Waikiki Natatorium War Memorial

You’ve asked what you can do to help. What you can do to contribute to the momentum for reopening the Waikiki War Memorial Natatorium.

Here’s what: Be there.

Be there on Sunday, May 27, at 10 a.m. Be there for the Natatorium’s solemn 24th annual Memorial Day Observance.

Be there because it’s important always to remember the sacrifices of our men and women in uniform, and never more important than over Memorial Day weekend.

But be there also because it’s important to show that this Natatorium is a sacred place, the official memorial to more than 10,000 from Hawai’i who served in World War I. Because it’s important to show that you believe this Natatorium should be restored to its purpose of keeping their memory alive. Because it’s important to show that you love and believe in this place.

Be there because it’s important. Join us: Sunday, May 27, 10 a.m., outside the Natatorium in Kapiolani Park.

Mahalo.

And if you want to volunteer to help at the service, contact the Friends of the Natatorium at natatorium@natatorium.org.

People ask us all the time why we are so passionate about bringing the Natatorium back to life. Well, they say that a picture is worth a thousand words. This is the picture. This is why:

This is what we’ve been missing all these years. This is what the “lost generations” — most folks under age 50, who are too young to have experienced the magic of the Natatorium — have been missing all their lives.

Just one look at this image, and you immediately understand what a re-engineered, renewed, reopened Natatorium could be for our families, for kids learning to swim, for recreational and fitness swimmers, for the disabled and elderly who want to experience the ocean, for competitors, for locals, for visitors, and for anyone who just wants to enjoy the view of Waikiki or appreciate sunrise and sunset.

Just one look at this image, and you understand the power of a living memorial to Hawai’i’s more than 10,000 World War I soldiers, sailors and airmen, a memorial where their descendants — and all of us — can enjoy the freedom they fought to defend.

Just one look: Now you understand why.

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The Friends of the Natatorium are enormously grateful to the anonymous benefactor whose generous gift allows us to show you this remarkable illustration of what we’re missing and what we all can enjoy… again.

Scottish novelist William Boyd recently published a New York Times opinion piece headlined “Why World I War Resonates.”

He talks about why memories of that horror-filled war remain so vivid in our collective consciousness even now, nearly 100 years after the conflict began. Why it is lived and fought again and again in our films, in our literature, in dramas on stage, in dramas on television. Even in our poetry.

“The last old soldier or sailor has died,” he writes, “and almost all of the witnesses have gone, but the war exerts a tenacious hold on the imagination. “

To our modern sensibilities it defies credulity that for more than four years European armies faced one another in a 500-mile line of trenches, stretching from the Belgian coast to the border of Switzerland. … It was a deadly war of attrition in which millions of soldiers on both sides slogged through the mud of no man’s land to meet their deaths in withering blasts of machine-gun fire and artillery.”

The “Great War” — the so-called “War to End All Wars,” the war that utterly failed to end them — also retains its grip on our memory through the many World War I monuments and memorials around the world. In Hawai’i, ours – the Waikiki War Memorial Natatorium – is unique. It was built as a living memorial, where families down the ages could come to enjoy the freedom and way of life for which 10,000 soldiers, sailors and airmen from the territory fought, and for which too many of them died.

The Natatorium is “wahi pana,” a celebrated, sacred place. It is a spiritual repository for those whose mortal remains never came home from a conflict a world away. It is a place for descendents – descendents in blood, descendents in culture, and descendents in love for Hawai’i – to visit and commune with the ancestors who sacrificed so much for them. For us.

That, friends, is one reason – one of many, but a very important one – why we fight so hard to restore, renew and reopen our Waikiki War Memorial Natatorium. Mahalo, and aloha.

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