Finally, The Jewish Walking Tour. We met our guide at the Hackescher Market stop. I'll I'll is an Israeli whose grandfather was a German, so had an interesting perspective. Another grandfather was friendly with an SS officer. Before the roundup he alerted him and arranged for an escape boat, which saved his family's life. Later this SS officer was on trial in Nuremberg, and the grandfather testified on his behalf. He became only one of two German officers who were acquitted. Our three and a half hour walk covered no more than a square mile in what once was the Jewish quarter. The first stop was quite dramatic at Rosenstrasse. A small park there has the footings of what was a large synagogue built in the 1700s. On that block was the local Gestapo headquarters. In 1942? There was a roundup of Jewish men, including those married to Aryan women. They were held in a building there, but were eventually freed because of the dramatic, unrelenting protest of the women; wives, mothers and children, standing in the cold not giving up. Nearby we went to a workshop that employed blind Jews to make brooms. The Christian man Otto Weith? used his wiles and bribery to keep them safe from the Gestapo. A number of them survived because of his generosity. We walked through now upscale courtyards with chic stores and restaurants, which used to house families of Jews before the war. Also in the neighborhood is a memorial park that was the first Jewish cemetery in Berlin. Later it was a deportation point for concentration camps. A dramatic sculpture of the "musselman" although all women, stands before the gates. Nearby there is a place where there is a gap in the houses where an apartment used to stand. On the walls of the remaining houses on the sides are painted the names of the former residents of the missing house, many of them Jews. As well, we looked at a small brass plate that was placed in the bricks and cement in front of the space. Throughout Berlin, and maybe Germany , these small (4"sq?) bronze plates are embedded in the sidewalks in front of houses where Jews lived before the holocaust. Nancy tells us that our friends Debbie and Hannah arranged for one either in front of the house or synagogue in Mannheim of their father, Rabbi Rosenthal. They are called "stumble blocks" and are slightly raised, so people will have to take notice of them and remember what occurred. The ones in more travelled streets have a shinier cast. We also walked into the courtyard of a Catholic hospital where the sisters hid Jewish children in the contagious disease ward as patients, so no Gestapo would want to nab them. Towards the end of the war, German boys were forced to wear military uniforms and fight. Two young kids became frightened and ran into the hospital. The nuns buried their uniforms at night and kept them safe for the duration.
The afternoon was reserved for The Jewish Museum. This is the structure designed by Daniel Lebskind. Attached to the traditional looking edifice is a somewhat disturbing dark grey building in a zig zag configuration. The exhibits about Jews in Germany are arranged in chronological order from the Middle Ages to the present. The most interesting presentations were of the 20th century. Again, we were made aware of how assimilated the German Jews were, brought home by the fact that they were more than eager foot soldiers for the glory of the fatherland in WWI . Unfortunately their service and zeal was of no consequence not even 20 years later when they were the targets of hate and discrimination. After 3 hours, we were spent. A pizza restaurant was a partial antidote to the heavy day of contemplating the worst and sometimes the best of what humans are capable of doing to their fellow man.
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