Camp Venture Memorial Pond Twins with Auschwitz Memorial Pond

Camp Venture has long been revered in Rockland County as providers of total life care of children and adults with developmental disabilities. Since its founding in 1969, they have been providing loving, family-oriented care for those who are all too often neglected and forgotten by society. While more laws have been put in place to protect the disabled in recent years, this was not always the case. As new challenges are faced for those whose responsibility it is to ensure the long-term care and daily needs of the developmentally disabled, we must learn from our history, even in its darkest depths, if we are to endure into the light of the future.

In 1997, Camp Venture set out to honor the disabled in their charge while honoring the memory of those disabled whose lives and deaths were dishonored in the most inhumane way imaginable. In tribute, Camp Venture created the “Memorial Pond of the 200,000” in a bucolic park-like setting, where they care for the most egregiously impaired, to honor the 200,000 people with all forms of disabilities senselessly slaughtered by the Nazis. During the Holocaust, Hitler practiced and refined his torture techniques and horrific experiments on the disabled, in what would later become his Final Solution for the extermination of the Jews. In his depraved estimation, the disabled were nothing more than “Useless Eaters,” unworthy to be included in his delusion of the ideal Aryan race. Thus, all disabled were summarily rounded up, tortured, experimented on, and ultimately destroyed, like some offal that one carelessly tosses away, rather than the human beings they were.

The inspiration for Camp Venture’s “Memorial Pond of the 200,000” came from the Ash Ponds at Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Death Camps. During the Holocaust, Hitler may have had a final solution for mass-murdering six million Jews and another six million of what he deemed “undesirables,” like the disabled, but the diabolical Nazi masterminds didn’t have a final solution on what to do with the tons of gruesome byproduct of incinerated innocent souls. Littered throughout Europe are the crematoria that carried out the Nazi’s Master Plan, such as the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camps, with 5,000 - 12,000 people killed per day. The ashes that resulted from cremating millions of human beings must have been astronomical, in the tons. The containers used to store the ashes began to overflow their evil contents. To help dispose of the tons of ashes and hide the war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated during the Holocaust, they began hiding the ashes in what are now known as ash ponds.

In life, they may have all been very different when they walked into those gas chambers - Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, resistance fighters, “Righteous Gentiles” that hid Jews, or even people whose only “crime” was to have been born with a disability that didn’t fit in with a madman’s vision of perfection. In death, their cremated flesh and bones comingled as one, fated to coexist forevermore in unmarked burial sites.

Seven decades have passed since man’s most infamous act of inhumanity against their fellow man, a genocide so great, it nearly obliterated the Jewish people from the face of the Earth. Even now, if one throws a stone in the ash ponds, a cloud of gray, lifeless ash rises up from the dense depths of death and human destruction, a reminder of the souls we must never forget and a reminder of what we must never allow again.

Seventeen years have passed since Camp Venture dedicated their “Memorial Pond of the 200,000” on land that traces its roots back to 1884 and the Dominican Convent of Our Lady of the Rosary. Cardinal John J. O’Connor was an honored guest at the dedication. Time and weather have since taken their toll on the pond, which includes wheelchair accessible docks and paths. As it is the only memorial of its kind in the country and it is a respite for Camp Venture’s consumers to be cared for and walked or wheeled about on pleasant days, it is imperative that the pond environs are restored to the idyllic sanctuary it once was.

It is our hope that the Rockland community will come together to help us accomplish the restoration and join our celebration and rededication of the “Memorial Pond of the 200,000,” which we are twinning with the Ash Ponds at Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camps in Poland. In commemoration of the disabled lost, but not forgotten, a special Holocaust Memorial will be erected at Camp Venture’s pond, identical to the memorials at Auschwitz, as part of the twinning of the two ponds.

We pray that bringing together people from myriad backgrounds, faiths, and spiritualities will not only restore a pond that brings hope to so many, but it will restore a sense of dignity and mutual respect that is the crux that bonds us together as one human race. It is this sense of humanity we wish to bridge across both an ocean and a generation past and tear down the barriers we too often build with our neighbors within our own community. In acknowledging the intolerance of the past, we can ensure that it is neither forgotten nor repeated. Never again!

Camp Venture’s inclusive Community Committee and its Honorary Chairperson, Mrs. Matilda Cuomo, have been organized to assemble the resources necessary for the restoration and the addition of a Holocaust Memorial. The Rededication and Twinning Ceremony will take place on October 2, 2014, at 10:00 A.M., at 230 Route 340, Sparkill, N.Y. We welcome small contributions of $18 or Chai (meaning life in Hebrew) and those with naming opportunities. To learn more or to contribute to the restoration online, please visit us at www.venturefoundation.org. Please make checks out to: Venture Foundation, 25 Smith Street, Nanuet, NY 10954 or call us at (845) 624-5402.

WHAT: Camp Venture Memorial Pond Twins with Auschwitz Memorial Pond

WHERE: 230 Route 340, Sparkill, N.Y.

WHEN: October 2, 2014, at 10:00 A.M.