Miguel Angel Yuste Madrid, Spain
In a corridor of the Madrid Atocha railway station there’s an astonishing place
where blue is the predominant color and at first glance could be a modern art
gallery. Inside, an incredible silence invites you to meditate but immediately
you’re drawn up to a wide hole in the ceiling where a glass cylinder over the
street level captures the light of the city. In the walls of this cylinder read
sentences in hundreds of languages that reproduce a part of the thousands of
spontaneous messages that covered the walls and halls of the Atocha railway
station during the many days after the bombings that caused 191 deaths in four
trains of the metropolitan railway network of Madrid on the 11 of March, 2004.
So I remember this day, the tragedy, the rising number of deaths growing hour
by hour and these railways where so many times I had passed in the same trains.
Three years after when I visited the monument, the emotion and the astonishing
beauty of the place started to move me, like the hundreds of visitors that, like
me, were forced to look to the sky and I’m sure, like me to think in silence.
Alfonso Romay Berlin, Germany
The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, also known as the Holocaust
Memorial, is a memorial in Berlin to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. It
consists of a 19,000 square meter (4.7 acre) site covered with 2,711 concrete
slabs or “stelae,” arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field. My first impression
was strange. It seems more an art exhibition than a memorial. But when I began
walking into this field of concrete slabs and they were getting taller I felt
confined. Perhaps the confinement that Jewish people felt in death camps. I got
lost only for a few minutes, feeling an intense dissapointment. The surrounding
labyrinth... On the other hand, the weather was sunny. In a rainy and cold day,
it would be even more intense, I think. I saw other tourists smiling, I couldn’t.
Graham Doig Canberra, Australia
The memorial is not particularly somber, with the warm autumn sun shining on
the light sandstone and a few kangaroos hopping around outside. A far cry from
the battlefields of Europe, Africa, and South East Asia where most of those
commemorated lost their lives. Walking around this courtyard close to the
memorial wall, it’s difficult to scale the number of names listed, or the number
of poppies placed by descendants, until you get to the far end and look back.
Suddenly you are struck by the seemingly endless stretch of entries converging to
a blur, a dark sea of tens of thousands of the fallen abruptly punctuated by
violent bursts of red.
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