Tuesday and Wednesday May 17-18, 2016: memorial sites visited in Berlin
On the hour-long flight from Frankfurt to Berlin, I ended up sitting next to another member of the Canadian March team, and a German girl studying at a university in some other city that I can’t remember the name of at the moment (forgive me, it’s been 36+ hours since I slept and I’m feeling kind of wonky) and it was absolutely amazing. She gave me and Breen (of the Canadian march) the most interesting take of German history…and I tried my best to act as a sponge. Her English was impeccable, and some of the things she said left me thinking far after we disembarked. It’s so strange to think about how no other countries know the intimate, yet important, details of your country’s history…And they never will unless they go out and look for it. Or, in some cases, end up sitting next to them on a plane.
Anyway, we landed at the smaller airport in Berlin at about 12:30 this afternoon, and after retrieving every last piece of our luggage successfully from baggage claim, all 58 of us loaded a bus and took off for the city. It was gray and rainy and colder than expected — something that wouldn’t change as the day went on. We met our tour guides, the lovely Sharon and the blunt Mikhail, ate a quick lunch in the park before splitting up into two groups and tackling some of the main sites of the city on foot.
Despite the cold, the walking tour was quite enjoyable. I was with Mikhail, and within minutes I was learning more and thinking far differently about Jewish life in Germany. However, I wasn’t feeling anything more than a respect for the historical significance of the places we visited (the grand Oranienburg Synagogue, the peaceful overgrown cemetery in which we visited the grave of the father of Jewish Enlightenment Moses Mendelssohn, and the site of the Nazi book burning at Bebelplatz) until suddenly the weather turned sour and all I could feel was the rain and how heavy the air in Berlin was. The Meue Wache Memorial, with the statue of the mother and her deceased son sitting in solidarity in a giant empty room, and the memorials at Tiergarten was the turning point for me.
With the rain coming down, I went inside the Meue Wache Memorial with my eyes heavy from lack of sleep and my legs tired from walking around the city of Berlin for the last four hours. Upon seeing the space and the statue, I had an off thought about the acoustics of the room, and closed my eyes. Almost immediately, my ears were overwhelmed with the sounds of footsteps, and all I could think of was death marches, flanks of soldiers, and the running footsteps of children. I took my pictures and walked out, trying not to focus too much on how the ambient noise got to me in that moment. I chalked it up to pure exhaustion.
I couldn’t do so in Tiergarten. The rain was coming down as Mikhail introduced us to the story of the Roma and Sinti memorial, and didn’t let up as I waited for the majority of visiting tourists to exit the small site. (I’m really not about crowded, emotional spaces. This was something I wanted to experience without hoards of people around me with cameras out and flashing.) When I walked in and saw the pool, no one was in front of it, everyone was off to the sides, and my eyes found the daisy resting on the triangle landing, the face of it pointed directly at me. With the rain hitting the shallow water and looking a hell of a lot like tears, along with this simple but horribly mournful violin music…it was almost sensory overload. I had to turn around quicker than I wanted to.
The memorial to gay victims was poignant as well, with the rose placed right in front of our faces as we looked into it to watch the film running inside. It’s crazy to me that people could (and I guess still can be in some place) be arrested, prosecuted, and executed because of any physical expression of love towards someone of the opposite sex. In fact, our tour group actually met up with three people from Georgia, studying in Germany for their semester, who were protesting the arrest and detainment of 10 people in their homeland who were arrested for their activity in the LBGTQ fight that’s been going on there. Living in a country where LBGTQ rights are finally coming to the attention of the legal system and slowly being accepted across the board… I forget how other countries are miles from achieving what the US has.
The last memorial of the day was the Memorial to the Victims of the Holocaust. From a distance, the 2,711 pillars didn’t look like much at all. It was simplicity by design, the gray stones looking particularly dismal against the gray overcast sky above them, and the bus waited on the other side of it. I didn’t think much of the whole space until I walked through it, and the three-foot slabs on either side of me became ten-foot slabs. I walked into the middle, stone rising above me and slicked by the rain, and felt engulfed. There were people amongst the monument, taking pictures, walking bikes…and as someone put into words yesterday, it felt a lot like the monument swallowed me. We could hear bike tires that sounded like they were hundred of feet away, but in reality they were right next to us. I stared down one the long passages and decided to use my last Polaroid for the day on it — and when I pressed the button to take the picture, kids ran by, their shoes lighting up like mine did when I was a child. The picture I took, though completely in color, looked black and white. Another my roommate Emily took looked like the monument was actually crying. All of us walked out of there and onto the bus like we were walking out of the past into the modern city of Berlin with a new weight on our shoulders.
The pictures and memories I made today were unbelievable. I can’t believe how lucky I am to be with this particular group of people at this particular time in this particular place, experiencing similar emotions and spaces. I feel like I have made friends already that will last beyond the parameters of this trip…And this is only day two.
I’ll be posting the pictures eventually, probably on a separate page with captions and dates — so stay present. I should probably try and get some sleep. Tomorrow, the train station and more.
Lauren DePoint, Nazareth College ‘17
https://inbothears.wordpress.com
The March: Bearing Witness to Hope 2016 