Memorial for Holocaust era children vandalized following pro-Palestinian rally

Memorial for Holocaust era children was vandalized in Berlin, after pro-Palestinian activities in the area. Despite anti-Israel demonstrations being banned by German authorities over the holiday period, demonstrators had illegally rallied on New Year's Eve and hundreds were arrested.

While German security forces had to deal with thousands of young lawbreakers throwing explosives and attacking police, vandals sprayed graffiti on the bronze statues of children, covering their eyes and overall degrading the bodies, as well as depicting what looks like a mosque on the chest of one child and one suitcase.

The 'Trains to Life – Trains to Death' bronze sculpture by Frank Meisler had been created to commemorate the 10,000 "Kindertransport" Holocaust survivors, contrasted by the millions of other children who were transported by train and killed by the Nazis.

"The monument was not vandalized by accident, the damage to it was intended to weaken the Jewish spirit by damaging the most important symbols to us. All the anti-Semites were told 'you will not succeed'. There is a clear connection between the denial of the Holocaust and the denial of the acts of terrorism on October 7," Revital Yakhin Krakowski, deputy director general of the World March for Life, told Israel's Channel 12.

The Kindertransport children were unaccompanied by their parents, on trains that went westward to ports that would take the children to the United Kingdom, the United States, and a small number of countries that allowed the entry of the Jewish refugees.

On the other side, as also depicted by the memorial, children awaited their death and were mostly unaccompanied by their parents after being taken by brutal force by the Nazis.

Through special operations to rescue Jewish children from the Nazis during the Second World War, thousands were saved by a small number of nations that had allowed a select few to enter their countries, during one of the darkest periods in modern Europe. The artist himself, as a child, had been rescued to the UK.

Today, Europe and much of the world have faced a stark rise in antisemitism. While thousand demonstrate in support of the Palestinian cause, during a war in Gaza instigated by the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the number of anti-Semitic attacks on Jews have increased at an unprecedented rate.