Memorial to the Sinti and Roma of Europe
Why is it significant?
Step through the glass panels into the clearing and you find yourself at the edge of a perfectly round pool, its water so dark it looks like a hole in the earth. In the middle sits a small triangular stone, and on it, a single fresh flower.
Key Facts
| Place | Memorial to the Sinti and Roma of Europe |
|---|---|
| Address | Simsonweg, 10557 Berlin, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.51730, 13.37600 |
| Part of Walk | Glass Dome and Golden Angel: Berlin's Reichstag, Tiergarten & Victory Column |
| Generated | Generated |
Step through the glass panels into the clearing and you find yourself at the edge of a perfectly round pool, its water so dark it looks like a hole in the earth. In the middle sits a small triangular stone, and on it, a single fresh flower. Listen for a moment... somewhere, very quietly, a violin is playing one long, sustained note.
This is the Memorial to the Sinti and Roma of Europe murdered under National Socialism, designed by the Israeli artist Dani Karavan and opened in October 2012. Historians estimate that up to half a million Sinti and Roma were killed, shot behind the front lines in the East, starved in ghettos, gassed in Auschwitz-Birkenau. The triangle in the water recalls the triangular badges prisoners had to wear in the camps.
The persecution began right here in Berlin, earlier than many people think. In the summer of 1936, just before the Olympic Games, the police rounded up Sinti and Roma families and forced them into a camp on the edge of the city at Marzahn, between a sewage field and a cemetery. The city wanted to look tidy for the foreign visitors. Many of the people held there were later deported to Auschwitz.
Look at the stone again. Every day it sinks beneath the surface and rises again carrying a new flower, so that the memorial is never left without one. Around the rim, letter by letter, runs a poem by the Italian Roma poet Santino Spinelli, called Auschwitz, about a hollow face, extinguished eyes and a broken heart. The violin is a piece composed for this place by the Sinto musician Romeo Franz.
For decades after the war, the genocide of Sinti and Roma was barely acknowledged. Survivors were often turned away when they asked for compensation, and West Germany only formally recognised it as a racially motivated crime in 1982. Even this memorial took some twenty years of argument to build. Leave the clearing on its south side and follow the edge of the park along Ebertstraße, past the Brandenburg Gate, to a grey concrete block standing among the trees.