The Peoria Holocaust Memorial takes an unusual approach to commemoration: it displays eleven million buttons — six million representing Jewish victims, five million representing other victims of the Nazi genocide. The buttons, contributed by community members and donors over many years, fill a display installation that makes the scale of the Holocaust tangible in a way that statistics alone cannot. Each button represents a life.
The memorial is part of the Illinois Holocaust Museum's broader effort to bring Holocaust remembrance to communities across the state. The Peoria installation serves as both a memorial and an educational space, and the effect of seeing eleven million individual objects in one place — each one physically present, each one standing for a person — is genuinely affecting. It is a quieter and more contemplative experience than the more monumental memorials in larger cities.