I recently returned from my first—and probably my last—trip to Germany. Like many other Jews of my age, I’d resisted visiting the nation that inflicted the worst crime of humanity, on my people as well as my ancestors. My parents, inveterate world travelers, never visited Germany, on purpose. Indeed, as a child, I remember them saying, “we don’t buy German products” (though this value went by the wayside when they ended up buying a Volkswagon van for our camping trips.)

While the taboo against buying German products hasn’t really carried over to my generation, some of my friends still resist visiting Germany. Others, however, have done so and returned with positive reports, especially of Berlin.

And so I visited Berlin a few weeks ago, and yes, it lives up to its reputation. The city has much to recommend it. It’s clean. It has excellent public transportation. It features lots of greenery and beautiful parks. It’s very bike friendly. I rented a bike and explored the Tiergarten, a park that feels like a large urban forest. I saw people playing games, picnicking and generally lounging on its spacious lawns.

And there’s so much to do and see: art museums, history museums, remnants of the Cold War era such as the Berlin Wall and Checkpoint Charlie, good restaurants, night-life. Parts of the city have an avant-garde feel, especially in the Kreuzberg neighborhood, a hip area that used to be part of East Berlin.

But the element that stood out to me were its monuments and memorials. Increasing from the 1980s onward, Germany has adopted what’s known as a Culture of Remembrance. The idea is to remember and expose the past rather than to repress it. As such, there are memorials pretty much everywhere you look.

Actually, the Soviets began constructing memorials to its soldiers, almost 100,000 of whom died in the Battle of Berlin, immediately after the war. One of them is on the edge of the Tiergarten Park.

Ironically, the memorial ended up in West Berlin, so the Soviets didn’t have access to it during the Cold War.

I also visited the other major Soviet memorial in Treptower Park. This one is may be one of the biggest memorials ever constructed. It’s absolutely massive, covering some 25 acres.

Then there is the Holocaust memorial, officially called the “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.” Opened in 2005, it’s in the center of the city, near the city’s iconic structures, the Reichstag (Parliament) and Brandenberg Gate, as well as the strip that used to separate East and West Berlin. It also turns out to be near where Hitler had his bunker. (I can confirm that the bunker is now under a parking lot and there’s no indication it once was there.) It’s definitely one of the stranger memorials I’ve seen because, other than the fact that it says it’s a memorial to murdered Jews, you wouldn’t know it’s a holocaust memorial.

It features rows of grey concrete rectangular slabs of various heights, 2711 in all. The memorial is open to interpretation, and is meant to be experienced, rather than witnessed, which is probably the point. Maybe the slabs represent coffins. Or the grey the color of ash. Or maybe the absence of any human shape reflects the idea that humans beings were stripped of their humanity by the industrialized nature of the death camps. The intent, according to its designer, the American architect Peter Eisenman (presumably Jewish), is to create feelings of isolation and disorientation as you wander through and around the slabs.

But it were the small, unobtrusive, memorials that made the greatest impact on me. That’s the thing about Berlin: you never know when you are going to encounter a memorialization of the past.

On my last day in Berlin, I took the bus from my hotel to visit a the museum of East German life (DDR museum). The bus stop was on a street called Varian Fry Street. I never heard of Varian Fry before. But there, literally on the bus stop, was a small placard that explained who he was.

Fry was a American journalist who volunteered to work with the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC), an organization set up in 1940 to try to rescue prominent intellectuals trapped in Vichy France.

He arrived, according to his Wikopedia page, in Marseilles in 1940 with $3,000 taped to his leg and a list of 200 artists and intellectuals, mostly German Jews, under imminent threat of arrest by agents of the Gestapo. Fry spent 13 months helping to smuggle people—about 1500 according to the sign—into Spain where they could get documents for the United States. He was eventually kicked out by the Vichy Government, and his expulsion was even abetted by the the U.S. State Department which objected to his covert activities. Among those he helped to escape were Marc Chagall and Hannah Arendt.

Like so many other righteous persons of the era, his deeds were not recognized during his lifetime. Indeed, it was not until 1994, nearly 30 years after his death, that he was recognized as one of the Righteous of the Nations by Yad V’Shem. (This is a central theme of the post-Holocaust era: the righteous were often ignored while prominent Nazis suffered little consequence and were able to return to public life.)

After visiting the museum, I returned on the bus. As I walked back to the hotel, I encountered another marker. It was a sign on a window next to a construction site. It spoke of a building that used to occupy this spot, a building destroyed during the war. It turned out to be place where the Nazis perverted justice. (As brutal and cruel as they were, the Nazis strove to keep the veneer of legality for their actions.) I took a picture of the sign, my image reflected in the photograph.

The building was called the Volksgerichtshaf, or “people’s court,” which meted out “Nazi justice.” Some 5,243 people were sentenced to death by this court for actions the court deemed against the interests of the state.

These judges suffered little consequence after the war. According to the sign, ” Most of the judges and state prosecutors who had been responsible for perverting the course of justice on countless occasions came under the so-called judges’ privilege after 1945. It was argued that the judgements had been passed in according with prevailing National Socialist law.” In 1985, when the Culture of Remembrance was beginning to take hold in Germany, the judgments were declared of invalid. In 1998, they were annulled by the “Law to quash unjust judgements pronounced by the national Socialists in the criminal justice system.”

These markers illustrate how Germany is dealing with its horrific past. It’s definitely better to constantly remind people of the past than to hide it. But there’s no denying that for someone such as myself, for whom the destruction of European Jewry and its reverberations weighs heavily in mind, to run into daily reminders of that past.

In the end, I was glad to have visited Berlin. I was also glad to leave.