Berlin Memorial to the Murdered Jews
By Debbie Carlson, Teacher at Meridian Middle School, Kent
Debbie Carlson just recently returned from a Holocaust study trip to Amsterdam and Berlin, offered by Museum Without Walls and supported by the Holocaust Center. Debbie is one of the Holocaust Center's Master Teachers and a recent alumni of the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous Summer Institute.
I walked around a corner or across a street and there it was, I recognized it immediately. We were a group of fifteen, but were given seven minutes to wander alone. So I dove in, literally. The memorial was made as a maze of rectangular cement blocks all the same width and length, but different heights. I think I learned later that there were 2,711 different blocks. I walked through them as you would walk through a maze. No identification. No words. No labels. Just acres of these concrete blocks. In some ways they reminded me of coffins.
I wanted to just sit lost among the blocks, but there was no time. I had to process my feelings quickly and rejoin the group. It was very difficult to consider the murder of 6,000,000 Jews being represented by acres of concrete tomb- looking blocks in such a short time. I kept noticing how the ground was uneven, there were places where it was so slanted one felt off balance, the passage ways were dark and narrow - only enough room for one person at a time, and the surfaces of the blocks created an undulating effect as I looked across the sea of concrete blocks. Suddenly I imagined what it must have felt like for the Jews to have their own lives thrown into such chaos. They had no solid ground anymore. They were constantly being squeezed into smaller, tighter, scarier spaces. They had no straight path to follow; they never knew what was around the next corner. The memorial began to make perfect sense.
As I rejoined our group I asked the guide if there was an official entrance or a sign or something to tell the public what the place was all about. No such sign and no such designated entrance. No wonder there were people climbing all over the blocks, sunning themselves, jumping from box to box enjoying a summer afternoon. I was horrified. But didn't the world do that while 6,000,000 Jews were being murdered?
