PixelHELPER founder Oliver Bienkowski was shocked when he woke up late August 2019 and discovered that his company’s project, a Jewish, Holocaust Memorial & Museum, got demolished overnight. In speaking about the incident Bienkowski said that the installations, artworks, and rainbow blocks built “were deliberately destroyed by bulldozers.” The controversy of the project ensues as to whether PixelHELPER had the administrative documents and government approval to build this Jewish site.
The Marrakech-Tensift-Al-Haouz region was in the process of building North Africa’s first Holocaust Memorial in Ait Faska, Morocco. The project aimed to educate the local community, children, and Jewish-Moroccan population about the horrific events that transpired during the Holocaust. “We think that the younger generation can understand the Holocaust better if they see it live…if people never see what happened in the Holocaust, they can’t imagine it, it’s important… to show school kids and all people what happened and make it clear,” said museum founder Oliver Bienkowski. He added, “We invite all Jews and Muslims in the whole world to commemorate this with us.”
Upon entering, visitors were intended to be taken on a sensory provoking tour “we have a black tower with an infinity flame, and in the black house we will show people the history of the Jews in North Africa during the Holocaust.” There was a memorial at the start of the maze; it was complemented by sound files, videos, live theatrical forms, and other installations. One room was intended to look like the barracks where prisoners suffered after a workday. Also in the works were replicas of the ovens in Bergen-Belsen and a Block 10 Auschwitz laboratory in which Nazi doctors experimented on prisoners.
“We set up steels (over 10,000 stone blocks) to give visitors in the labyrinth of gray blocks the sense of helplessness and dread that people had in concentration camps back then. We want to create a place in North Africa that brings the memory to the digital age. With a live stream, the spectators are present at the construction site and can use (their) donations to influence the number of workers and blocks to be built. The more people watch and donate the bigger the Holocaust Memorial (will) becomes”
A rainbow-colored blocks tribute to honor the LGBTQ Jews who died in the concentration camps was being built. It was intended to be completed by Hanukah.
The funding behind this visionary project was Bienkowski’s non-profit German organization, Pixel Helper. “As a German with Polish roots and a masonic background, I directly started working and started building,” he explained. “We will turn on our infinity flame on the tower…[to signify that] evil doesn’t come in fast steps, [it starts as] little steps that nobody…recognizes and protests. The whole world should see what humans can do to other humans if they are in a dictatorship like Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany,” he added.
Bienkowski envisioned that the Holocaust Memorial would be the largest one of it’s kind worldwide; it was already five times the size of the Berlin Holocaust Memorial. Oliver, PixelHelper’s founder was inspired to start the project when he looked up his name in the Yad Vashem database and discovered a connection. When he then searched to see where the nearest Holocaust Memorial & Museum was in Africa, he was disappointed to learn that it was “half a world away” in South Africa.
Bienkowski is a light artist and freemason from Germany. His organization philosophy is to protect the poor and oppressed. It currently supports 70 light & action artists, and cartoonists throughout the world. Many call it “one of the most innovative incubators of political action art.” Their campaigns “highlight the possibilities of art as the fifth power in the state. Accordingly, art is not a mirror held up by reality, but a hammer with which it is shaped.”
PixelHelper condemned Moroccan authorities’ decision to demolish the memorial and asked for compensation hoping for King Mohammed VI’s intervention to save what is left of the memorial. The Jewish Holocaust Memorial & Museum’s planned location was on the road to the Ouarzazate Film Studios, the famous backdrop for movies like Gladiator, Mummy, and The Game of Thrones.