‘I toured Europe a couple of
years ago: Berlin, Warsaw, Krakow; Auschwitz’ a friend told me. ‘I’ve been to
Auschwitz twice.’
‘You’ll cry your eyes out’ said
another. ‘Exhibits of hair, just piles of human hair; shoes, bags. You should
go.’
There’s an increasing trend
towards ghoulish tourism: sites of crashes, assassinations and murders; a
modern version of popping down to the Colosseum for a gladiatorial fight or
Tyburn for a public hanging.
I chickened out and didn’t go to the
concentration camp at Auschwitz, a daytrip away from Krakow in Poland. Instead,
I stayed in Berlin, the city where the holocaust was organised and overseen. It’s
a city whose sometimes troubling history is visible at every turn.
The growing line of stelae of the Holocaust memorial, Berlin
For me, a more powerful image
than the sheds and rail lines of Auschwitz is the eight year old Holocaust
Memorial; more correctly The memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe. It stands
in the heart of civilian Berlin, within sight of the Brandenburg Gate and
Tiergarten, close to the sites of Goebbels’ private bunker and the
Fuhrerbunker.
The 2711 smooth rectangular grey-blue
concrete blocks – officially described as stelae – are identical in width and
breath but alter in height, up to 4 metres, between undulating pathways. The
change in heights gave me a very real feeling of powerlessness. The interaction
of the stelae with those who have come to observe it creates an obvious
comparison between life and death. Children play and climb over the lower
stelae, while others sit on them to enjoy picnic lunches, looking away from the
abstract memorial to the Victory Column at the heart of the Tiergarten.
Beneath the standing stones is a
modern underground bunker – an information centre or museum. Standing in it,
with the knowledge that tons of concrete rests above me further enforces the
sense of lacking control. The centre focusses on individuals; tens rather than
millions. Central to the museum is an exhibition map, marking 220 locations
where persecutions and exterminations of Jewish men, women and their children
took place across Europe. Only Switzerland and Sweden are free of sites.
The essayist George Santayana once
wrote “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The aim
of the bravely named memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe is to stop that
happening as survivors reach old age and the sheds of Auschwitz crumble.