Silent Heroes – Berlin

The project called Silent Heroes is a Grundtvig Learning Partnership financed by the Lifelong Learning Programme of the European Commission. The context of hiding during the Second World War as a challenge for cultural memory organisations.
Thanks to this opportunity I was part of an international group meetings in Amsterdam, Hohenems, Berlin, Warsaw and Budapest. Through this journey I learned and experienced a lot as a historian and also as a filmmaker. This opportunity inspired me to create a short video for each of the locations where I was. Every piece reflects on an exact place, square, river, monument or memorial where the time and history stamped in, but a lot of people do not even know about it. Most of these places had a nice, culturally vivid past, that changed under the Holocaust. The aims of the videos are to create attention on the present and the future of this places.

BERLIN
“Here in the former Supreme Headquarters of the Army, Germans organised the attempt of 20 July 1944 to end the Nazi rule of injustice. For this, they sacrificed their lives. The Federal Republic of Germany and the State of Berlin created this new memorial place in the year 1980.” The naked man sculpture marks the place where the conspirators were executed. In front of the statue, on the ground, there is a plaque that says:
You did not bear the shame.
You resisted.
You bestowed the eternally vigilant symbol of change
by sacrificing your impassioned lives of freedom, justice and honour.

More information about the historical background:
gdw-berlin.de

Silent Heros Berlin from Andrea Ausztrics on Vimeo.