I live in Berlin’s former Jewish Quarter and all around me are memorials to the many Jews killed in the Holocaust. Among the cobble stones in the pavement outside my apartment are brass plaques. Each one details the name and age of the former residents of Große Hamburger Straße – and to which concentration camp they were deported.
Just up the street is Berlin’s oldest Jewish cemetery which dates back to the seventeenth century. The German philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn was buried here. In 1943, the cemetery was destroyed by the Gestapo, and the graves desecrated. It was turned into air raid shelters and in April 1945 the bodies of thousands of Berliners killed in allied bombing were brought here.
Across the road from my apartment is a building marked with placards on the wall. Each one names a resident killed in the block that used to stand next door. It was destroyed when the bombs fell one night, killing everyone as they slept.
Next door to me is a Jewish school. It was closed under the Nazis and turned into a deportation camp. The school was reopened in 1993, following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Next to it was a Jewish Home for the Elderly, but this too was closed in the 1940s and turned into a camp for Jews. It was completely destroyed in bombing raids.
And this is just one street in Berlin. There are many more across this city that tell equally harrowing, tragic and moving stories of those Jews murdered by the Nazis.
What I find most humbling about living here, is that Berlin – and Germany in general – has not shied away from its past. It tells the stories in all their horror, so that those lives cut so brutally short are not forgotten. It’s a constant reminder of what humans are capable of. Many other countries could learn from Germany’s honest approach. On this Holocaust Remembrance Day, let’s not forget that.
You can read more detail of what happened on my street here.