Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe  -  (Holocaust-Mahnmal)                                               

The New York Times
Holocaust Memorial Opens in Berlin
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN  -  Published: May 11, 2005

BERLIN, May 10 - Germany's much debated and long-awaited Holocaust memorial was officially opened Tuesday here in the very city where the genocide against the Jews was conceived, planned and administered.

"Today we are opening a memorial that commemorates the worst, the most atrocious of the crimes committed by Nazi Germany, the attempt to destroy a whole people," said Wolfgang Thierse, president of the German Parliament, which authorized the construction of the memorial six years ago.

The inauguration ceremony, attended by all the senior members of Germany's government, including Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, took place in a large white tent set up on the edge of the memorial field itself, only yards from the place where Hitler's underground bunker was.

The ceremony, which lasted two and a half hours, consisted of speeches, a short film and a medley of Yiddish and Hebrew songs, apparently intended to remind Berliners of the people and the rich Jewish-German culture that were destroyed.

"The horror touches the limit of our comprehension," Mr. Thierse said. "This memorial acts on the limits of our comprehension." It will serve, he continued, "as a place of memory" for future generations, helping them "to face up to the incomprehensible facts."

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, as it is officially called, was designed by the New York architect Peter Eisenman. It consists mainly of 2,711 gray concrete slabs of varying heights arranged in a tight, waving grid that extends over more than five acres in central Berlin, only a couple of hundred yards from the Brandenburg Gate.
The debates over whether to have such a memorial and what form it should take extend back 17 years, when a small group of private German citizens, led by a television journalist, Lea Rosh, and a historian, Eberhard Jäckel, neither of whom is Jewish, first began pressing for Germany to honor the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust.
Among the rejected proposals was one to inscribe the names of all six million of the victims on an immense tilted concrete surface. Another was to create a Holocaust museum. Other ideas involved a memorial not only to the Jews but to all the victims of Nazism.
The decision in the end to build a field of steles dedicated to the memory of the Jewish victims alone, accompanied by an underground information center, has not been accepted by everybody, including members of Germany's small Jewish community.
Reflecting the continuing disagreements, Paul Spiegel, the president of the Central Council of the Jews in Germany and a speaker at the opening ceremony on Tuesday, expressed what he called "reservations" about the memorial, saying that it was "an incomplete statement."
Specifically, Mr. Spiegel said, by not including non-Jewish victims, the memorial suggests that there was a "hierarchy of suffering," when, he said, "pain and mourning are great in all afflicted families."
In addition, Mr. Spiegel criticized the memorial for providing no information on the Nazi perpetrators themselves and therefore blunting the visitors' "confrontation with the crime."
But in a partial response to Mr. Spiegel, Mr. Eisenman, who followed him to the podium, said, "It is clear that we won't have solved all the problems - architecture is not a panacea for evil - nor will we have satisfied all those present today, but this cannot have been our intention."
By far the most touching moment of the inaugural statement was a quiet speech by Sabina van der Linden, who came with her husband, children and grandchildren from Australia to represent the victims, or, as she put it, to be "the voice of the lucky few, the voice of the survivors."
"Try to imagine me not as the elderly woman before you, but as an 11-year-old girl from a small town in Poland," she said. "As an 11-year-old child, I witnessed unbelievable cruelty."
Ms. van der Linden described how she and her mother tried to hide when the Nazis began to select Jews for deportation, but they were found and separated and her mother was taken away, never to be seen again. She lost her father and her brother as well, she said.

The medley of Hebrew and Yiddish songs that followed the speeches was sung by Joseph Malovany, cantor of the Fifth Avenue Synagogue in New York, accompanied by the choir of the White Stork Synagogue in Wroclaw, Poland, and by the Lower Silesian German-Polish Philharmonic Youth Orchestra.