Germany opens new memorial to the Holocaust

BERLIN — Germany dedicated its new national Holocaust memorial Tuesday with a survivor's plea for reconciliation, but disagreement surfaced even at its opening over how to remember the 6 million Jews killed under the Nazis.

Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder joined Jewish leaders and hundreds of other dignitaries in opening the memorial, a one-block-square undulating field of more than 2,700 charcoal-colored concrete slabs meant to evoke the helplessness of the Holocaust's victims.

Backers had insisted on a place in the heart of reunited Berlin, a block from the Brandenburg Gate and near where Adolf Hitler holed up in his bunker at the end of World War II. The opening was timed to coincide with this month's 60th anniversary of Nazi Germany's surrender.

"Today we open a memorial that recalls Nazi Germany's worst, most terrible crime — the attempt to exterminate an entire people," Parliament President Wolfgang Thierse said at the opening ceremony. He called it a sign that the reunited Germany that emerged at the end of the Cold War "faces up to its history."

Holocaust survivor Sabina van der Linden riveted the audience with her account of loss, terror and survival in Nazi-occupied Poland.

An 11-year-old Jewish girl when the Wehrmacht occupied her town in July 1941, she was sheltered at great risk by a Christian family and later survived by hiding in a forest. Her parents and brother died in the Holocaust.

In a message of reconciliation that won the most applause of the afternoon, she said there could be no collective guilt for Germans and that her survival represented "a victory of all decent people over evil."

"What have I learned?" asked van der Linden, who now lives in Sydney, Australia. "I have learned that hatred begets hatred. I have learned that we must not remain silent and that each of us must fight discrimination, racism and inhumanity."

Schroeder, visibly moved, clasped van der Linden's hands as she left the podium.

A New York cantor, Joseph Malovany, sang songs in Yiddish and German, accompanied by an orchestra of young Germans and Poles. Berlin rabbi Yitzhak Ehrenberg ended the ceremony with the Kaddish, or Jewish prayer for the dead.

Designed by U.S. architect Peter Eisenman, the memorial in the former no man's land of the Berlin Wall opens to the public Thursday after 17 years of wrangling among German politicians over its design and message.

Visitors will find themselves on an uneven, downward slope, their heads slowly disappearing amid the slabs as they walk.