– These, here at the edge, are like graves. Not coffins, they are the size and shape of graves, Each one at our feet a grave for an individual.
– Look, the whole structure rises to the middle like a hill. The separate blocks build a landscape.
– Then, as you move in, the blocks get higher. They are not one person. Person on person on person, stacked …
– It’s like a hill, but then there is an umbrella, and then a head, then shoulders, and one person and another and another emerges from inside. And at the same time, people walking and disappearing into the hill.
– Toward the centre, the blocks tower over you. All those people, all those people … piled …
– Have you noticed also, the ground is uneven, it rolls and drops as the stelae get taller?
– Out here, at the edge, there are blocks missing. They are not placed regularly. There are wide spaces in between.
– At first the blocks seem to be regular, uniform, identical, grey, anonymous …
– As you go further in, they crowd you, stand over you, overpower you. It becomes oppressive.
– …then, look, not one is the same, standing at different heights, erected at varying angles. Even different patterns of rain on the concrete. Every one an individual.
– Also, have you noticed, it’s …
– Walking into the hill, from the sunshine, the stones standing higher and higher around you, and it’s …
– cold.
– cold.
– …
– It makes me think of descending into a barrow beneath standing stones. The rock cistern beneath the Senate where captive kings were strangled. The final walk, down, knowing
– All those people
kestrelart 
Powerful and moving post – I’ve been to this memorial in Berlin. Your images are amazing.
I think this is one of the best, most moving pieces you have done
You are, by doing this, helping these cruelly-abbreviated lives, live again through your art-remembrance. Thank you.
Thank you.
I realise this has lived with me since childhood. Seeing the remnants of Auschwitz and hearing the words of Jacob Bronowski on television in the 1070s stayed with me life long, a cornerstone of how I see the world. I have written more in a second post on this subject. Sometime I also need to write about historian John Grenville, whom I had the privilege to know late in his life, and who talked to me a little of his childhood in Berlin and his escape on the Kinder Transport.
My best friend in 1950s grade school–Janie–had parents who spoke in a decidedly German accent. It wasn’t unusual to me, because my father, a German pastor, had a congregation made up of recently arrived post-war German immigrants. Much later I saw Janie’s mother on a PBS TV programme, describing how she and her physicist husband were rescued at the last minute in 1939 Vienna by faculty members of MIT. And later I learned how members of my father’s congregation had secrets and Nazi involvements they wanted to stay hidden. I personally discovered LIFE magazines kept away from our coffee table, and so learned as a young boy of Auschwitz by staring at those photographs. I married a Jew and became a pastor, and was a member of Jewish/Christian Dialogue, Montreal, and visited Yad Vashem in 1989. Your paintings speak to me in multiple ways–and I thank you.
In turn, thank you, for sharing your story. I value it.
Very strong and moving. Thanks Neil.
Thanks Leonie. Its not exactly our conversation as we walked there but its based on what I remember
Ah, the description is superb. Deep-going.
Thank you
It came from just talking with my wife. It’s not exactly a verbatim account, but what I took from it was we each saw this memorial differently.
Words and images for No-Words.(K)
That makes sense.