By Sarah Mulu
GREENSBORO, N.C. — Four women and one girl stand firmly, huddled close to one another, their arms tightly interlocked. Their faces are taut, their eyes unflinching. Their silence begs to be louder than the world that surrounds them. Forever moments away from their deaths, bronze clings to every crevice of their skin, shielding them with an immalleable armor.
You’re safe now.
Children’s laughter echoes into Carolyn’s Garden from the nearby playground in LeBauer Park. Their joy is unbridled and free, as their sneakers thud on the turf. Some are drawn to conquering the mighty geometric climbing dome. Their parents look onward with vigilance, ready to sweep in and save them at any slight tumble.
A few paces away from the women, a solitary bronze camera propped on a tripod points back at them. The camera beckons for someone to look through its lens and lock eyes with each woman. Etched above the camera’s viewfinder is a quote, a subtle warning from Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel:
THE OPPOSITE OF LOVE
IS NOT HATE
IT IS INDIFFERENCE
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The women of bronze trace their roots back to a single frame of film.
Liepāja, Latvia. Dec. 15, 1941.
Nazi soldiers and local collaborators rounded up thousands of men, women, and children onto the frozen Baltic dunes. In groups they were forced to undress and march to the edge of a long and wide grave. There, they were shot. Their limp bodies fell into the Earth, and those that did not topple directly, were kicked into the pit.
In the midst of the massacre, a Nazi photographer raised his camera.
Click.
The shutter captured five women, four adults and one child.
On the far left, little Sorella bows her head, her small hand clutching her dress. Next to her, Roza steadies herself, her arm tightly linked to the matriarch in the center. Fruma, firm and unyielding, stood planted in her boots. To her side stands Nomy, her jaw set, gaze forward. On the far right, Emma tilts slightly, her hand brushing her hair as though caught in a passing breeze.
Decades later, their faces resurfaced in The New York Times. On June 8, 2018, columnist Bret Stephens published an Opinion piece titled “Tell Them I Was Not Afraid.” The piece recounted the story of his relative Raya Mazin, whose mother and sisters were among thousands of Jews executed during the Liepāja Massacre. Before her death, Raya’s mother, Haya, refused an offer of forged work papers that might have spared her life. “I will not take it,” she told a friend. “My husband is already gone…Just know that I am not afraid. If you meet any of my children, tell them I was not afraid.”
When Jewish-American artist Victoria Carlin Milstein read Stephens’ column and locked eyes with the five women, she was transfixed. “The image changed my life,” she said. “I knew I had to show the world their resilience.” Milstein had spent decades as an artist — painting, sculpting and teaching. But this photo pressed on her differently. She saw not only the horror of their last moments, but also the courage burning on their faces. That vision would grow into “She Wouldn’t Take Off Her Boots,” North Carolina’s first women’s Holocaust memorial.
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A few months earlier, Milstein had traveled to Poland with a Greensboro delegation for the March of the Living, joining 10,000 others who walked through Auschwitz-Birkenau. Inside the women’s barracks, she was shaken by the inexplicable smell of roses.
“There were no roses,” she recalled. “But the smell washed over me, and I heard this voice: ‘Don’t forget us. Tell our story.’”
She thought of the women who had walked those same grounds, their children torn away; of the mounds of shoes and hair preserved as proof of the millions lost. She wondered whether the women in the photograph could ever have imagined her, a Jewish woman, free and alive, standing in the place where they perished.
“Had they known,” Milstein asked herself, “would they have believed their deaths were not in vain?”
Back in Greensboro, that rose-scented memory and the photograph fused. The women in Liepāja would be her subject. Milstein would immortalize them.
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The act of sculpting was its own pilgrimage.
For months, Milstein worked in her South Elm Street studio surrounded by sketches, photographs and clay. The women first emerged as life-sized figures. Pliable, soft, vulnerable. Their clay skin displayed Milstein’s fingerprints, tool marks, and the small imperfections that come with human touch.
“She Wouldn’t Take Off Her Boots.”
Each figure began with a study. Her granddaughter’s hands became Sorella‘s. The arms of Greensboro resident and Holocaust survivor Shelly Weiner gave weight to the middle figures. Milstein’s twin sister, Liz, modeled poses of endurance and care. “It feels like you’re giving birth,” Milstein said. “The inspiration was these women who are no longer with us, but the process was very personal.”
When the clay foundation was complete, the work was sent to a foundry to be cast in bronze. There, molten metal poured into molds, filling the voids where clay once stood. The final sculpture is 7 feet tall yet unmistakably human.
The memorial, however, is not a strict replica of the photograph. In the original, the young girl Sorella is partially hidden behind her mother. In the sculpture, Milstein brought her forward.
“I didn’t want to just copy the photo,” she said. “Rodin [a French Expressionist sculptor] influenced me…I wanted presence, not replication. Sorella deserved to be seen.”
That shift changes the piece. The child no longer disappears behind an adult body. She stands visible, her face unobscured, and her hand pressed against her mother’s back in a gesture of comfort.
As for the memorial’s name, historians believe that the middle matriarch figure, Fruma, had refused to remove her boots before execution. Soldiers could strip her of everything else, but not of her dignity.
Not of her stance.
For Milstein, the boots became more than footwear — they became anchors.
“Those boots grounded me,” she said. “They were about standing firm, about refusing to surrender your presence.”
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The memorial doesn’t just commemorate history; it restores what is often overlooked within it.
“Until the last 20 years, women’s roles were underrepresented,” said Karen Auerbach, a historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Diaries and memoirs from men circulated widely. Women’s accounts often did not.” Even Anne Frank’s diary, perhaps the most famous firsthand account of the Holocaust, has often been taught less as a record of genocide and more as a coming-of-age story.
Yet women played pivotal roles. In ghettos across Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, they smuggled food and information between resistance groups. Female couriers could sometimes pass checkpoints with less scrutiny. Auerbach explained that German officers often looked for physical signs of Jewish identity in men. Women carried the same risks, but their gender sometimes allowed them slightly more freedom of movement.
Additionally, women carried unique burdens, such as deciding whether to send children to underground schools and dividing bread into rations small enough to last another day — all duties holding together households inside collapsing communities. “Their choices reveal how genocide atomized family and community life,” Auerbach said.
The interlocked arms in Milstein’s sculpture recall those decisions. Resistance was not always armed; sometimes it was intimate, daily, and nearly invisible.
Morgan Morales, a Ph.D. candidate at UNC Chapel Hill, studies one of the most wrenching choices for Jewish women. Her dissertation traces those who sought abortions in the ghettos as an act of survival. “These weren’t just victims,” Morales said. “They were women making choices in impossible circumstances.” In places like the Warsaw Ghetto, where average rations dipped below 200 calories a day, pregnancy could mean death for the mother, the child, or both. “Many women chose abortion not because they didn’t want children,” she said, “but because they wanted to survive and have children later.”
The memorial, she said, forces people to see these choices not as abstract history but as human lives. “Women didn’t suffer more,” Morales said. “They suffered differently.”
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Survival lives in Greensboro, too. In a PBS documentary interview, Greensboro’s Shelly Weiner recalled hiding as a child with her cousin, Rachel Guralnik, near the city of Rovno — now Rivne, Ukraine — after Polish neighbors agreed to conceal them. Their first refuge was a barn attic, walled off by stacks of hay. When German soldiers began raiding nearby homes, the farmer dug a hole in the frozen earth of the woods for them to hide underground. “At night, I had to deal with all the mice and the rats crawling all over me,” Weiner recalled. In another hiding place, cold overtook her body. “I actually froze,” she said. “When they came to get us, they thought I was dead. The daughter-in-law said, ‘Let’s rub her with snow and see if we can revive her,’ and that’s what they did.” Guralnik added a simple but searing reminder: they were children, and still they endured.
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Greensboro was chosen as the home of the memorial by design.
Milstein often refers to it as a “social justice city.” This is the place where four Black college students staged the 1960 Woolworth’s sit-ins, sparking a national movement. It is also a city where Jewish and Black communities have long stood in solidarity. “It made sense for this memorial to be here,” Milstein said.
Carolyn’s Garden, where the sculpture now stands, deepens that symbolism. The space was endowed by Jewish philanthropist Carolyn LeBauer, who envisioned downtown as a place where art and community could grow side by side.
And this is not a passive statue. Women of the Shoah, the nonprofit behind the memorial, keeps it in motion. Partnering with the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, the organization brings busloads of students from across the state to stand in front of the bronze women.
Classes arrive from Wilmington, Asheville, Charlotte. They gather in folding chairs and listen as docents tell stories like Weiner’s.
Then, they are invited to the camera.
The lens points back at the women. Students take turns peering through and meeting the sculpture eye to eye. Not through a Nazi photographer’s gaze, but their own.
“It’s about sparking curiosity,” said Morales. “Look at the memorial, but don’t stop there. Go to the library. Visit the archives. Learn more.”
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Sorella, Roza, Fruma, Nomy, and Emma stand now not on frozen dunes but in Greensboro’s center, bronze rooted where families gather and children play. The boots stay on. Their arms stay linked. Their eyes hold steady.
They will not move. They will not be hurried past, reduced to a footnote, or left to silence. Their presence interrupts the ordinary rhythm of the park, demanding recognition in a place where indifference might otherwise win.
And when you lean into the camera’s lens, you meet them as they were meant to be seen. Not through the gaze of their killers, but through your own.
YOU ARE A WITNESS.
Sarah Mulu is a junior studying Media and Journalism and African American and Diaspora Studies.
