What a long, depressing day of witnessing the products of the reign of National Socialism! Although I had already visited the information center under the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, this second experience of it was certainly different in the context of my 4-years-older brain. I consider myself pretty well informed as far as WWII and the Holocaust go, but this memorial is very powerful in that it paints a much more personal picture of the atrocities of the Nazis’ “final solution”. Boris, our tour guide, gave a very interesting and informative talk prior to our entrance into the exhibit, in which he described to us the degree of controversy and the many years of planning and re-planning that went into the construction of the monument and the information center below, and tried (only somewhat successfully) to engage us in a discussion of some of the potential meanings of this intentionally ambiguous memorial. We then proceeded into the exhibit itself, which consists of various rooms with various focus. The first room has rectangles of light on the floor with fragments of writings from survivors and witnesses of the different stages of Jewish persecution in Germany during the Nazi era. One of the most striking of these was a poem written by a Hungarian Jew which gives a vivid description seemingly from the perspective of a living person in one of the mass graves, corpses of his neighbors falling onto him. The next room provides short biographies of different Jewish families from various areas of Nazi occupation, describing their lives and their fates. This was a very sobering experience and Boris’s attempts to entice us to discussion after our trip through the various rooms even less successful.

We then proceeded directly to the Topography of Terror which stands on the former site of the SS headquarters and is dedicated to documenting their rise to power and the subsequent horrors committed by them throughout Europe. At this point, though, it seemed as though everyone–including myself–was pretty much Nazi-ed out for the day, and our lack of enthusiasm was almost certainly apparent to our tour guide.

The best thing about this outing, for me, was seeing the lengths to which modern-day Germany has gone to be transparent about their bloody and terrible past. It was also very heartening to note that neither of these two memorial sites charged entrance fees–perhaps in order to avoid profiting from the atrocious deeds of their past.