Remembering Germany’s Final Surrender: May 8, 1945

Berlin, May 7, 2025

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A stage set up near the Brandenberg Gate in preparation for a March of the Living remembrance of those who died during the Holocaust. Wir Schweigen Nicht means “We Will Not Remain Silent.”

Remembering Germany’s Final Surrender: May 8, 1945

We stood in the shadow of Berlin’s Brandenberg Gate (where the Torchlight Parade of 1933 celebrated Hitler’s election as Chancelor) reading display boards detailing Germany’s formal capitulation to the Allies 80 years ago, and suddenly heard amplified voices singing a Hebrew song, “Sh’mor Na Aleinu (Please watch over us).”

It’s a prayer to peace recorded by Ofra Haza in 1981 that became something of a mantra after the Hamas massacre and kidnappings in Israel on October 7th, 2023. Why was it being sung in Berlin, Germany on May 7th, 2025, and by whom?

My heart was already bursting from reading the dioramas (translated into English) describing the formal German surrender on May 8, 1945.

Hearing a song asking for God to watch over us felt surreal. After walking about thirty yards (27.4 meters since it’s Europe), we learned that a quartet of singers was practicing for the March of the Living event in a tent set up on the other side of the gate. Germany takes its history seriously — it is illegal to question the Holocaust or deny the systematic genocide of SIX MILLION Jews.

Nobody will ever know the exact number, but over 80 million people died because of the war started by Hitler. How are there people around the world questioning documented history, asking if the Nazis were all that bad, rewriting history?

Sadly, in other parts of the world, there are a growing number of Holocaust deniers. They’ve never visited a concentration camp or read the history or visited Germany. They’ve invented a revised history that doesn’t acknowledge the huge amount of work Germany had to do after its defeat. They’re like Flat-Earthers or people who deny that the U.S. Civil War had anything to do with slavery. Their opinions are based on nonsense and have little connection to reality.

Note to Trolls and Bots: I will make contributions to a pro-Israel cause (Like the JNF) for each uneducated, biased, or hate-filled responses.

Still hearing the music, we walked around the curved road to the profoundly moving Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

We wandered among the shadows cast by huge concrete blocks and kept repeating the Mourner’s Kaddish that we say in memory of loved ones who’ve died.

I’ve read about how the memorial evokes introspection, how it’s comprised of 2,711 concrete slabs arranged in a grid, how sometimes you’re above the slabs, sometimes below. It was a profound experience.

We wept, watched others hurry or linger amid the blocks, and prayed for the 6 million Jews (and 70+ million others) who died because of Hitler and the Third Reich.

I’ve studied and read about the Holocaust, but this was my first visit to Germany, the first time I stood in the city that cheered on Hitler and supported his Final Solution. It was devastating to read the names of cities engraved on the concrete blocks. Those were some of the towns and cities whose Jewish residents were slaughtered like animals, shot and shoved into pits, or packed into trains and sent to certain death.

Later, when I called my mother to tell her about our day, I learned that one of the blocks is inscribed with the name of my grandfather’s town.

Zayde, my father’s father, was born in Shchedrin, Minsk Gubernia, formerly in the “Pale of Settlement” that is now part of Belarus. They hadn’t lived there for generations, according to family lore, but migrated when they were expelled from one country after another, until they were as far east as Jews could get (except for Siberia).

Zayde was the eldest son of a Lubavitch rabbi and was apprenticed to a tailor at age eleven because someone had to support the growing family. He always bemoaned not having gotten an education and wanted my sibligs and me to know how lucky we were to be in school.

Zayde left Shchedrin in his early twenties, soon after the first World War, to escape continuous Jew-hatred and avoid being conscripted into the Tsar’s army. Later in life, he wrote poetry, and he used to sing to me in Yiddish. He loved hearing me sing his songs. I remember sitting on his lap as he told stories about hiding with his family in the nearby forest in the weeks surrounding Christmas and Easter, when the peasants were riled up by their priests.

He died in 1970. A decade later (this is a longer story), I drove with my parents from Chicago to Pittsburgh, to meet a few families of Shchedrin descendants. One man had, as a child, survived the final Nazi round-up and mass killing of the Jews still in Shchedrin after the Nazi takeover in 1941. He’d jumped out the back window and ran into the same forest where my Zayde used to hide.

Today, Berlin is an exciting international city with people from all over speaking different languages. Restaurants, museums, and theaters are filled, the streets are lined with thriving shops, and there’s constant movement. It’s hard to imagine the postwar bleakness and the city divided by a wall with a military presence guarding those in the east from escaping to the west.

I wished we could return to the Brandenburg Gate for the events commemorating the formal end of the Holocaust, but we were exhausted. During our five days in Berlin, I couldn’t get the song out of my head. “Please watch over us, like children.”