Going down below the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe to the Information Center was like stepping into the mass graves scattered across these countries. It takes you step by step through the process of how the holocaust came about. It shows you six victims pictures blown up so you can get a sense as to who was targeted.

The first of four rooms gives you numbers in estimation of the Jewish people killed in each of the countries occupied. On the floor in patterns that echo the stelae above there are notes from diaries, letters, postcards thrown from mass transport trains where people stood packed sometimes for 30 plus hours. One that caught my eye was the brief letter to her father saying that they were taking them off to die today and how they wish they could live but alas they are to die.

The second room gives you an image of different families from different regions that were put to death, again on the stelae pattern as above, only now instead of lights on the floor they are pillars that don’t quite reach the ground.

The third is a room where four projectors are constantly telling the stories of different names of individuals that lost their lives and placing their names on the blank walls. I couldn’t stay in this room for very long as it was maddening to hear the monotony with which the speakers told their stories, like listing off numbers on a document, like a roll call when no one is present.

The last is a room of sites where these massive murders took place. You can listen in on stories and brief histories of a few of these places, and then look at the map and see they are only a drop in the bucket of sites. All the while the same undulation that is seen above on the ground you walk through the stelae on can be seen on the ceiling in these chambers. I got a sense of looking from underwater towards the surface of a wave above only there was no image you could see beyond the wave. The wave barred life entrance.

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The Topography of Terror was kind of odd to me. I can understand the choice in architecture and grounds layout. They seem to impose a certain terrible foreboding quality. Maybe it is just because of all of the other images I have seen from World War II, but I couldn’t help but feel like this site didn’t get the point it was trying to make across to the audience as well as some others.

I would say the information is all well laid out and organized according to what part of the National Socialist structure they are wanting to emphasize. I feel like I got the sense that there was supposed to be this feeling that since we can see how this was all laid out we can somehow make sure to never make this same mistake again, but by the end of the hanging placards of information I realized that many of the people who were a part of this regime were never punished for their crimes. It makes a good point though in asking how do you punish any one individual for the crimes committed so anonymously or out of fear of death.

At the beginning I assumed that all of what I saw would be the face of evil and by the end what I saw were terrifying acts of murder under the pressure of a force that no individual could possibly hope to stand up to. The survival instinct of most of these individuals heavily outweighed their ability to do otherwise. That being said, there was something lurking beneath the surface that seemed far to close to home with the situations the world is currently tensioned under.