Berlin Saturday 2.14

All of the planning and orginization helped us get on our cross-Atlantic flight, but they didn't help much with the lack of sleep. A bumpy commuter flight from Paris to Berlin was full of sleepy travelers. Once we landed in Berlin, we were greeted by Julie, our fifth chaperone and a BLS alum from the class of 03. We also met Tom, our tour guide. Tom brought us, via double decker bus, throughout the city of Berlin.
Berlin is an interesting city on many levels. A lot of it was destroyed in World War 2, so much of the city has a very modern feel to it. Furthermore, it is extremely spread out, so despite being the capital of Germany, with 3.4 million people living within city limits (344 square miles), you never feel that cramped.
Tom brought us by the Olympic stadium, which was busy with the heated Berlin-Munich soccor game going on, and also to many arcitectural sites. The first time that we got off of our tour bus was in Gruenwald, at Gleis (platform) 17. Gruenwald is a suburb of Berlin, which reminds me quite a bit of Wellsley MA. It has lots of trees and shrubs, big well kept houses, nice little resteraunts near the train platform, and things of the sort. The town is idyllic. However, Gris 17 was a point from which, beginning in the early 1940's, Jews were sent to concentration camps throughout Eastern Europe, including Auschwitz. What did the people of the community think and do? How did they rationalize the fact that hundreds of unwarrented death sentences were essentially given in their town?
Rationalization is a powerful instinct; I can imagine that people went about their days without dwelling on the horrible consequences of what it meant for a shipping point for the concentration camps to be in their town. The success of the Nazi uprising and system of concentation camps relied on this; not only must hundreds of thousands actively participate in genocide, but millions must be silent, and allow it to go on. Memorials at the site include plaques identifying the number of people on all of the train cars leading to concentration camps, trees which intentionally grow up through the tracks, and an eerie, unsettling memorial, in which angular figures cut out of a huge slab of rock seem to march to their doom.
From Gruenwald, Tom brought us into the center of Berlin, where we saw some other historical sites including Brandernberg gate, Deutsche bank, and Hotel Aldon, where Michael Jackson dangled his baby son Blanket by one of his feet in front of a crowd of reporters. After a long tour, we checked into our hotel, went out for a dinner of weinerschnitzel, and turned in for a night of much needed sleep.

All of my pictures from Berlin are in the album below. Click on it to see them all. Comments will follow

EE Berlin