Holocaust-era railway cars, the famously cynical Nazi slogan “Arbeit macht frei,” Anne Frank, and “the six million” are the four Holocaust icons that form the subject of Oren Baruch Stier's insightful new book, Holocaust Icons: Symbolizing the Shoah in History and Memory. Stier's choice of the word “icon” to describe these Holocaust symbols is careful: the four selected symbols emerge as dense yet consumable crystallizations of cultural signification and memory. They possess a unique power to express certain essential characteristics of the Holocaust. Stier demonstrates that these symbols resemble sacred relics and religious symbols both in structure and in the meanings and emotions they generate among their viewers. Furthermore, as representations rooted in actual historical contexts and events of the Shoah, these icons draw their power from an authentic past while contributing, through the strengthening of memory, to the authentication of that past as a real presence in contemporary culture. The icons thus possess the power to stand in for a complex range of events and experiences, and they enable the unfolding of greater constellations of meanings and narratives. There is a danger, though, that it is precisely through this vaster potential that the symbols could lose their specificity and the natural ties to their historical contexts, becoming too general and reductive to usefully inspire further remembrance.

Here the necessity and timeliness of Stier's undertaking becomes clear: his intent is to restore to each icon its history and context; to place each, once again, within the parameters of its specific past; and, thus, to forestall “a degeneration of memory” through a twofold method. First, Stier explores how each of the icons has evolved. In effect, he carefully unravels each icon's genealogy. Second, he delineates the way each icon functions to anchor, on the level of representation and memorialization, the past within the present. Stier concerns himself ultimately with both the life and the afterlife of these icons of memory. The two themes running as leitmotifs throughout the book include the generation of Holocaust icons—how does a symbol become an icon, and why—and the question of the continuing evolution of Holocaust icons. For, as Stier expertly shows, these icons are never static, but rather change as contexts of memory and memorialization shift with the passage of time.

Holocaust Icons is divided into four chapters that trace the histories and manifestations of the four chosen icons. Throughout the book, the author remains in conversation with a number of notable scholars within the fields of Holocaust and Jewish studies, including Lawrence Langer, Marianne Hirsch, Barbie Zelizer, James E. Young, Ziva Amishai-Maisels, Deborah Lipstadt, and Michael Rothberg.

The first chapter of the book, entitled “Different Trains: Holocaust Artifacts and the Ideologies of Remembrance,” examines the placement of four authentic Holocaust-era railway cars. These railway cars, as Stier shows, create meaning and memory according to four different modes of memorialization and iconization. The railway car at the Dallas Holocaust Museum Center for Education and Tolerance, for example, originally placed at the entrance to the center, initiated visitors into the events and narrative of the Holocaust. The railway car at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, in contrast, is framed as an artifact that is fully integrated into the museum's historical narrative. The Florida Holocaust Museum presents yet another strategy by highlighting the symbolic potential of its railway car and preserving its mysterious, sacred quality by keeping it closed and thus inaccessible to visitors. However, this strategy is ambivalent because the railway car has also been domesticated in certain ways. Stier's final example of a railway car at Yad Vashem reveals the monumental mode: this railway car reinforces Israel's discourse of destruction and redemption. Poised on a ruptured, exploded iron railway bridge, the railway car evokes an image of an alternative ending to deportation that might be interpreted in heroic terms.

The next two chapters, “Thresholds of Initiation: ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’” and “From Innocence to Experience: An Icon Comes of Age,” examine, respectively, the “Arbeit macht frei” parole and the iconic figure of Anne Frank. In the process of tracing and describing the symbolic meaning of “Arbeit macht frei,” Stier explores the phrase's origins and early meanings, its function in Nazi ideology, its appropriation by inmates with the “Dachau Lied,” and finally, its provocative use by artists Frank Stella, Judy Chicago, and Horst Hoheisel; by theater director David Ma'ayan; and by authors Art Spiegelman and Melvin Jules Bukiet.

Chapter 3, which focuses on Anne Frank as the world's most famous Holocaust victim, explores two components of her iconicity: her literary persona, which emerges from her writings, and her visual persona—the result of photographic, cinematic, and televised representations of Frank. Through a series of analyses of exhibitions, photographs, films, plays, diary editions, and fictionalized versions of her life, Stier illuminates the many different and often problematic ways in which Anne Frank has come to symbolize transcendent universal suffering and victimhood and has even emerged as a saint or martyr, embodying values that are often more suggestive of Christian, rather than Jewish, ethos. Interesting, too, are Stier's insights into the role that Otto Frank, Anne's father, has played in the creation of her persona as well as the way he has been treated and often unfairly targeted in public discourse.

In the book's final chapter, Stier turns to an unusual Holocaust icon: the figure of six million. Stier traces the use of this number as a reference to the total count of Jewish victims from its earliest origins to its current iconic status. He demonstrates that “the six million” is not merely a number but also an icon that transforms all Jewish victims into a single collective. Uses of the number in the memorial-political context date as far back as the 1940s, when it appeared in a proposal for a “Martyrs’ Forest” in Israel. From here, Stier follows the iconic history of the number through a variety of contexts.

Stier warns that due to excessive repetition and lack of reflection about how these icons memorialize the Holocaust, they might lose their specificity and concrete connections to an authentic past. This book is written against such a possible degeneration of memory. By tracing the genealogies of four potent Holocaust icons and revealing how they embody key cultural beliefs about and attitudes toward the Holocaust, Stier illuminates the forces behind an ever-unfolding and evolving Holocaust consciousness. Well written and thoroughly researched, this provocative and fascinating study is a welcome addition to existing scholarship on Holocaust memorialization and visual representation.