The Jüdisches Museum in Berlin is a stunning facility carefully designed to ensure the visitor’s experience is focussed equally on both the content and the architecture - one reinforces the other in a symbiotic dance of form and function. What distinguishes this Museum from many others is that equal importance is given to “the void as place” as is given to the detritus of the lives of those who came before.
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| accounting table for commerce |
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| fabric patterns for clothing patches |
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| original paintings of stills from documentation of the Majdanek trials |
Bedřich Fritta - Drawings from the Theresienstadt Ghetto
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| Before the Transport 1943/45 |
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| Tower of Death 1943/44 |
Fritta’s Tower of Death can be regarded as alluding to the tower of the camp headquarters, topped by a flag. In the basement of that building, there was a jail where prisoners were locked up and tortured.
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| The Life of a Privileged Detainee 1943/44 |
One unusual feature of the Theresienstadt ghetto was that some detainees were categorized as “VIPs” or “prominent individuals”. Their privileges included better food, accommodation in special buildings together with their families, and in some cases even protection from deportation.
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Café 1943
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Fritta gives a wraithlike and strangely abstracted quality to the guests in this café, set up in the ghetto in december 1942. The tables are empty apart from the entrance tickets, which had to be bought with “ghetto currency” and were valid for two hours. The café was designed to delude the Red Cross delegation, but for the prisoners it was a comfort - for a few moments, it offered them a semblance of normal life.
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| Abandoned Luggage 1943/44 |
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| spice holders |
The Garden of Exile
Menashe Kadishman - “Shalekhet” or “Fallen Leaves”
The over 10,000 faces covering the floor are dedicated to all the innocent victims of war and violence.
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