Day Three Berlin - Remembering

In 1996 “Der verlassene Raum” (The Deserted Room), a bronze sculpture by

Karl Biedermann, was erected at the Koppenplatz park. It's a heartbreaking memorial to the Jews deported from the surrounding neighborhoods.

A work by Christian Boltanski, from 1990, located on Grosse Hamburger Strasse, across the street from the Jewish School, not very far from the New Synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse. The missing building was destroyed in WW2. Some of its former residents were Jews. Boltanski constructed there “a memorial space dedicated to absence”. The signs on the walls indicate the names, dates of birth and death and profession of the former residents.

 The Jewish School on Grosse Hamburger Strasse was founded in 1862. It was closed by the Nazis in 1942, and used as a deportation station.

Jewish Memorial Cemetery - In 1943, this cemetery was destroyed on the orders of the Gestapo. The Nazis razed the graves and turned the entire grounds into air raid shelters whose walls were reinforced with demolished headstones. The Jewish old people’s home next door to the cemetery became a transit camp for Berlin Jews destined for deportation. More than 55,000 Jews were deported from there to the extermination camps in “the east.”

Monument commemorating the deportation of the Berlin Jews: also on Grosse Hamburger Strasse, there is this monument, commemorating the deportation of some 55,000 Jews from Berlin. It stands before the oldest Jewish cemetery in Berlin, dating from 1672. The cemetery was completely destroyed by the Gestapo, and it holds today only one reconstructed grave, that of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn.

New Synagogue was consecrated on Rosh ha-Shanah in 1866. It was designed in the Moorish style by the Berlin architect Eduard Knobloch. It was destroyed during the war and rebuilt.