berlin | A long-disputed national Holocaust memorial that is set to open in Berlin will be Germany’s first monument dedicated to all the Jews murdered across Nazi-occupied Europe.
On May 12, the public will be able to enter the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a sea of 2,700 cement steles in the heart of Berlin.
Visitors also may descend into an information center, where the history of the Holocaust is told through photography and personal documentation.
They can learn about Meyer Spektor of Odessa, shot to death by a Nazi mobile killing squad in 1942, when he was 64. Or Olga from Litomysl in the former Czechoslovakia, murdered at 46 in Auschwitz. Or Rachel Posinova of Hamburg, asphyxiated in the gas chambers of Auschwitz with her daughter in 1944.
In all, 800 names — of infants, adults, the elderly — will represent the 6 million murdered Jews.
“The main task of the memorial is to keep alive the discussion about German history,” says Dagmar von Wilcken, 46, the exhibition designer whose concept for the underground center complements the aboveground sculptural memorial designed by American architect Peter Eisenman.
“What I like about the memorial is that it is not a thing that says we have apologized and now it is over,” von Wilcken says. “Rather, people will like it and dislike it and discuss it. And maybe we can even expect that right-wing people will spray-paint graffiti on it. It is a place where all the different thoughts in Germany exist at the same time.”
In 1945, many Germans were relieved to blame a few perpetrators. Today it is widely understood that Nazi crimes against humanity were committed with the help, approval and acceptance of a majority of Germans.
By now, the period has been memorialized with hundreds of monuments. But there still is resistance to establishing a huge memorial in Germany’s reclaimed capital. There are questions of cost — which runs in the tens of millions of dollars — and of purpose.
For more than a decade, many Germans have expressed annoyance with the constant reminders of their history. That’s one reason why TV personality Lea Rosh, who is not Jewish, fought for 10 years to have an unavoidable reminder of the Holocaust placed in the nation’s capital.
“There had been no place in Germany that was dedicated to all the murdered Jews of Europe,” says historian Ulrich Baumann, who for three years assembled family histories for the information center. “It is a subject that is nearly unbearable.”
He often asks himself, “What would I have done if I lived in the ghetto?” How would he have felt “going to the gas chamber?”
The Holocaust haunts exhibition designer von Wilcken. Though her parents were children during the Nazi era, her uncle was one of many Germans forced by Russian troops to look at dead victims at Buchenwald when the camp was liberated.
Visitors can “look into the pillars” to see photos, documents and personal statements. It gives the victims “a voice, a face,” she says.
Dealing with the subject every day for four years does not remove the shock, she adds.
“It hits me every time like the first time, sometimes even worse,” she says. “It’s still not understandable.”