The day before I arrived they told me there were flowers all over the streets because it was the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Today, Thursday was still a day of remembrance for me. I am staying temporarily in the Wilmersdorf section of town, which is a beautiful, timeless, upscale residential neighborhood. This was the neighborhood where well-to-do Jews, doctors, scholars, business owners, etc. lived, but Kristallnacht changed all that. There are many remembrance markers here. Here is a photo of 4 of them stating the names of the people who lived there and what happened to them, They say there are 120,000 throughout Berlin. Most of the buildings damaged in the war have either been rebuilt or torn down but here is a ruin not far from where I'm staying, with a picture of what was apparently there originally.
Remembrance continued into the evening. I went to an opening at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien by a group of Roma and Sinti about their experiences during the war. There were several videos of survivors relating their experiences in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, during the war with drawings and paintings by one. What they lacked in skill was compensated for by the strength of her vision. She had one titled "Even the Devil is Afraid of Auschwitz"
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