian and Czechoslovakian Jews deported to the Baltic States (2003).