This is the largest work by a Berlin-based sculptor and one of the most successful martyrological compositions in contemporary European art, and remains under-appreciated, both in Poland and internationally. The monument is located at a local railway station in the western part of Berlin, a station from which Jewish people were deported from 1941 onwards. It was commissioned by the Berlin City Senate and the Wilmersdorf district authorities. The author used solutions that are often found in memorials to the victims of war and the Holocaust: preserved elements found at the place of execution (here the railway ramp, cf. a similar treatment in the memorial at Treblinka concentration camp) and a discreetly applied figural element - traces, imprints of human silhouettes.

"Even more difficult to render in any material were the now anonymous figures that had departed into nothingness from the Grunewald train station on the outskirts of Berlin. All that was left was an empty space - the memory of absence. The empty spaces left by those who were sent away from Bahnhof Grunewald have been fixed in the concrete of the wall as formless cracks and holes peeking out from the face of the wall. In certain lighting they can be mistaken for shadows of human silhouettes."
(Anda Rottenberg in the catalogue "Karol Broniatowski. Works from 1969-1999", Warsaw 1999).

The motif of a negative imprint, a trace of a figure, appears in the explorations of various artists of the second half of the 20th century, including Polish artists (e.g. Władysław Hasior, Alina Szapocznikow). Analogies to the concept of the Grunewald monument can be seen in the 'formless' figures that have appeared in Broniatowski's sculpture since the 1980s, as well as in his ink and gouache drawings-monotypes (i.e. made using the imprint method).

The inscription on the monument reads: "Zur Mahnung an uns, jeder Missachtung des Lebens und der Würde des Menschen mutig und ohne Zögern entgegenzutreten" (For our warning to courageously and without hesitation oppose every violation of life and human dignity).