The destroyed city / La Ville détruite, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Passing through Rotterdam, I saw a strange, unbelievable sight ... there was nothing
but a vast desert .. It was as if I were looking at a film, the film of a catastrophe.
The ruins of a church blackened by a fire stood erect, like the teeth of a prehistoric beast
emerging from a volcano. What I saw made me sleep-less ... it was as if I had been
personally stricked by the holocaust ... One morning I started modeling in red clay
a figure two feet high : my first reaction to the ruins of Rottererdam.
A human figure expressing terror and revulsion, rasing its arms to the sky, a cry of horror
gushing from bruised flesh. What is the meaning of this monument,
what is its intention, what does it express? It is striving to embrace the inhuman
pain inflicted upon a city which had no other desire but to live by the grace of God
and grow naturally like a forest: a cry of horror at the human atrocity of these butchers
who inflicted the most insane tortures in history on their fellow men as expiation for
misdeeds never committed.
It was also intended as a lesson for future generations.