Berlin's memorials, part 1.

We were blessed with a terrific guide for our second day in Berlin.  I believe his real name is Andreas, but he asked us to call him Andy.  He spoke with a nearly flawless British accent.  He had a great sense of humor and told very amusing anecdotes.  My favorite was a reference to the
Siegessäule, Berlin's famous victory column.  He noted that a number of British and American soldiers he knew referred to it as "the chick on the stick".

He told us he'd spent a good part of his young adulthood in Wales and  Ireland (I believe).  He shared that he had recently lost a great deal of weight and was anxious to get back into shape so he could play rugby.  He also mentioned that he had recently been felled by heatstroke.

We had felt that heat while in Poland and the Czech Republic.  The day we were touring about Berlin, the temperature had dropped well below 70.  It was drizzling, so it felt quite cool.  Frankly, that's just the way I like it--perfect touring weather.

What made Andy great was the plan he had for our day.  He was taking us to particularly meaningful Holocaust memorial sites.  We started at "Berlin: Levetzowstraße, I. The  Liberal Synagogue, Levetzowstraße, was one of the largest synagogues in the city.  It consists of metal tiles representing the destroyed synagogues of Berlin."

This obelisk contains the dates transports left from the Levetzowstraße Synagogue.

Although the Liberal Synagogue on Levetzowstraße was not damaged during the Kristallnacht pogrom, it did suffer bomb damage.  The site became a collection point where up to 1000 Jews a day were sent to concentration and death camps.

Today, beyond the obelisk, the site also features plaques identifying the 34 Berlin synagogues.

The plaques list seating capacities and other building facts for each of the synagogues.

This is the plaque for Synagogue Levetzowstraße.  I don't think I've ever seen a synagogue with seating capacity for 2,120.

The most eye-catching aspect of this site is the boxcar and blocked sculptures, both inside and leading up to the boxcar.

These sculptures of the train car and the carved block of marble represent prisoners huddled together as they ascend the ramp to the car.

Perhaps the most meaningful site on this tour was Platform 17/Gleis 17.  The Deutsche Bahn site states, "without Deutsche Reichsbahn, the deportation of the European Jews to the extermination camps would not have been possible."

This memorial was established by the Deutsche Bahn to commemorate the deportations of Jews from the western district of Grunewald (which, by the way, is not too far from the Wannsee Villa).  The Deutsche Bahn site says that for many years, the rail systems in East and West Berlin did not acknowledge the role of the railroad in facilitating the Holocaust.  The memorial was not established until 1998.  Some 50,000 Jews were deported from this location starting October 18, 1941, and ending in February 1945.  The first group of 1,251 prisonsers was sent to Lodz.

There are similar "grates" positioned up and down the length of this segment of the platform detailing the date, the number of Jews on the transport, and the destination.  Altogether, there are 186 such plaques.

The designers made a purposeful decision to allow the track to disappear into overgrowth.  The message is:  no more trains will ever leave from this platform.

I seem to recall Andy pointing out the uneven height of  platforms.  I think Andy said that one level was designed for human passengers and the other for livestock.  As one might anticipate, the Reich assigned those to be deported to leave from the livestock platform.

Beyond the end of the track is another sculpture wall.

The forms scooped out of the wall suggest absence and shadow.  I found the emptiness to be haunting.


Our next stop was the German Resistance Center.  We had time only for a quick stop, so we didn't go in to the Museum itself.  This is definitely a site I'd like to visit when I return to Berlin.  According to the website for the Memorial, this is "the site of Hitler's speech of February 3, 1933, on "Lebensraum (living space) in the east." Yet the site is best remembered as the center of the attempt to overthrow the National Socialist regime on July 20, 1944."  The German Resistance Memorial Center is located in the Bendler Block.  This is where Hitler's would be executioner, Claus von Stauffenberg, was executed.

These are the names of the officers executed on this site.

The museum is the site of the original coup attempt in 1944.  As mentioned above, I didn't go in to the permanent exhibit, which covers 18 topics centered on the theme of resistance.  It's interesting that this was one of the first Holocaust-related museums in Berlin.  Commemorations on this site began as early as 1952.  The Berlin Senate voted to establish a memorial at this site in 1967.

We then drove to the Denkmal fur die ermodeten Juden Europas--the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe. 

My friend Cindy and I had visited the Denkmal in the winter of 2013.  The museum under the ground was one of my favorite on that trip.

We didn't have time to visit it this time.  Instead, Andy had us stand among 2,711 steles (each with the same horizontal dimensions, and ranging in height from eight inches to 15 feet tall) and asked us to describe how we felt.  I think it's worthwhile to do such reflection.  We don't usually take such moments in the middle of touring.

We also walked across the street to the Tiergarten Park to see a Memorial to Homosexuals who perished during the Holocaust.

The motif of the Memorial for Homosexuals is based on the Denkmal.  The "twist" is that there's a peephole through which visitors can see a film of a kiss.  According to the website, the memorial is intended as "a lasting symbol against exclusion, intolerance and animosity towards gays and lesbians."

We drove by the Bebelplatz on the plaza by Humboldt University.  Only Sura and I were really interested in this site, so we decided to make the visit on our own.

We didn't get to return until the day before we departed.  This is a fascinating exhibit commemorating the Nazi book burning.  I found it very moving, but it was a complicated experience since there was construction on the site.  It was also difficult to get good images in the middle of the day (which means I recommend visiting in the evening) and the number of visitors crowding around the relatively small space.

The memorial contains empty bookshelves.

This photo is from "A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust."

There's a plaque featuring the famous Heinrich Heine quotation.

The 1820 Heine quotation is in the upper left hand corner:  "Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo Man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt Man am Ende auch Menschen. (That was merely a prelude. Wherever they burn books, eventually they will burn people too.)"  The quotation on the right hand side reads:  "In der mitte dieses Platzes verbrannten am 10. Mai 1933 Nationalsozialistiche Studenten die Werke hunderter freier Schriftsteller, Publizisten, Philosophen und Wissenschaftler. (In the center of this square on the tenth of May, 1933, National Socialist students burned the works of hundreds of free authors, publishers, philosophers, and scientists.)."

All of these visits took place before we had lunch.  We really packed in a lot on this tour.  I'll finish up discussion on the Berlin Memorials in the next post. 

A wild Irish Rose

My mother would have turned 91 today, had she lived longer than the 64 years God gave her.  She was a beautiful woman.

Helen Lorraine Watson was born in the small fishing village of Northport on the Long Island Sound.  She loved her hometown and spoke of it often when she was alive.

She talked with great fondness of the Sound and its bounty.  One thing that always got my sisters and me going was when she spoke of her love for eels. One of her dreams was to own a sailboat and spend her summers sailing on the Long Island Sound.  Alas, that was never to be.

Hers was a difficult childhood.  She was born to Ruth Alma Ruland Watson and Edwin Watson in 1923, 17 years younger than her brother Eddie.  She had a younger sister, Ruthie, who never made it past her fifth birthday.  As I recall (and I'll ask my sisters to correct me), poor Ruthie died of uremic poisoning.

I'm not crystal clear on some of the dates and ages, but when she was 8 or 9 she was hit by a truck and went in to a coma.  At age 10 or 11, the apartment where she and her parents lived burned down.  At age 11 or 12, her beloved dad died.  I seem to recall his death was attributed to stomach ulcers, but looking back on it, it might have been stomach cancer.   At this point, the year would have been 1934 or 1935, the depth of the Depression.

Her mom had some kind of deal with the Works Progress Administration wherein she provided lunch for WPA workers.  The men would come to her kitchen and she'd provide soup and sandwiches.

She talked a bit about visiting relations who had no electricity or indoor plumbing.  She talked about studying by kerosene lamp.  She also talked about an elderly relative who had been a shipbuilder.  They had to lift their legs at high tide.  A final memory she shared from that time was kissing the corpse of one of her relatives who passed away.

My mom was active in the Methodist Church.  She sang in the choir and participated in the Methodist Youth Fellowship--activities I took on as a teenager.

Her best friend was Muriel Tiernan, a girl of Irish descent.  My mom spoke so often of Muriel, I found it curious that she lost touch with her.

Her best memories of high school were studying French.  She wasn't particularly fluent, but she sure liked the idea of French.

After high school in 1941, she went to work for Grumman Aircraft in Beth Page, New York.

Photo from http://www.bethpagecommunity.com/community/woman_grumman

She's not in this photo, but I believe this is the kind of work she ended up doing "for the duration of the war". 


She considered herself a New Yorker first, last and always.  As far as she was concerned, there was no greater city on this earth than New York City.  She told my sisters and me many stories about going in to the city as a young woman.  One of my favorite tales concerned bumping in to Eleanor Roosevelt on one of Manhatten's busy streets.  According to her, she and her friend, flustered, said "We're so sorry Mrs. Roosevelt."  To which she replied, "Think nothing of it, my dears."

She met my dad at a roller skating rink on Long Island.  He was three years her junior, but he could pick out a beauty.  She found him very annoying (as did we all), but she admired his intellect greatly (as did we all), and she recognized a decent person in him (as did we all).

They married in 1950, just after my dad turned 24.

She and my dad settled into a small apartment in Needham Heights, Massachusetts.  My dad was working on his Ph.D. at Harvard. I recently learned from my youngest sister that my mom apparently had Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome.  For almost four years, she worked for John Hancock Insurance company in Boston.  She had to quit when she finally became pregnant.  I came along just shy of four years after their wedding.

That's my sister Linda under my mom's coat (we're Irish twins).  I remember my aunt saying my mom suffered from Post-Partum Depression.  It was a challenge for her to care for two little girls and my dad who contracted pneumonia while finishing up his dissertation..

We moved from Cambridge, Mass. to Lawrence, Kansas where my sister Wendy came along in 1958.  We lived there a scant two years, and then we moved on to Tucson, Arizona where my sister Nancy was born in 1961.

I think Tucson was a major culture shock for my mother.  It was so very different from what she'd known.  She found the informality of western life really disconcerting.  I can't imagine the adjustment she had to make.  Tucson was so hot.  I remember the day we moved to town, the temperature was 117.  I also remember seeing photos in the newspaper featuring people frying eggs on the sidewalk.

Poor dear, she was pregnant, new to town, and having to enroll her oldest in school.  The new house had three bedrooms and an enormous lot.  It was all too much for her.  We had asparagus, blackberries, figs, peaches, apricots, pomegranates and mulberries.  It was a really beautiful garden.  Unfortunately, neither my mother nor dad had any skill when it came to tending these wonderful plants.  They all slowly died away.

My mom didn't drive when we were little girls.  That made for some interesting challenges.  We used to go grocery shopping as a family at the El Rancho grocery market  (now Bookman's for Tucsonans in the know).  I remember sampling the parsley (it was free), and begging my dad to buy a new Mad Magazine.

In the summer, we used to prey upon my dad to take us to Austen's Ice Cream parlor (Broadway and Country Club).  My mom loved pineapple shakes and butter pecan ice cream.  It was such a treat.

My mom used to walk with her little girls all over town.  My sister Wendy contracted Valley Fever when she was a toddler.  My mom would be walking with Nancy in the stroller and Wendy at her side, only for Wendy to fall to the ground in a slump.  She had the amusing habit of falling into a sleep while we played together.

My sister Linda and I used to share going to concerts with my dad and mom.  My mom always looked so pretty when she dressed up to go out on the town.

My mom used to bake cakes and cupcakes for various celebrations at school.  That's something that doesn't happen today.

My mom volunteered as a Girl Scout leader because she felt that scouting was a worthwhile activity.  She encouraged us to go to Girl Scout camp.  She took us on hikes and other scouting activities. 

She taught Sunday School because she thought it was important to have a faith tradition.

She encouraged us to learn and to explore crafts.  She tried to teach us to sew and to cook.  Only one of us really took to it (Wendy).

She often made us Halloween costumes--some were more successful than others.  The point is, she tried.


She read to us when we were little, and inspired a lifelong love of reading in each of us.  She loved books and she loved stories.  She joined the book of the month club and often gave books as gifts.  I've taken that to extremes in my own life.

She really worked so hard to expand our horizons.

Going to Europe in 1972 (the year I graduated high school) was a mixed bag for her.  She loved being in England, but Germany was a challenge for her.  She and I took German as a Second Language classes.  It was one of only a few times I felt she and I connected as adults.   I think she was glad of the experience, but I think she felt somewhat isolated.

She was always searching for ways we could connect, but it was difficult to find points of intersection.  She'd always have schemes, or plans for the two of us to work on projects together.  I know I disappointed her repeatedly.  I regret that.

Distance made communication difficult for us.  We spoke weekly on the phone, but there were 2,000 miles separating us.

Once she and dad had an empty nest, they each took on new artistic pursuits.  Dad started piano lessons, and mother started to paint.

This was one of her first efforts.  We call it "The Rocky Desert", aka, "The Smoking Cactus."

She had a real nostalgia for the eastern part of the U.S.  This was a painting of her imagination.

This was her painting of Navaho country.

This was one of her last paintings--and in my humble opinion, one of her best.

She didn't get to plan my wedding, and that was a sore spot.  My sister Wendy, however, always said that babies solve problems and truer words were never spoken.  She was absolutely nuts for my first baby, Jacob (and of course, all the others she got to know).  She came to help me after Jacob was born.  One time when she was helping me bathe Jake, he started to defecate on her arm--her reaction, "Oh, look at the little poos."

She did get to plan my youngest sister's wedding; we all referred to it as "Ma's wedding."  We were glad of that.

She came to be with me after Leah was born, and that was lovely.  She loved spoiling her grandkids.

Her illness and her death were terrible blows to my entire family.  Before she went in to the hospital, she ironed my dad's chinos, and froze dinners for him.  To say he was lost when she died would not be an understatement.

I did get to visit her once more before she died.  It was a bittersweet meeting.  She often visited my dreams after she died.

I regret so much not spending more time with her and not asking her enough questions.  It is too late now, and I find myself wondering about so many questions regarding her life.

She was a good woman.

The road to Berlin

The trip to Berlin was the second longest road trip on our tour.  Fortunately, the weather had turned much cooler than it had been when we drove to Prague.  We made a stop just over the German border for our lunch at a roadside restaurant.  After picking up our food, we sat outside at picnic tables.  Despite the cooler temperatures, the insects were out in force.  My friend Sura was wearing a sky blue shirt which the bugs seemed to like.  We took turns trying to brush them off her back and shoulders, but it was a Sisyphean task.

By mid-afternoon, we arrived in a southwestern suburb of Berlin and we were no longer plagued by the tiny winged pests.

Our first stop once we made it to Berlin was Wannsee House.

The Wannsee neighborhood is very elegant.  According to a website on the History of Wannsee Villa, this beautiful home was built in 1914-15 by "merchant, factory owner and Privy Commercial Councilor Ernst Marlier" who owned it for a few years before selling it to industrialist Friedrich Minoux.  

The house was the site of the famous Wannsee Conference in January 1942 and since 1992 it has been a museum and library/archive dedicated to the story of the fateful conference where the "final solution" was developed.  The Wannsee Villa site reports "In November 1940, [the owner] sold the villa to the Nordhav SS Foundation set up by Reinhard von Heydrich. According to the museum website, 'The purpose of the foundation was to build and maintain vacation resorts for the SS Security Service (SD).' Heydrich wanted to use the Wannsee villa for 'official functions and as a holiday resort.'"

As it happened, one member of our group had done an internship at Wannsee House and was offering a few of us some background on the conference.  We were just standing in the central hallway listening to our friend Beth share what she knew when a member of the staff came up and told her she was not allowed to give her own tour.  We protested saying she wasn't giving a tour, but rather sharing some background information.  The staff member was adamant that she had overstepped.  We were flabbergasted.  It seemed absurd, but our guide explained that the staff member was acting on behalf of local guides--protecting their ability to make a living.

That's the staff member coming through the door. Our friend respectfully demurred and then we were each on our own to make our way through the museum. 

The central hallway (pictured above) features a map similar to one we had seen at Theresienstadt listing countries of deportations.

One of the first placards in the museum notes that the conference was originally scheduled for December 9, 1941, but this was the day Hitler wanted to announce the declaration of war on the US.

One site providing a translation of the Wannsee conference minutes  noted that the participants at the conference were mostly technocrats, one of whom was named Martin Luther.

The conference duration was "only an hour".  Another site on the Wannsee Conference offers this statement:

Marshall Rosenberg, who teaches non-violent communication, was struck in reading psychological interviews with Nazi war criminals not by their abnormality, but that they used a language denying choice: "should," "one must," "have to." For example, Adolph Eichmann was asked, "Was it difficult for you to send these tens of thousands of people [to] their death?" Eichmann replied, "To tell you the truth, it was easy. Our language made it easy." Asked to explain, Eichmann said, "My fellow officers and I coined our own name for our language. We called it amtssprache -- 'office talk.'" In office talk "you deny responsibility for your actions. So if anybody says, 'Why did you do it?' you say, 'I had to.' 'Why did you have to?' 'Superiors' orders. Company policy. It's the law.'"

I found this chilling. 

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum declares that the origins of "the Final Solution" are unclear, yet the genocide of the Jews was the culmination of a decade of  Nazi policies. A placard at the museum noted:  "In the course of the final solution and under appropriate direction, the Jews are to be utilized for work in the East in a suitable manner.  In large labour columns and separated by sexes, Jews capable of working will be dispatched to these regions to build roads, and in the process a large number of them will undoubtedly drop out by way of natural reduction."

Although Heinrich Himmler is the acknowledged "architect" of the Holocaust, Reinhard Heydrich was the chair of the Wannsee Conference.

The Jewish Virtual Library says he "stood out as one of the cruelest and most brutal mass murderers in Nazi Germany."  A lifelong anti-semite, he joined the Nazi party after being discharged from the Navy.  Himmler was godfather to his oldest son.

After Kristallnacht, Heydrich saw to the arrest of 26,000 German Jews who were then  sent to concentration camps.  The next year he ordered Jews into ghettoes.  He was also behind Einsatzgruppen executions  of Jews in the Soviet Union.

Hitler had appointed Heydrich as the Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia in the fall of 1941.  His responsibilities included squelching the Czech resistance and transporting Czech Jews to Poland.  At the end of May 1942, "two Czech patriots, Jan Kubis and Josef Gabcik, parachuted from Britain into Prague, ambushed Heydrich's Mercedes and threw a bomb into the front seat."  Heydrich, mortally wounded, died days later on June 4, 1942.  We saw this monument to Operation Anthropoid, the code name for the attack, on our way to and from Terezin.

Adolf Eichmann was responsible for deportations of Jews.  According to a description at the Wannsee House museum, he compiled the protocol of the Wannsee Conference.

Eichmann is famous for having escaped to Argentina in 1950.  He was finally apprehended by Israeli agents ten years later, and executed in Jerusalem in 1962.

The entire Wannsee Conference meeting lasted about 90 minutes (some sites suggest it was only one hour, regardless it didn't take them long to do this evil work).  Beyond spelling out the details of the Final Solution, one of the objectives of the conference was to resolve conflicts between the SS and the German Civil administration in Poland.  Additionally, the conference was charged with addressing the issues of whether or not to deport the Mischlinge, people of mixed .blood, and those in mixed marriages.

Beyond the minutes and records encased in the rooms off the the entry hall, there are also placards offering the perspectives of survivors, including Primo Levi.

Levi's comment is:  "I felt as if everyone should ask us questions, read from our faces who we were and numbly listen to our story.  But no one looked us in the eye, no one took up the challenge.  They were deaf, dumb and blind, shut inside their ruins as if in a fortress of deliberate ignorance, still strong, still able to hate and to despise, still trapped and caught up in a web of arrogance and guilt."

Ever since I started studying the Holocaust, I have heard stories of how, after the war, no one wanted to hear these stories.  There are a number of explanations for the attitude of those alluded to by Levi including guilt, shame and disbelief.

The museum has a number of other displays, including some art.

The Women of Ravensbrück  by Helen Ernst, 1946

Art in the camps was forbidden, but each of the camps I've visited have featured art.  Some of it, such as this Ernst piece, was based on memory.

The museum offers interesting archives and displays, such as this "death book" from Mauthausen.

As the images included here show, the museum has a number of displays from other camps.  This one reminded me of the problems of displaced persons following the war.

This is a view inside one of the women's barracks at Bergen Belsen on April 18, 1945 after liberation.

There was an interesting exhibit on antisemitism

This old saw regarding the "blood libel" was something which still had shocking resonance in the mid-twentieth century.  The phrase, "Die Juden sind unser Unglück!" appeared at the bottom of every issue of Julius Streicher's propaganda rag.

The Wannsee site is truly beautiful.

By the time our visit was complete, the sun had come out and we had a lovely view of the lake.

Our next stop was the Topography of Terror museum.

This indoor/outdoor museum is worthy of much greater attention than I was able to give it at the end of a long travel day.  It's located on the site where a number of buildings important to the Nazi era still stand.

The longest extant portion of the Wall is located here.

We were lucky to catch an exhibit on a secret euthanisia program code-named T-4.

It was such a shame to have to cut this short.  It's particularly unfortunate since it was just a temporary exhibit.