Friday, November 3

Our final day began with a lovely bus-ride through the Berlin countryside to an elegant villa on a lake, where members of the Nazi leadership planned the systematic murder of Europe’s Jews.

The villa has recently been turned into a holocaust museum, which we explored under the thoughtful direction of our guide. During its course, he touched on many topics, including the rather common perception in Germany that the people were largely unaware of the mass killings of Jews. He shattered this illusion. Before the construction of Auschwitz, the Wehrmacht, the Nazi army, and its killing squads gunned down over one million Jews in the former Soviet Union. Millions of German soldiers fought during this first wave of the Soviet Campaign, and thus to deny their participation and familiarity, and the flow of information between them and their loved ones is beyond fact and good sense.

Our guide also explained that the extermination of the Jews was not Hitler’s original intention, nor were the means already pre-determined. The Nazis’ primary goal was to remove the Jews from Germany in order to create Liebenstraum, living space for the Third Reich. And in the war’s earlier years they sought the deportation of German Jews to Eastern Europe and even considered sending them to Madagascar. It wasn’t until the Soviet Campaign in 1941 that the Nazis followed orders to murder Jews en masse. And finally on January 20, 1942, senior Nazi officials (including Adolf Eichmann who took notes) met at the Wannsee Villa to elevate the issue of the Jews’ extermination and develop a systematic plan to execute it with swiftness and efficiency.

Like the experience at the Jewish Museum, the space was perhaps more meaningful than the exhibition. The setting at Wannsee could not have been more idyllic, to the contrary of the meeting, which could not have been more horrific. This juxtaposition between the villa and the death camps only illustrates the depravity of those individuals who planned genocide in a setting that instead ought to evoke the desire to venerate and protect nature and all of its creatures.

Or might it be more complicated than that? Even after we learned in great detail about the conference and the events leading up to it, we somehow found ourselves taking group photos at its entrance, with bright eyes and smiles. In some strange way, we become disconnected from reality, from what this deceptively lovely villa truly represents to us and all of civilization. And therefore it is absolutely imperative for us to not only remember the evil that happened there, but also to keep in mind how easy it is to get distracted, to forget, or even become numb to it.

And it was thus entirely fitting for us, immediately following the visit at Wannsee, to embark on a tour of just a couple of the many memorials dedicated to the Holocaust’s victims. Our first site was Track 17 at the Grunewald Train Station. From there, the Nazis deported tens of thousands of German Jews to their deaths. Then we visited the Memorial to the Levetzow Synagogue, which was one of the places Jews were forced to gather before their fateful trip East. And finally, we stopped by the old and desecrated Jewish cemetery, where we paid our respects to the site that the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn is believed to have been buried, and recited Kaddish near the only remainig tombstones. Although this afternoon’s activity was titled a “Tour of Jewish Berlin,” it might have been more accurate and precise to describe it as a “Tour of the Dead Jews in Berlin and How They Are Remembered.”

We then met with Christian Staffa, Executive Director of Action Reconciliation Service for Peace , and Thomas Lutz, Head of the Memorial Museum Department, Foundation Topography of Terror to discuss the ways in which Germany remembers and copes with the Holocaust. The latter organization confronts the Holocaust from a perspective quite different from what we had observed in the previous few hours. Rather than focus on memorializing the victims, Lutz seeks to document the perpetrators. And he reminded us that the German Nazis did not act alone – there were many other collaborators across the Continent.

Of course, where responsibility ends, accountability begins. Staffa’s organization, the ARSP, operates under the presumption of German guilt and seeks reconciliation with the peoples and countries that suffered under Nazi occupation. Over 180 long-term volunteers work in foreign countries ranging from Belarus to Israel to the United States with the intention of performing good deeds and learning about other cultures. Its reach is obviously quite impressive; even more so because the volunteers’ experiences stay with them for a lifetime. And by the end of our discussions, I realized that we had come a long way from the Wannsee Conference.

Later that evening I learned that Jewish life in Berlin was livelier than that day’s tour had suggested. Most of us in the group had decided to attend Shabbat Services at the Neue Synagogue on Oranienbugerstrasse . When we showed up ten minutes late, we had to be escorted to our seats because so few remained. The rather traditional service was easy to follow -- it was in Hebrew -- and the Rabbi accommodated our language deficiencies by summarizing portions of the German sermon in English.

And probably everything else about the evening defied the synagogue’s earlier traditions. For one, the service was held in a small chapel on the top floor because the main sanctuary had been bombed out by the Allies. Furthermore, today’s congregation’s history is also likely to be quite different: it was founded by two communities – one gay/lesbian and the other feminist. And yet the majority of the people in attendance were neither gay nor lesbian, but Eastern European. Both rabbi and cantor were women, and the rabbi, to my surprise, was a German convert.

In many ways I think this congregation offered a representative sample of the larger Jewish community in Berlin – small, yet engaged; traditional, yet progressive; German, yet multicultural. I loved it.