Exberliner Issue 167, January 2018

TRAINS
SPOTLIGHT
Endstation Grunewald
This month marks the 20th anniversary of Gleis 17, one of
Berlin’s least known but most powerful Holocaust memorials.
By Amy Leonard. Photos by Pavel Mezihorák
The platform at Grunewald station onto
which you disembark is unremarkable.
There’s a main road to one side, loud
with traffic. The stark black-and-white signs
pointing the way to “Gleis 17” (track 17) are unremarkable
too; no description, no explanation,
just those words. Were you only here for a hike,
you could walk past them without a thought.
You descend into the tunnel connecting
the platforms to the outside world, but instead
of heading off towards the forest, you
re-ascend a staircase and emerge onto the
platform for Gleis 17. Save for a few Israeli
tourists, it’s completely empty, as is the
track itself. As you can tell from the vegetation
rising up from between the railroad ties,
no train has been here for a long time.
It was from this exact platform, on
October 18, 1941, that the first deportation
of Jews happened in Berlin; 1013
people crammed onto a train bound for the
Łódź ghetto in Poland. In total, over 50,000
members of Berlin’s Jewish population were
deported from Gleis 17 to Warsaw, Riga,
Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, amongst
other ghettos and concentration camps.
At the time, Grunewald was a much larger
rail station, with 17 tracks, and it was not
by chance that this particular spot was the
point of departure for the transports. “The
platform was deliberately developed by the
Reichsbahn solely for the deportation of
people,” says Nigel Dunkley, a British historian
and tour guide. The platform’s location
on the outskirts of the city and its position
on the edge of the rail complex were ideal
because “deportation could be carried out
without people seeing”. Every aspect of the
platform’s location was carefully thought out.
“It is on elevated ground, so it’s not easily
visible from below by normal passengers. It’s
a dead end, with the only exit for rail traffic
facing east. And it’s immediately accessible to
columns of deportees being marched to the
station on foot.” This said, Grunewald was a
densely populated area, and it is hardly conceivable
that so many Jews could be marched
to the station without residents noticing.
Today, 186 large cast-iron plates line the
platform on both sides, the edges nearest
the track itself inscribed with the date,
number of deportees and destination of
every transport that left this place between
1941 and 1945. Reading the words, you can
follow the course of WWII, of the rise and
fall of the Nazis; the change from ghettos to
death camps as time went on, the swell in
numbers of deportees to Auschwitz after the
gas chambers were built in 1942, the change
of destination when the Red Army advanced
further west. It’s simple and stark, and in being
both, quite devastating.
Commemorative efforts date back from
1953, when a plaque was installed but swiftly
removed after it was suspected that the
initiators were a communist group. A local
women’s church group laid a small memorial
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EXBERLINER 167