Gleis 17

Thursday, October 29th

Our class made an excursion this week to what is now my favorite Holocaust related memorial in Berlin. Gleis 17 is a platform at the Grunewald S-Bahn stop where thousands of Jews were packed into train cars and taken to concentration camps like Auschwitz and Theresienstadt. The platform has been rebuilt as a memorial to those Jews who boarded trains there throughout the 1930’s and 40’s. The floor of the platform is made of steel grates upon which dates of departing trains are inscribed along with the number of Jews on each train and the concentration camp which would be their destination. When walking down the platform and reading this information, one can see that trains transporting thousands of Jews to their death departed from the platform on consecutive days. It is obvious that trains no longer run through this platform, as trees have sprouted and grown between the tracks, standing as symbols or measurements of the time that has passed since the platform was used. The memorial was constructed here in the wake of a grassroots movement of mourners who illegally visited the site, which had been closed off by Deutsche Bahn, to pay tribute to those who were murdered in the Holocaust. Hundreds of flowers were laid upon the tracks, and several floral wreaths were placed at one end – we learned later that these had been placed by a high ranking member of Israeli defense forces just a few days earlier. Gleis 17 is my favorite Holocaust memorial because of its original location; it reminded me of how efficiently the Nazi’s murdered millions of Jews during the Holocaust.