Today I cooked an omelette with eggplants, cooked some eggplants with cheese for Francis and Reuben (forty)... and reuben drove me to the main station where i met up with some of the other juice peeps to go on a bus tour around stuttgart on the ANTI FASCIST Tour.

We first stopped off at a location where one of the first grafitti bombs was painted on these monuments that had statues. The monuments used to be in a place where many people would walk by on their way to work, back in 1935. The man who painted on the base of the monument was part of a anti-naZi group called G, was tortured, terrorized. and the polizei went in to his house and found photos of his group, and were able to arrest everymember based on the photos.

We next went to a house which is now a kodak store, where we saw these gold faced plates embedded in to the ground to signify a house where a jewish doctor lived with his family. He offered free services , and the nazi's then forced him and his wife in to a concentration camp. he had send his children away to poland so they were safe. he and his wife returned from the concentration camp, but committed suicide to spare them selves of being deported once again. This was just one of many other houses of jewish people that have been commemorated with the same type of gold face plaques embedded in the concrete infront of their house.

the normal stuttgart city tour does not show such things as this anti-fascist tour showed. they are not proud of the atrocities that went on, and some of the monuments are hidden and not obvious.

we also went to the mercedes benz museum,

didn't go in but stood outside of it and he showed us /talked tous about how mercedes vehicles were used for nazi vehicles, but no where in the museum would u see documentation for this. i unfortunately missed the mercedes museum tour due to me just lagging... but the booklet he showed us was interesting, the propaganda fliers for nazi organizations showed mercedes vehicles.



we drove by a location that had a small black tombstomb like memorial monument, that signified one of the jewish synagogues that was burned down. A school had commissioned for two signs to be set in the area to signify the monument better since the little tombstomb like monument was not very prominent. one sign says "locals are allowed here free until December 8 1941" which was when they burned it down.

The most moving place we went to was the train station used to deport 2500 Jewish out of stuttgart. There were several dates people were deported out, and many of them were families. Only 40 returned. The rest were killed in concentration camps. The monument is relatively new. There are remains of four train tracks where the trains took off, and there is a very long wall enscribed with names of all the jewish accounted for.


down the street from the train station is a church that has metal placard with words that describe the fact that the priests in the church acknowledge what went on at the train stations, sending a message to everyone that you may see wrong doings, and you shouldn't shun away from the wrong acts, but rather take action and do something about it. some of the anti nazi germans would leave food out for jewish if they knew the jewish were to pass by certain parts of the streets.

We also went to a place that started out in 1875 as HOTEL SILBER, then be came a secret police station where they interrogated and held anti-nazi perpetrators. four people were killed in the building. and today the building is an office building for interior designs.

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there's a placard inside the building that is the only signifier that this place held such horrible atrocities.



THe last spot we stopped off at was in the main castle park area, where stands the main memorial monument for the Holocaust. It is four large black cubes with one cube balanced in the center.




There are placards around it, and words enscribed on the floor in the middle of the monument.


The words are a poem, listing some of the millions of ways Jewish were executed.




the tour guide said it was hard to translate, but in the end i forced him to explain to me and i was able to figure out some of the words when he used german to explain. The words were something like:

banishment, slander, hanging, stabbing, gassing....
the millions of acts done by the nationalistic organization of nazis
this i promise will never happen again.

posted by pep @ 4:50 PM