Jüdisches Gemeindehaus

Albert Fichter’s 09.11.1969 target.

Memorials continually fascinate me. There is a general correspondence of names to geographic location here, except for the third where there’s not. The names are a mixture of camps, extermina­tion sites, and ghettoes. The large Star of David next to these names reminds me of what contested terrain The Holocaust™ is: the sign at Gardelegen pointing out the term „holocaust“ was first used to refer to Gardelegen, a sign at Stutthof stating that 43% of the prisoners were Jewish — another way to read that, of course, is that over half the prisoners were not Jewish — the Polish barrack display at Auschwitz insistence on reminding visitors of the Poles at Auschwitz seeming a bit over the top until I saw it in the context of other displays, the street display in downtown Kiev giving a history of concentra­tion camps that included their use in 19th Century Africa and in WW I, the KZs initially being for political prisoners and undesirables, the imprisonment of Jehovah’s Witnesses, the huge number of Soviet POWs killed. And on and on, I guess.

Bookmark the permalink.