NOTES FROM BERLIN

I am taking a train, a train from Berlin to Gruenewald. Gruenewald, green wood.  It really is country, if brown rather than green at this time of year, a lovely area once lived in by wealthy Jews. At the railroad station there are  modest signs for Gleis 17. Track 17. Down a long tunnel and up more stairs. The bare long tunnel, I am thinking of what they saw in the way of a tunnel. How they felt. Up the stairs and out, two long platforms. Two parallel tracks. 17. Written  in brass along edge of the platform was every month, the number of Jews boarded and the direction of the train: mostly Teresienstadt but also Riga, Auschwitz, Ravensbruck. Most were 100’s. Juden. But in 1945 April they still rounded up 19, 28 Juden.  April 10, 100 Juden, Teresienstadt. April 11, 100 Juden, Teresienstadt. April 12, 100 Juden, Riga…..

A few flowers were spread by the tracks. At far end a group, a guide was speaking Hebrew to a small quiet group. Appropriate. Outside alongside the rising, a sculpture, relief of several abstract bodies as if etched in the wall, one fit me. I fit myself into the recess. Pretty cafes. When I got back  on my train to Berlin, I thought of where I was going and in what comfort and knowledge. And where I had been.  Not so for them. The Juden. Plenty of photos of them on that very platform or others like it, with their bundles, their children. Me on that platform. With my iPhone. In a warm puffy coat, sun shining. Not shivering huddling unknowing fearful crying clutching my child or husband

I am taking a train, we take taking a train for granted, not thinking of those thousands who took another train, hundreds of trains, no padded seats, no digital signs telling directions or the next stop. Only one stop. Not named. Auschwitz. Only one direction. There. Did those trains back out, turn around, and return empty to Gleis 17? Hosed out? Back and forth, hundreds of trains. Box cars really. So many box cars in 1930s Germany?

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I was walking on the grass, such a lovely spring day in Berlin, sun shining, my coat open for the breeze.  A few other people also walking around. But it was not any old grass area. It was the Death Zone. A no man’s land between two walls, walls that divided Berlin, right down the centre of the street. After too many people had tried and some succeeded jumping from the windows of the houses on the east side, the people were removed and the houses destroyed. In case the death zone does not sound serious enough, that area was as well the cemetery  of the nearby Sophia church. The buried remains of hundreds of people, bodies,  further covered with rubble.  Later people laid flowers at the bottom of the wall.  The Germans do explanatory plaques very well, and there is also a small wall with the photos and names of the more than one hundred people who died trying to cross over the wall in Berlin.

Walking in the Death Zone, over the ghost stations of the underground, stations that were closed by the East, walled up. Walls. The Wall. The Death Zone.

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It was my first outing and bus adventure, the first place I went to visit and the last one I am writing about. Because it is the most affecting, challenging, confronting, surprising, hardest to find words to describe. What I am talking about is the Holocaust Memorial. As you approach it is almost invisible..some low concrete slabs..until you look closer-  looking closer is the operative word throughout-  and they appear as gravestones, coffins. Low grey slabs. Parallel lines of them on cobblestones. Long straight lines, straight as an arrow, they become bigger, taller, always the same oblong shape, but uneven heights. You don’t know which way to go, along the row where the slabs become taller and taller , almost, or are they? Leaning in on you? The shadows of them, on each other adding another dimension of leaning and angles. While all the while the ground, the cobblestones under your feet, moves slightly, as it dips down or rises up almost imperceptibly, an uneven surface on which to walk, up and down gentle rolling hills, dizzy making. You walk along and then for no reason you make a turn and walk in the right angle direction, then parallel again, weaving,  except the lines are so straight, it cannot be called weaving. A vortex? Any one of the rows, the paths with their straight straight direction leading to… The End. The far end. Sometimes other people are glimpsed as they negotiate similarly. Or differently. The same end. Being in it- a sort of maze but a maze is a complex design and this is dead simple- is different than looking at it, from above or the sides, as from a bus or on foot on the outside. As I write I see that all the words I use are a metaphor for all my feelings, and most importantly for all that is represented here- people human beings, Jewish homosexual gypsy human beings, drawn into a straight line vortex to the same end. The end. You are drawn, inexorably.

And then, at one corner, still all grey concrete, a modest staircase going down. Down. To the museum. The interior reflects what is above with oblong square designs. On the floor, as if gravestones, with letters and photos of people seeking escape, not escaping. Personal vivid stories, stories of human beings, men and women, children. You and I. Not. More on the walls. Maps of routes, photographs of…every stage of the process. The rounding up. Maps of the extermination centres, I had no idea there were so many dotted over what is now considered Europe. Into Russia. Explicit photos of these places , some, Auschwitz and Teresienstadt are familiar, most not. Photos of the mass graves, the pits, the bodies. Of human beings. Men and women and children, stripped bare, naked. The holocaust. The memorial.

Not everyone visits. As many (non) reasons as people? I could not not. Not visit.