SATURDAY, DECEMBER 30, 2006: THE HOLOCAUST AND THE WALL
We went to the hotel for our free breakfast. It ended at 10:00 a.m, but the hotel worker grudgingly let us in at 10:15 anyway. From there we decided to go back downtown towards the Reichstag. We took the U-Bahn to Potsdamer Platz and followed the signs to the controversial “Denkmal fuer die ermordeten Juden Europas” (Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe).
At a glance from the street, the memorial looks like a cemetery without grass. The memorial has also been referred to as a field of stone. The stones are square and of varying heights and widths, arranged in straight columns. As one enters the memorial it feels like a dark grey maze where the stones get higher and the path beneath your feet becomes more hilly and slanted. It seems like something meant to evoke the fear and suffering of the Jews, but I can’t see how it had this affect at all. Moreover, there was nothing in this monument that had anything to do with the PEOPLE who died.
Fortunately, at the end of this maze we found the information center, which is more like a museum of the Holocaust and which more than makes up for the lack of pathos in the memorial itself. The museum begins with a timeline of the events of the Holocaust throughout Europe, including surprising places such as Greece. By the time we reached the end of this timeline, the room was so quiet you could hear a pin drop. This continued until the end of the exhibits.
In the next room, there were fragments of letters representative of the Holocaust, including a mother telling her husband that she and her daughter were safe, not knowing that they most certainly were not safe. Another letter was from a child telling her father that she was about to die, and she was scared. A third was from a man in a concentration camp or ghetto who cried out, “Where is God?”
In the third room, the focus shifted to families. In eleven examples, there was a family portrait accompanied by an explanation of their lives before the war, and the known fate of each person in the photo. In one case, no group portrait could be found; all photorecords of the family had been destroyed.
At the end of this tunnel was a small ray of light. There was a computer linked to a database of Yad Vashem. I was able to search for the name of my great-grandmother’s town, and then her family name (Lerman). If everything is accurate, then it seems her brother Dov in Israel reported that their brother Noah was a ritual slaughterer like their father, married, moved to a different town in Poland, and was killed there in 1942 at the age of 31. I’m not sure why knowing all this brings me comfort. Maybe just knowing there is a record of it somewhere helps.
After the museum, we pressed on to the Reichstag. We wanted to go in, but there was a giant line. It was cold and I was hungry and thirsty. We wanted currywurst (a Berlin original), but only saw stands outside. We ended up at Theodore Tucher, named for a famous cartoonist. The restaurant had a literary theme—there were shelves of books and esoteric quotes on plates and bathroom entrances.
It was here that we probably had the most expensive currywurst in Berlin. For 8 Euros, we got a foot-long sausage and a plate covered with a thin ketchup sauce, and curry powder arranged on the sauce in the shape of the Brandenburg Gate and the name of the restaurant. We also got bread. It was good, but not worth 8 dollars, even if President Clinton had had currywurst there too.
After lunch, I was in serious need of a nap. We went back to the hotel where Peter had coffee and then went out on his own to Kreuzberg, a formerly funky neighborhood of Berlin. We met up at 8:00 at Haus on Checkpoint Charlie. When it closed at 10, we probably still had another 15-30 minutes of the museum to cover. There was so much to read about the uprising against the Soviet East Germany on June 17, 1953, the construction of the wall in 1961, the world reaction to the uprising and the wall, the ways people escaped to West Berlin or died trying, the soldiers who helped and risked being fired or shot, and demonstrations against oppression behind the Iron Curtain and around the world.
It’s hard to believe that after all that, we were hungry. After looking unsuccessfully for places on Friederichstrasse and near Nikolaiviertel, we ended up at Brauhaus Mitte on Alexanderplatz, a touristy restaurant that had homebrewed beer and dishes from around Germany. We each had Mecklenburger potato casserole, like potatoes au gratin but with ham and vegetables and shared a salad. It hit the spot.
Tags: Berlin, Germany, Travel
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