Let's try something new

I feel really bad that I haven't been updating my blog at all, so I'm going to try a picture a day project that a friend of mine is doing - I will post a single photo (I will try to do it once a day) and talk about it - it will be probably past photos from things I've seen or done already on this trip. I hope this is something that I can consistently keep up with. It's really hard though, to keep up with anything here,  I am constantly struggling to keep up with my work.



Here we go: These photos were taken on February 23rd, 2014 in Berlin at the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe.

I started by sitting on the cold concrete, feeling the smooth polished grain against my finger tips and letting its cold seep into my body. I allow that coldness to chill my body, to slow the beating of my heart, to focus my eyes and mind. It doesn't seem like that powerful from this vantage point. That's the point I guess, hatred and evil never looks like it has true existence in our lives from this perspective. Yet, you can't deny that you can see it growing and rising and all you can do is begin to pull yourself up and follow the path within. 

It is the most powerful monument I have ever experienced in my life. That's simply what it is, an experience. You can not comprehend it just by reading about it or looking at it from a distance. You must walk inside of it to understand it. You can enter it from any direction you choose and take whichever path within your feet decide to follow. You make yourself lost in the center of these monoliths with the weight of this dark human legacy pressing on your already aching soul. You are forced to face the nature of what happened, that human beings in this world were capable of allowing for and orchestrating such a genocide. You can see the exits in every direction, you are deluded into thinking that the end is so close and you can leave it at any moment, but you can not escape it without walking through it first. The deeper you go, the longer it takes to come out on the other side. 

Once you do find the other side, you see that the stones have shrunk in size, but they do not fully reach the ground, a reminder that such things never go away. We must always be active participants in keeping hatred and ignorance at bay. We have to be conscious participants in this crazy world to avoid the perpetuation of the banality of evil. We all have the potential for such destruction again. 

Berlin chooses to never forget that past. Instead of simply erasing it from the history books, it chooses to act as a monument to that past for the world. It takes quite a progressive type of world view to perform such a role. I realized then just how much I believe in the power for global change that happens in the type of city, the type of people, who would try to take up such a task.