Berlin, Germany

Berlin, Germany was our next stop, mainly to reconnect with some friends from here that we had met on a previous trip. It was a respite for a few days so we didn't do a lot of sightseeing. We had been here before in 2014, and had been to most of the "must see" tourist points on our list. (That isn't to say they aren't worth seeing again or that there isn't more to see in Berlin, we just chose to take these few days and be more low-key.) If you click on the "CD" under "About Me" on the right-hand side of this blog's home page, a list of my previous blogs will show up. If you go into the "CDs 2014 Travels" blog in Oct, you will see three separate posts for Berlin. Those will give you an idea of what we thought were special in Berlin and what we had visited. We did revisit the Brandenburg Gate, pass the Reichstag, eat at a beer garden, walk along the river, have a Starbuck's at the Sony Center and people-watch, and walk around Potsdamer Platz.

Potsdamer Platz was completely leveled during WW II so is a new area with high-rise buildings, restaurants, and hotels. Part of the Wall was preserved here with history info.




Sony built a big building here and has a unique cover over the plaza outside their building that they light up in different colors at night.

There is also a Lego Land here at the Sony Center.



One item on our list that we hadn't gotten to before was the Holocaust Memorial, correctly called The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. It consists of a field (19,000 square meters) of 2,700 concrete blocks and the information center below. The idea is you go through the information center first and it exits you to the center of the field of blocks. We did it backwards but I'm not sorry we did.

We arrived and I headed straight to the blocks. They are smaller on the edges and move to bigger ones in the center. WOW. Walking through the maze was powerful. I really didn't have any particular thoughts, one way or another, as I started out except to take some pictures, but the deeper I got into that maze of blocks, the stronger my feelings got. It built slowly but I had such strong emotions after a few rows that I felt them overwhelm me. It was like a sense of sadness crept into me from the feet to the heart. It wasn't despair exactly, but I couldn't ignore it and I still am weepy just trying to describe it. I'm not sure my reaction would have been the same if I'd gone through the information center first. I might have been better prepared after the displays, maybe not, but that place just drew out raw emotion from me.

The information center is a little different also, and goes through 6 rooms. The first exhibition (room) is an overview of the "national socialist terror policies" (what I call Nazi policies) from 1933 to 1945 and describes with words and pictures how the approach to the Jewish "problem" started, changed, and spread. The second room has actual diary entries, letters, and final notes from victims written during that period. The third room focuses on 15 families with personal pictures and notes, and what happened to family members. They are from various countries to illustrate how widespread the genocide attempt was. The fourth room calls out individual names and short biographies of murdered and missing Jews from across Europe. The fifth room represents the Holocaust in its geographical entirety across all of Europe with maps and examples of specific extermination locations (not all were camps). The last room has computer terminals where you can look up memorial sites, interviews of survivors, and other info.

Exiting the info center into the blocks

The top of the stairs puts you here

I had always thought most of the Jews were killed in gas chambers but "only" 2 million were killed that way. More were shot. I also hadn't realized the geographical extent of the extermination attempt. It was much farther reaching than I had thought, extending from France into Russia and from Norway to North Africa. There are so many sites where Jews were killed and buried that the whole of Western and Eastern Europe would be orange if they were all colored that way. They will never find all the sites nor know the names of all who were killed. The extermination centers were mostly in Poland because they would be too obvious in Western Europe. They were hidden more in Eastern Europe. Some sites were built right next to the railroad station so people could be taken off the trains and put right into the gas chambers. They were built just to kill people and when all the people were dead, the site would be taken down. We learn about this in school but this exhibit added info I wasn't totally aware of and the way it is presented has a real impact. This is a very good exhibit. Very emotional, but we need to remember. We definitely cannot let anything like this happen again.