I first encountered this memorial in the fall of 2017 while in Munich and surrounding areas during a short, two-week vacation. Our happening upon this area was partially by accident, as we had wandered into the park without any awareness that the memorial center existed, however the impact this place had on us was immense.

This memorial was designed and constructed by a German architectural firm called Brückner & Brückner to commemorate the “Munich Massacre” that occurred in 1972 at the Munich Olympic Games. During this incident, a group of Pakistani terrorists known as “Black September” had infiltrated the game grounds and killed 11 Israeli competitors and 1 German police officer.

According to an article in the New York Times, one of the designers with the firm, Stephan Graebner,  mentioned this: “Our design idea was to cut into the hill, to take something away from the landscape… When you think about the massacre, it took something away, cutting into the lives of the victims, the families, the Olympic Games. We wanted to fill this void with memory.”

I had no knowledge of this occurrence prior to this visit. I remember sitting in such all-encompassing silence with a fair number of others for nearly an hour as we learned and, for some, as they remembered. This was a place that demanded silence. Merely walking into this space seemed to such the sound from the air around you and not one of us dared to speak. It was awesome in the purest sense of the word.