top of a man-made hill . In one hand he carries a rescued child , while in the other he holds a sword that is cleaving through a swastika at his feet .
The Soviets knew exactly what they were doing with such monuments . Each was built to symbolise the friendship between nations , or triumph over tyranny ; but the sheer scale of some of them is also a rather unsubtle demonstration of Soviet power and invincibility . The vast monument complex at Treptower Park is not unique in this respect . The Slavìn Memorial in Bratislava sits on a hill above the city , and includes a 12.5 metre statue of a Soviet soldier standing on a 42 metre-high obelisk : from wherever you stand in the city , it dominates the skyline . Similarly huge war memorials were built in Sofia , Budapest , Vienna and many , many other cities .
Unfortunately , with the collapse of European communism in 1989 , many people in Eastern and
Central Europe began to see such monuments not as symbols of liberation and shared victory , but as symbols of the Soviet oppression that came afterwards , during the Cold War . In 1997 , the Victory Monument in Riga was bombed by a far-right Latvian nationalist group , and since then veterans of the Second World War have repeatedly called for it to be taken down . In Estonia , in 2007 , the Bronze Soldier memorial to the “ liberators of Tallinn ” was removed from the city centre and relocated in the military cemetery a few kilometres away , sparking two days of protest by Tallinn ’ s ethnic Russian minority . In Vienna , the Monument to the Heroes of the Red Army is regularly vandalised . The Monument to the Soviet Army in Sofia has repeatedly been daubed with paint – sometimes in jest , but more often in protest over recent actions by the Russian government . It was vandalised again this year , around the same time as the monument in Treptower Park .
4 . Auschwitz Memorial Museum , Main entrance of the former extermination camp . ( EUROM )
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Observing Memories Issue 6