Platform 17 is no regular train station platform. Today, it stands as a Holocaust memorial just outside Berlin. The first deportation train departed from Platform 17 on October 18, 1941. By the end of World War II, more than 50,000 members of the German Jewish population from the Berlin area were deported to ghettos, labor, and concentration camps. Most were sent against their will to Theresienstadt and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Few survived the ordeal. The platform and tracks were abandoned after the war. It was well into the 1990s before the platform was…
