I've spent the past few days in Hannover, Germany, attending the DIDACTA education conference. As this is my first time in Hannover, I made sure to carve out a few minutes to visit the local Holocaust Memorial.

Documented Jewish life in Hannover goes back to about 1290, and the first synagogue was built here in 1703. Jewish presence in Hannover waxed and waned over the years with changing geopolitics, but by the start of WWII Hannover was home to the 10th largest Jewish community in Germany. And then everything changed. The largest synagogue was destroyed during Kristallnacht, and deportations of Jews began in 1938 (to Buchenwald) and continued through 1945. Of the almost 7,000 Jews deported, less than 70 survived, and 66 of them (mostly from the nearby Bergen-Belsen concentration camp) returned to Hannover after the war to start to rebuild the Jewish community. They opened a new synagogue in 1963, and today Hannover is home to over 5,000 Jews and multiple Jewish institutions, including the European Center for Jewish Music.

The Holocaust Memorial was erected in the Openplatz in the City Center in 1994. The names (and place of death when known) of about 1,900 Hanoverian Jews who were deported from the occupied East to the ghettos and extermination camps are engraved around the memorial's pedestal. The design is a giant pyramid structure and features a large open bracket, intended to invoke a sense of voidness and loss. Standing in front of it I can attest that the design has the intended effect.