A Noble Past
The Brandenburg Gate marks the end of Unter den Linden boulevard, lined with beautiful linden trees that are meticulously cared for.This largest avenue in Berlin – comparable to the Champs-Élysées in Paris, which also features a historically significant Arc de Triomphe – is the road that connects the Brandenburg Gate with Charlottenburg, the former Prussian palace.
Charlottenburg is the largest palace in Berlin, built in the late 17th to early 18th century, which was destroyed during World War II and has been under restoration and reconstruction since 2013.This work is still ongoing. A way to preserve history, cherish the past…
Not only do they preserve modern history and certainly the history before that, but the recent painful history is also preserved by the Germans.South of the Brandenburg Gate is a memorial with a rather long name: Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe – Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas.But it is often referred to simply as the Holocaust Memorial – Holocaust-Mahnmal.
The memorial was started in early April 2003 and completed in mid-December 2004. It was opened to the public on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II – on May 10, 2005.
Located on a 19,000 square meter plot of land like a park, but without trees, it consists of nearly 3,000 fake graves made of dull gray concrete, with equal width and length (2.38 x 0.95 meters), varying heights (from 0.2 to 4.8 meters, some taller than a person’s head).All of this creates a bleak, somewhat suffocating scene, evoking a sense of sorrow and coldness for those who enter, making them reflect.Is that the intention of the memorial’s creator?
Here, the names of about three million Jews murdered by the Nazis are also inscribed.That is, only about half of the Jewish population in Europe was massacred by that brutal regime.According to some historians, it should also include the five million non-Jewish victims who were killed by the Nazis.Because of the so-called “Aryan master race”…
Suddenly, I remembered the story in a historical novel by the French writer Robert Merle that I read more than 50 years ago about the life of a German Nazi officer in charge of a Jewish extermination camp during World War II.That is the book “La mort est mon métier” which was translated into Vietnamese: Death is my profession.The tone is so calm that it borders on coldness; the author merely describes the events, allowing the readers to draw their own conclusions.Very close to the style of traditional journalistic reporting.
And thinking further: Surely in the future, the whole world must come together to build a memorial for those who died due to the Covid pandemic.Where should it be placed? Maybe at the United Nations headquarters, or at the capital of the country that suffered the heaviest human losses due to the wicked Corona…
