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Shoah Stories Win Prestigious Prize

A love story swallowed by the Holocaust

by
Marc Tracy
June 02, 2010
The Grunewald tracks.(Photo by the author)
The Grunewald tracks.(Photo by the author)

Congratulations are in order to Sarah Wildman and Slate magazine: Her and their series, “Paper Love: Inside the Holocaust Archives,” won the 2010 Peter R. Weitz Journalism Prize, which is given by the German Marshall Fund “for excellence and originality in reporting on Europe and the transatlantic relationship.” In five parts, Wildman reports on the recently opened International Tracing Service archive, as well as her quest to find the fate of her grandfather’s apparent lover, who was trapped in Berlin after he had escaped. Read it in parts on the Internet, print it out and read it on a train, but do read it.

The final installment closes with Wildman at the train tracks in Grunewald, the posh neighborhood in western Berlin. On these train tracks, “on Jan. 29, 1943—the day of Valy’s deportation, 1,000 Jews were sent to Auschwitz, 100 to Theresienstadt. The tracks stretch out into the distance, covered with vegetation in places but still totally visible.”

This picture of the fateful Grunewald track comes from my post from a month ago about my own visit to Berlin.

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.