Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe- Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas

   On a raining Sunday, I went alone to visit the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas).  About one hundred meters away from the tourist-attracting Brandenburg Tor, a field of Stelae, which contained numerous gray concrete blocks, lied silently on a square plaza in the center of city. The orderly lied blocks were of the same shape but different height;  erecting straightly from the ground into the sky, they formed a gray lifeless forest, where silence and stillness overshadowed the rustle and bustle in this city.
   From one side of the Stelae field, a downward sloping stairway led people into the underground information center. An exhibition designed by Dagmar von Wilcken about the persecution and extermination of the European Jews and historical sites was displayed in the center. Both the ceiling and floor of were divided into long rectangular areas, which mirrored the shape of the blocks and reminded me of the gravestones. Here's an exert about the 4 most important rooms in the center (marked in blue), which I took from the official information brochure.

0 Starting Hall: an overview of the national-social-list terror policy between 1933 and 1945.  A line of photos and short explanations, as a very small model, dealt with the persecution and murder of European Jews.

1 Room of Dimensions: the first room centers on diary entries, letters and last notes that were written during the Holocaust.  I found one of the sentence in the farewell letters extremely heart-breaking and thought-provoking: " I do not to do anything (to be treated like this), I simply need to be who I am."

2 Room of families: in this room, information about 15 Jewish families were presented. Previous black and white photos and personal documents reflected their prewar life, the separation, destruction and murder during the war.

3 Room of Names: here the names and brief biographies of murdered and missing Jews from all over Europe can be heard. Presenting all victims' names in this way would take six years, seven months and 27 days.

4 Room of Sites :this room shows the geographical extent of the Holocaust in whole Europe. A focused introduction of the major murder sites including Auschwitz is supported by film and photo documents.

The work to record information about the persecuted Jews, homosexuals, Sinti and Roma during the National Socialist Regime continues. As it is emphasized in the exhibition, "it is impossible to find the exact number of victims...or to record the tragedy of every family", the history of that time period, of tear and blood, of frenetic racism and genocide,  left us a heavy lesson, which could never be forgotten.

                                        the narrow pathways in the Stelae