A few stone walls, trees and gravel make up the simple composition of a modern cemetery for the victims of the sea.

The Estonia ferry, sailing from Tallinn to Stockholm with more than a thousand people on board, sank on 28 September 1994. The 852 victims were mostly Swedes and Estonians. It was one of the greatest tragedies in the history of European civilian shipping. In a competition, announced by the Swedish State Arts Council (Statens Konsträd), five designs were evaluated. On 12 November 1995, the results were announced, with Mirosław Bałka receiving the most votes from the jury, with second place going to Icelandic sculptor Sigurdur Gudmunsson.

Bałka originally designed a heated road running from the monument all the way to the sea. This idea sparked controversy in Sweden, where the issue of this memorial had been hotly debated from the start, due, among other things, to the lack of a tradition of commemorating mass death. These delayed implementation. In the end, the creator and a committee at the Arts Council agreed on a simpler version. "A wall of granite boulders, converging into a triangle and leading out from the existing old fence of the naval cemetery, delimits the area intended to commemorate the victims of the largest peacetime catastrophe in the Baltic. Here, under the old elm tree standing in the middle, it will be possible to lay flowers and light candles. Three-metre-high walls shelter from the wind from the nearby sea. On their inner surfaces, paved with grey granite, 852 names will be engraved" (Michał Haykowski). Bałka's concept was to keep the temperature of the monument constant - 37 degrees as the temperature of the human body.

Bałka had been abandoning figurative art since 1989, leaning towards ascetic forms derived from minimal-art, although still referring to man, outlining the field of his existence, or rather non-existence. The simple forms Bałka uses in his installations, subjected to geometric rigour, often closely associated with the artist or his family (metal pipes filled with salt, containers with grey soap, squalid and cold tables, terrazzo slabs), correspond to selected dimensions of the artist's body or refer to his biography. Over time, they began to make increasing references to the memory of the Holocaust. The Stockholm realisation remains the only monument in his oeuvre, fitting seamlessly into both Bałka's oeuvre and the tradition (particularly alive in Poland since the 1960s) of architectural monuments that sacralise a place of remembrance with simple means.

Another monument to this disaster is located in Tallinn.