Day 13: The Holocaust Memorial (Venice)

Hi, Venice here!

Today, we went to the Holocaust Memorial. We started out by taking the U-Bahn, and then we walked the wrong way for about half a mile. After correcting the mistake, we were able to get to the memorial. 

I immediately noticed one thing about it, the cement blocks where all rectangles. But, I saw when I looked over all of them that they were not perfect rectangles. Some leaned left, some were taller on one side. It made me think, every person that this memorial represented was different, just like the blocks, yet they had one thing in common, they were jewish, and the block where all rectangles and cement.

Photo on right by Venice

Later that day my mom would tell me that the two artists (americans, interestingly) had never given an interpretation. They wanted all of us to make up our own. As we walked through the aisles, we saw that the shadows on nearby blocks were interesting. One way, to the left, was almost a shadow imprint of a city. The other way, to the right, the shadows where pointy and like spikes. It made me think that even the shadow acknowledged that we moved on from spikes to the peace of the city. And at the time, I wasn’t in the middle, so the city part looked bigger and longer, as if saying the past was fading, but forever, and that we should go on to greater things.

Photo on left by Venice

Part of me really wanted to run through the maze of stone, playing night watch (you can go to Xander's and my post on IKEA to learn about it), but it would have been disrespectful. We saw one or two people who were jumping from block to block, the 2 feet tall ones, of course. Not the giant 13 feet tall ones. 

At one point we saw at the edge that they had put a QR code into the ground. When mom scanned it with her phone it gave us an audio tour! They also had some stairs at the edge that went to an underground exhibit. But this exhibit might have been a little too intense, so we decided to skip it. We walked to an ice cream stand and got a cone.

As we walked back an Italian tourist came up to us and asked for directions. His english was very good, so we were able to communicate and help him. He told us he was touring Berlin and came from south Italy. When we told him how we had just been in Venice, he said that Venice was a 1 hour bus ride away. I’m sooo jealous! We walked him to the U-Bahn station and he took an U-Bahn with us for a stop, then switched. Hopefully he made it to his destination, another Holocaust museum. 

We got off the U-bahn and walked home. The end to a successful trip!