A Railway Line to Nowhere: Berlin’s Platform 17
It is the memories that last longest, outliving always the events that created them.
The signs for it say little other than the basics — just its name and an arrow, easy to miss unless you know it is there. But walk down the tunnel beneath the tracks at Grunewald station, and you find it, in plain black-and white: Mahnmal Gleis 17.
It is on the south side of the station, a platform from which no train will ever leave again. Trees stand within its rails or so close that no engine could ever go by. It is blocked at one end and the tracks go off into more trees at the other.
The station was built in 1879 and given the name Grunewald five years later. The buildings are now old and scuffed around the edges, much too big for how it is used today. Families come here at weekends to walk into the forest and people commute from it during the week.
Travelling west from the city’s main train station on the S7 line, it is the point at which the newer and more modern stations of glass, steel, and concrete give way to the older buildings in the urban parts not destroyed by war. Its dull, dark-coloured brick buildings are an ornate hangover from when it was busier.
The history is brutal. As Atlas Obscura wrote about it: “The first deportation train departed from Platform 17 on October 18, 1941. By the end of World War II, more than 50,000 members of the German Jewish population from the Berlin area were deported to ghettos, labour, and concentration camps. Most were sent against their will to Theresienstadt and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Few survived the ordeal.”
There are a hundred-and-eighty-six metal plates that line the platform along both sides and they each give a date on the deportations took place, and how many were taken that day, and where to. They began at the end of October in 1941 and pushed on until three months before Berlin fell. The numbers are low at first — a hundred people one day, ninety-nine the next — but then climb quickly into the thousands before falling away again in the final months when there was no longer that many to take. Down at the front of the station, there is a huge block of concrete with human-shaped holes carved from it, ghosts of those who last saw Berlin from this place.
A few people wandered up to the platform that afternoon, but nobody stayed long. There was nothing up there to read or give context and you had to go back to the front doors of the station to find anything other than dates, or numbers, or platitudes.
We rode back into the city and went to Friedrichstrasse station. Out there, on its south side, lies a permanent memorial to the kindertransport. It acknowledges two directions of travel: to life, between 1938 and 1939, when safe passage was granted for over 10,000 little ones; and death, when the deportations took place between 1941 and 1945.
It was getting dark when we got to Friedrichstrasse and it was a Saturday afternoon. There were fresh flowers on the memorial and one or two people stopped, but the crowds mostly flowed by. The people have not forgotten what happened but have instead come to live beside its memory.
On the other side of the station, on its north, is the Tranenpalast, the former ticket office known as the ‘Palace of Tears’. It is an ugly, blue box of a building that looks like a municipal swimming pool cut in half. The lights inside are sickly yellow. You cannot see in from the street.
It is now a museum, a memorial to more-recent memories. The war of 1939 to 1945 means much less to those walking by than the separation that came later. One evil progressed into another. Travel in these parts saturated so often with trauma.
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Many years ago, I taught at a school not far from the station. It is gone now, but we were a little further up Friedrichstrasse, up where it corners into Torstrasse.
One of my students there was a retired doctor called Helmut. He had been educated and spent most of his career under the strictures of the East German government, and once he told me a story about his son.
“My boy,” he said when we sitting together in the school, “fell in love with a girl in the West.”
“How did he meet her?”
He waved his hand. No interruptions, please and you don’t need to know the how. “He fell in love with her, and she with him, and they wanted to be together. They were both seventeen. And so he needed to get an exit visa.”
“That was hard, I guess?”
“Yes… It took him a year, but he got it. And I took him to Friedrichstrasse and I watched him go into the Tranenpalast there. You know it?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, well, I watched him go in and I knew in my heart and my bones that I would not see him again for another ten years. He was not going to be able to come back under the government at the time.”
“That’s awful.”
“It was.”
“And what happened?”
“Well, that was September 1989. The wall came down six weeks later.” Helmut smiled. “He didn’t need to have gone. He could have waited.”
“That’s a good story. Is it true?”
“Yes.”
“And the girl?”
“Still together. Married now for twenty-two years.”
This story has also been published on my personal website.
