Tips 1 - 2 of 2 Freiburg im Breisgau General Tips
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General Tips: Gurs 1027 km
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Favorite Thing: This looks at first glance like a perfectly normal yellow road sign, such as you might find on any regional highway in Germany. But wait! These signs don't normally point to places over a thousand kilometers away. And who ever heard of a place called Gurs, anyhow?
Gurs is a city in the southwest corner of France. It was the site of a concentration camp that was used by the Nazi collaborators of the Vichy government to intern Jews and other people considered undesirable by the Nazis.
Within a few hours on October 22, 1940, the Nazis rounded up 6504 Jewish men, women and children from the regions of Baden and the Pfalz, including some 300 Jewish citizens of Freiburg, and deported them to Gurs. Many died there of hunger or illness, and in 1942 the rest were sent east to Auschwitz or Maidanek, where they were murdered.
On the 60th anniversary of the deportation, in October 2000, Freiburg citizens erected a plaque explaining what had happened. The text on the plaque concludes: "Too many people looked away back then, too few resisted. This must not and will not happen again."
Update: There is now a similar yellow sign in front of the main railroad station in Mannheim, but with a different number: "Gurs 1170 km".
Second photo: Square of the Old Synagogue. This is where the main Freiburg Synagogue used to be, until it was destroyed by the Nazis in 1938.
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General Tips: Stolpersteine
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Favorite Thing: "If one person dies, it's a tragedy. If a million people die, it's a statistic." This cynical statement was attributed to the late Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin (1879-1953). It was quoted to me by a Russian orchestra conductor who spent his childhood in Moscow under Stalin's rule.
Like many other German cities, Freiburg is trying translate the statistic of six million Jews murdered by the Nazis back into the tragedy of individual people dragged from their homes and put to death. They do this by setting little squares of metal into the street or sidewalk in front of the houses where the people used to live. The two in the photo are embedded in the street in front of my hotel in the Rathausgasse in Freiburg. The one on the left reads:
Here lived
Sofie Rosentahl
neé Bloch
Born 1889
Deported 1940
Gurs
Murdered in
Auschwitz
and the one on the right:
Here lived
Julian Rosenthal
Born 1878
Deported 1940
Gurs
Murdered 1942 in
Auschwitz
These little squares of metal are known as "stumbling blocks" (Stolpersteine), but you can stumble over them only in a figurative sense, meaning you are made aware that these two murdered people used to live right here, so they aren't just statistics, but real people.
The "stumbling blocks" are an initiative of the artist Gunter Demnig, born 1947 in Berlin.
http://www.stolpersteine.com/
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 Comments for Nemorino about Freiburg im Breisgau | | | | |
Ewingjr98 Tue Jul 21, 2009 23:07 UTC
We have a small village in Pennsylvania, USA called Fryburg, apparently named after Germany's Freiburg. It's nice to know more about the original town. Even after living in Germany for two years, I didn't know the rules for the "play streets." Thanks! | BruceDunning Wed Jul 15, 2009 21:58 UTC
Well maybe Freiburg goes green before the rest of us. Great comments and pictures and the theater looks like it holds a lot of culture. The US is trying urban concept just like Vauban | Maryimelda Thu Jul 9, 2009 07:47 UTC
Thanks for the Schlossberg tip Don, I'll be there in August. Lovely page. Regards, Kate | csordila Thu May 14, 2009 05:11 UTC
I have just checked your updates, whether a visit is worth here. Yes, it is! Best. L. |
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