Hell's Traces
Is a book by Victor Ripp, a Holocaust survivor who visited 35 different Holocaust memorials in Germany, France, Poland, Belarus, Austria and Hungary.
From a recent review in the WSJ:
One of the most stirring memorials Mr. Ripp visits is situated in the Berlin neighborhood that was once called Jewish Switzerland because of the preponderance of Jews who lived there, including Albert Einstein and Erich Fromm. Mounted on 80 lamp posts over several blocks are two-sided plaques that tell the step-by-step story of the laws passed to marginalize, persecute and, ultimately, annihilate the Jews. One side of each plaque shows a pictogram (swim trunks, for instance), with the other side displaying the text of the Nazi-era law banning Jews from yet another ordinary activity (in this case, the dictate that Jews could no longer use Berlin pools).
As the memorial’s designers Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock explain to the author, the point was to “make visible the conditions which led in an insidiously logical way to the destruction of the Jewish inhabitants.” Thus the succession of plaques ends with a pictogram of a char-blackened face, redolent of the death camps and their crematoriums. To some this may sound tasteless, but the impact was striking. “When we first put up the signs, some people took them to be new government rules,” Ms. Stih recounted. “Apparently these people believed that it was perfectly reasonable for Nazi policies to be put back into practice. Finally we had to attach a small disk to each sign to tell people that they were looking at art.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/reminders-to-never-forget-1497643952