Today, I found myself lost in a maze of concrete towers in the middle of Berlin. These towers were not the type that made up buildings, however. They were over two thousand blocks of different sizes that made up a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, called the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. As I wondered through the memorial, I couldn’t help but think of all of the atrocities I read about in Schindler’s list, and whether this memorial did the Holocaust some sort of justice.
When you approach the memorial, there is no clear signage that I could see pointing out what the memorial was for. When I first walked up, I thought it was a huge modern art installation. Each concrete block is supposed to represent a different town in Europe, and the taller the tower is, the more lives were lost from that town. I thought the anonymity of the pillars was really in keeping with the way the Jews were treated in Schindler’s List by the Nazis. They were just numbers in a system, a problem to be solved.
Over all, I do not think the monument displayed the gravity of the Holocaust. The lack of identification of the pillars themselves and the memorial as a whole left the people around it puzzled. More than once, I saw people jumping from one pillar to another, which I felt was very disrespectful to the nature of the site.
This, of course, was not purposeful, but was almost expected due to the fact that you couldn’t tell the purpose of the art unless it was explained to you. I felt that in the city where Hitler held most of his rallies, and was such a stronghold to the Nazi regime, there could have been a more meaningful and identifiable monument. The suffering of the Jews I read about in Schindler’s List deeply disturbed me, and left me moved. During our trip, we have visited a few memorials to the Holocaust, such as the memorial In Budapest for the Jews shot dead along the Danube, called the Shoes on the Danube Promenade. We also visited the synagogue in Prague that listed the Holocaust victims from the city, called thePinkas Synagogue.
I found both of these more moving, and a more fitting tribute to such a tragic, and truly horrible crime. Both of the memorials above treat the Jews as more than the mere numbers they were to the SS. They give names or individual characteristics (through the individual pairs of shoes) to the victims. This, to me, was more in keeping with the way Schindler treated the Jews. They had lives, families, and dreams that were all taken away from them by the Shoah. The monuments above helped me identify with this more, and elicited a more emotional response. Unlike the monument in Berlin, both of these pieces screamed what to me is the most important message I could have taken away, which is never again can humanity let this happen.
This, of course, was not purposeful, but was almost expected due to the fact that you couldn’t tell the purpose of the art unless it was explained to you. I felt that in the city where Hitler held most of his rallies, and was such a stronghold to the Nazi regime, there could have been a more meaningful and identifiable monument. The suffering of the Jews I read about in Schindler’s List deeply disturbed me, and left me moved. During our trip, we have visited a few memorials to the Holocaust, such as the memorial In Budapest for the Jews shot dead along the Danube, called the Shoes on the Danube Promenade. We also visited the synagogue in Prague that listed the Holocaust victims from the city, called thePinkas Synagogue.
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| Prague memorial |
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| Budapest memorial |
I found both of these more moving, and a more fitting tribute to such a tragic, and truly horrible crime. Both of the memorials above treat the Jews as more than the mere numbers they were to the SS. They give names or individual characteristics (through the individual pairs of shoes) to the victims. This, to me, was more in keeping with the way Schindler treated the Jews. They had lives, families, and dreams that were all taken away from them by the Shoah. The monuments above helped me identify with this more, and elicited a more emotional response. Unlike the monument in Berlin, both of these pieces screamed what to me is the most important message I could have taken away, which is never again can humanity let this happen.
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