Research : Movement and tonality of the void spaces – 28. July
On my way back from Potsdam, I step out at the station Gruenewald, to visit the platform 17 /Mahnmal Gleis 17.
“From the platform 17, between in the fall 1941 to the spring 1942, about 10,000 German Jews were deported to concentration- and labour camps and mostly murdered. Besides Riga (Latvia) and Warsaw (Poland), the destination camps were the Auschwitz-Berkenau (Poland) and Theresienstadt (Czech). Of the total of over 10,000 Berlin Jews, over 30,000 were deported from the Güterbahnhof Moabit and just under 10,000 from the Anhalter Bahnhof.” – www.berlin.de
The Deutsche Bahn AG established the memorial with the architect Nikolaus Hirsch, Wolfgang Lorch, Andrea Wandel and open on the national Remembrance Day [Tag des Gedenkens an die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus] on 27.January 1998.
There is only the date of the train’s departure, the number of people on board and the destination – the only facts that really need to be remembered – on an iron plate stuck to the platform. But as I walked the platform reading through the plates, that unimaginable amount of numbers, in contrast to the emptiness at the end of the empty track, overwhelmed me.
There I met a family, father and daughter. The father said that he used to visit my colleague’s Improvisation class at Tanzfabrik, so we talked a little.
He said, although as a child, he remember that he used to board repeatedly taught about the Holocaust, but now as a father he concern that more and more people lost their interest on the history. They ware on their way to a forest hike, but then she said she haven’t been the platform, so he decided to bring her shortly.
As we talked the daughter was sat on the platform and started collecting the broken ceramic plates written ‘Never again’ in many language.
記憶の文化 / Erinnerungskultur, The Culture of Remembrance
=
償い / Versöhnung, reconciliation,
祈り / Gebet, Player
願い / Wünsch, Wish
次世代への行動 / action for the future generation
and
希望 / Hoffnung, Hope