The moving Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. Photo / 123RF
The moving Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. Photo / 123RF
On a freezing evening in Berlin, Ewan McDonald walks among the ghosts of those who paid the ultimate price for a new life.
I'm walking. I've been walking along this grimy street of cafes and bookshops and grocery stores, leaving behind the imperial boulevards and boutiques and galleries and offices and embassies, for an hour. It reminds me of Dominion Rd: a street that has seen better times, takes one step into seediness with each shopfront.
But this is Berlin. Given the past century, heaven - if there is such a place - only knows what better times were. Before World War I? Before Kristallnacht? Before the Shoah, the Holocaust? Before the city was divided?
It's cold. Four degrees when I left the hotel. It will be dark by 4pm.
I check the directions scrawled in my notebook. Plunge into the side streets. Apartment buildings. Language schools. Corner bars, neighbourhood restaurants.
At the end of the street is a park. Grass. Space. Light. People ambling, chatting. Trees, behind that wall. On that corner there will be a store where I can get a drink and a sandwich.
Except that this is not a park. I walk along a quiet suburban street where kids play and electric cars are plugged into community recharging ports - and into the reality of a civil-engineered killing machine. Twenty-five years after it fell, this is the longest, best-preserved and most graphic remnant of the Berlin Wall.
I grew up seeing blurry, grey images of "the Wall" on the TV news. We thought it was a haphazard construction that wouldn't have got past the first round of The Block. We wondered why halfway-decent athletes couldn't pole-vault over it to freedom. After all, East Germany bred wonder Olympians.
Now I understand why. There was the outer wall, several metres high, with barriers in the earth to stop cars or trucks driving up to it. Then the 20m death strip, where guards could pick off fools who dared to tread. Strips of buried lights and alarms along no man, or woman's land. Searchlights. Guardhouses. Machine guns.
It is deathly - I choose that word - quiet here. For centuries it was the parish cemetery. The East German state commandeered it and barricaded off a street and laid its killing field over the graves of the suburb's citizens.
A few visitors walk among the grass and twisted iron and crumbling concrete, read the dispassionate, factual captions on the relics, look at the photos of more than 100 people who died at this corner for wanting to cross the street to freedom. Most are tourists, some are German. That might be her uncle in the photo on the memorial gallery: shot, aged 22. That might be his father: border guard, killed by his comrades, for the mistake of not shooting his neighbour.
I turn back to the city, stumble across something on the pavement and look down to see what it is. A small bronze circle, 10cm across. A name. A date. He died here, trying to breach the Berlin Wall. He and hundreds like him.
On the way here, I walked through Checkpoint Charlie. In the middle of tourist and shopping Berlin, it was jam-packed with sightseers, mostly American. They posed for photos with young men dressed in US Army uniforms and pretending to drill with the Stars and Stripes.
It felt like Disneyland, especially with the McDonald's and Burger King and Starbucks and souvenir hawkers. Still, Berlin and Germany, the dynamic dictators of Angela Merkel's Europe, exist only because of the drive and commitment of the United States during the 50s, 60s, 70s.
The Holocaust Memorial on the day of its official opening in Berlin. Photo / Supplied
Maybe, at this inner-city intersection where a capitalist island once met a communist continent, it was the perfect metaphor.
Imperial Berlin. I am making for the Topography of Terror and never was a place better named.
This was the headquarters of the Gestapo and SS, those records-obsessed bureaucracies of fear and annihiliation that conceived the Holocaust.
And more than that: the extermination of the Romany. Homosexuals. Liberals. Intellectuals. Poets. Artists. French. Polish. People with bad haircuts.
It is not just because of the weather that I am chilled in this dull, menacing, grey, concrete, lowering archive. Perhaps I identify with several of those groups. If you were standing among these photos, these archives, you might feel the same. Have hair or eyes of history that marked you as different. Marked you for death.
I see photographs, read captions of the most horrific, ruthless degradation that humans have visited on one another. You have seen the photos so I do not need to describe them. There is no evasion. Only dispassionate recounting of the truth.
Tagging on to a group of teenage students, though I don't speak their language, I watch their faces and their reactions as a guide walks and talks them through the history. They are shocked. This is not a movie. That might be her great-uncle in that photo. That might be his grandfather.
Dusk. The anniversaries tumble through my mind: 25 years since the Wall fell. Seventy since the Reich crumbled and Auschwitz was exposed. One hundred since Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo and Europe's ruling cousins began the mother, father, brothers and sisters of all wars.
A block from the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag, from the glitzy megastores of Potsdamer Place, I lose myself in a wasteland of crafted concrete blocks, discombobulated offset paths, grey and anonymous non-entity. This, in the heart of Berlin, in the heart of the state apparatus that envisaged, codified, sanctioned and executed the Holocaust, is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.
It feels like a cemetery. A cemetery where there are thousands of graves but none has a name or a headstone. At first I don't know how to absorb, assimilate, react. Then I realise that might be the point.
I put my hands and forehead on the nearest, coldest, anonymous slab of concrete and cry.
