[...] after one speech, one newspaper wrote that it was one of the most emotional responses President Kennedy had ever received; it said that more than 1,000 people fainted. First lady Michelle Obama and daughters Sasha and Malia visited monuments commemorating dark eras of the country's past. The family walked through the Holocaust memorial, a vast undulating field of more than 2,700 gray concrete slabs designed by American architect Peter Eisenman. Merkel's husband, chemistry professor Joachim Sauer, made a rare public appearance to show the Obamas one of the few remaining sections of the Berlin Wall, which East Germany's communist rulers built in 1961 and divided the city until 1989. Obama paid tribute in his speech to the "airlift of hope" that kept West Berlin out of Soviet hands in the late 1940s — and to a 92-year-old veteran of the operation once known as the Candy Bomber. The airlift began on June 26, 1948, in an ambitious plan to feed and supply West Berlin after the Soviets blockaded the city, attempting to squeeze the U.S., Britain and France out of the enclave within Soviet-occupied eastern Germany. Germany and the United States both could claim some credit for a spectacular warm-up act by violinist David Garrett before Obama's speech. Garrett, the son of a German father and an American mother, was born and raised in Aachen on Germany's western border and studied at Julliard in New York under famed Israeli-American violinist Itzhak Perlman.