ROOTS & REMEMBRANCE
Standing in the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. Meant to mimic grave stones, and erected in unending rows, you are forced you to move through the columns alone, meditating on the inconceivable horror of the Holocaust. —
"Places of Remembrance is made up of 80 signs in public space. On one side of each sign there is a text that reflect upon the anti-Jewish regulations and laws, the letters and the eyewitness reports."
These anti-Jewish laws passed throughout the 1930s and 40s, little by little whittling away Jew's rights, are the incremental steps that would lead to the eventual deportation and mass extermination of Jews. It is an important lesson as to why the denial of fundamental rights today – whether it be the criminalization of immigrants to mass incarceration – must be something we fight against with every fiber of our beings.
At the the Grunewald S-Bahn train station on the western outskirts of Berlin. Between autumn 1941 and spring 1942, deportation trains carrying over 50,000 of Berlin Jews to ghettos and extermination camps in the east departed from this train station.
Today, as part of the Gleis 17 Memorial, trees grow between the tracks, signifying that never again will another train leave from this station.
The mass graves of the Treblinka Extermination Camp. During this time, it is estimated that somewhere between 700,000 and 900,000 Jews died in its gas chambers, along with 2,000 Romani people.
Treblinka was also the site of the Treblinka Death Camp Revolt. On August 2, 1943, prisoners launched their revolt, seizing weapons from the SS storeroom. The resistance leaders fought bravely to aid the escape of the inmates and many prisoners broke through the camp’s barbed-wire fences.
Of an estimated 300 inmates who escaped from Treblinka that day, about 100 survived.
The Odessa Jewish Heritage Cemetary in Białystok, Poland, where many killed during the 1905 Pogrom are buried. The 1905 Pogrom against Jews in Odessa was the most brutal of the period, with reports of up to 2,500 Jews killed.