Take a stroll down by Government Center if you want to see the essence of Boston. Walk by Quincy Market. Stop for a bite at Faneuil Hall. Pick up a bag of tomatoes, oranges or grapes from the foul-mouthed vendors at the Farmers’ Market if you have a chance.

And then look upward: six tall glass towers, arching skyward. Walk beneath them; they line the path you cannot avoid.

Between City Hall and the Freedom Trail, two symbols of Boston freedom, these towers embody the true nature of Boston’s identity. This memorial to the Holocaust also symbolizes a community that has always come together to engrave the rights of a nation and to protect the rights of its people.

The towers are at once simple and esoteric. A tombstone-like obelisk tells you all you need to know: This is Boston’s tribute to the victims of the Holocaust. This is the gist of the text. Yet the message is much more complicated.

This monument, these towers, obscures the Boston skyline forever. You literally cannot look past them; you cannot ignore them. The towers plunge into six pits below. Six dark pits with embers of light: our past, a past of despair, of a massive regime of evil. But the towers catch the eye, not the pits. They symbolize a future – one of hope, one of remembrance, one that we cannot envision without remembering what has passed.

These towers break you from the innocence of your stroll; their accessibility does not allow you to walk by in ignorance.

The United Nations has erected its own version of these six towers. In its first formal recognition of the Holocaust, the United Nations declared Friday, Jan. 27, the Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz, an International Day of Remembrance for Holocaust Victims.

Across the different governments, independent of religion, race or nationality, the world came together to mourn and remember. On this day, the world’s horizon was obscured by memory and by mourning. Here in Boston, the community banded together, not at a place of worship, not at a place of restricted membership or exclusive affiliation, but in a symbol of fraternity – of local, national and judicial unity. In the Boston State House, in the House of Representatives Chamber, the Boston community assembled to remember what Elie Wiesel called “an era in history when civilization lost its humanity and humanity its soul.”

But Boston, true to its spirit, gathered not just to mourn what has passed, but to alert us to what is passing in Rwanda, Sudan and Darfur.

The towers obscure our vision because they do not let us look by without stopping to take notice. They reject our claim to ignorance and to innocence.

As you walk past the last tower, the words of Reverend Martin Niem