Despite swastika, crowds welcome Berlin memorial

berlin | Within hours after the opening of Germany's national Holocaust memorial, a vandal scratched a swastika into one of the 2,711 gray slabs, a spokesman for the memorial said last week.

The small swastika was spotted by security guards and quickly removed, though the vandal was not caught, spokesman Uwe Neumaerker said.

"What else can we do?" he said. "There are some security forces and they walk through and if they find something they remove it. ... You can't be everywhere at once."

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was officially inaugurated May 10, after years of debate and delay. It opened to the public May 12.

The underground information center had 2,700 visitors but many more wandered among the haunting field of slabs. Neumaerker said he could not even speculate who may have defaced the slab.

Designed by U.S. architect Peter Eisenman, the memorial is a labyrinth of narrow rising and falling pathways between the upright slabs in the ground.

Ahead of its opening, Eisenman said he recognized the memorial could not please everyone, and that he wouldn't mind skateboarders, children playing hide-and-seek or even graffiti on the slabs.

Asked this week if the project would be demeaned if someone scratched Nazi symbols on it, he was noncommittal. "Maybe it would. Maybe it wouldn't," Eisenman said. "Maybe it would add to it."

The memorial opened on a damp, overcast day with hundreds of people wandering along the pathways that separate the undulating field of slabs. Other visitors perched atop the slabs, posed for photos and, in some cases, jumped from one block to another.

Now the fences that surrounded the site have been removed, along with signs that identified it as the Holocaust memorial, leaving no specific indication of its purpose.

"That's precisely what is good about it — there's no sign saying 'you must remember,' but you do remember," said Juergen Seifert, 77, a retired university lecturer from Hanover and a former Berlin resident. He praised Eisenman's design.

"When you walk through these deep gorges, it's an impressive experience," Seifert said. "You go through alone — it's not something you can walk through in a group."

"It's a little disorienting," said Myra Shapiro, 72, visiting from New York City, who said she hadn't been sure what to expect from the memorial. "I'm very grateful for the architect who had a vision that's not ordinary."

Eisenman's concrete maze, she said, reflected the fact that the victims of the Holocaust "didn't know what they were going toward."

Visitors stood in line to visit the underground information center, at one end of the site, with exhibits on Adolf Hitler's Final Solution. Someone had laid two red roses on top of one of the slabs at the edge of the 204,500-square-foot memorial.

However, the atmosphere was often less somber, with the shouts of children echoing through the site — underlining the architect's hopes that it would "be a part of ordinary, daily life." That rankled Peter Drandes, a visitor from Hamburg.

"It doesn't entirely convince me," said Drandes, 35. "I find this labyrinth a little problematic ... it doesn't live up to the function of remembrance."

The opening followed 17 years of wrangling over how best to remember the victims of the Holocaust. The project was first proposed in 1988 by writer Lea Rosh; in the late 1990s, politicians rallied behind the idea.

More controversy emerged from this week's opening ceremony, at which Rosh proposed inserting the molar of a victim that she found at the Belzec death camp in Poland into one of the memorial's slabs, along with one of the yellow stars that the Nazis forced Jews to wear.

The leader of Berlin's Jewish community, Albert Meyer, dismissed the suggestion as "totally unacceptable," arguing that the bodies of Jews can only be buried in Jewish cemeteries.

"I don't think that's a good idea," said visitor Angelika Heideke, 49, a charity worker from Bonn. "It isn't fitting."

Heideke was undecided about the monument's effectiveness.

"I need to let it work on me," she said. "When you see it on television, it's totally different from being here ... I don't have anything to compare it with."