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Berlin

A street of remembrance

Memorial for the 'Jewish Houses', or Judenhäuser, Duisburger Strasse, Berlin

Not forgotten. We remember.

The words are inscribed on a glass plaque situated in Duisburger Strasse, a well-to-do residential street located just a short walk from Berlin's famed Kurfürstendamm.

Ironically, it goes largely unnoticed by most Berlin visitors - little wonder, perhaps, in a city where far better-known memorials tragically abound.

And yet, in some ways, Duisburger Strasse tells one of Berlin's most immediately poignant tales of loss and persecution.

Its large apartment blocks once served as officially designated 'Jews' Houses'; a last refuge, of sorts, for those who had been forcibly stripped of their own homes and assets.

Jewsih memorial tablet near Kurfürstendamm, Berlin

As the tablet itself states:

More than 100 Jewish citizens endured the misery of displacement from their daily lives in the twenty buildings that line this small Berlin street.

In October 1941, the last chapter of their suffering began with the deportation of Jews from Berlin to ghettos and concentration camps in eastern Europe.

Today's leafy, stolidly bourgeois Duisburger Strasse makes it clear that history can easily be effaced. But the seldom seen story of what took place here must not, indeed, ever be forgotten.

Jewish memorial plaque, Berlin
Duisburger Strasse, Berlin - site of one of the city's most poignant memorials

See also:
A Moabit memorial

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Jewish memorial: Duisburger Straße, 10707 Berlin


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