Wednesday 2.18, Krakow, Lublin

We wake up at 6:00 Am, have a very quick breakfast, and get on the bus by 7:30. We have two bus drivers today to manage the 10+ hour round trip to Lublin. On the bus everybody is typically silly and in good sprits. There is a Bon Jovi “Livin on a Prayer” sing along, an unfortunate 45 minute wait for a toilet at a gas station, and a good deal of napping. When we arrive at Majdanek, the mood changes quickly.
Whereas Auschwitz and Birkenau were either systematically dismantled by retreating Nazis or destroyed by advancing Allied forces, Majdanek is essentially as it was when the Nazis left it. The Russians advanced on the camp quickly, and the Nazis essentially picked up and left. As a result, the camp is completely in tact. Auschwitz was like a grim museum; Birkenau was like a stark graveyard. I don’t have a good word to describe Majdanek.
The first thing we saw upon our arrival was a Russian-built open-air memorial for those murdered in the camp. It is a roof covering a pit the size of a 25-meter swimming pool filled with a pile of ashes from the crematorium. Fragments of bone are readily visible in the pile. From there we walk to the site of mass graves. In 1943, tens of thousands of prisoners were murdered here. They were forced to dig a hole, and lie down in the bottom, where they were shot. After that another group was forced to lie on top of them, and were then shot. This went on for almost a full day, until the mass graves were full, leaving mounds above the normal ground level when the dirt was replaced. Beyond the cruel depravity of this act, there is another dimension as well. Houses and businesses in Lublin are only about 200 meters away from these graves. What did the people of Lublin hear? When interviewed after the war, townspeople often stated that they had no idea what was going on. Considering that the only fence surrounding the camp is barbed wire, and the closeness to the town, that seems unlikely. How often do we ignore injustice and brutality in our world, and more so, in our own backyard? Are we turning a deaf ear as the townspeople of Lublin seemed to do?
From the mass grave, we move into the crematorium. A Jewish tour group from France is also in the crematorium, where they hold a prayer service. We wait in the room by the entrance until the finish. As they walk out of the crematorium, with tears streaming down their faces, we walk in. We are much closer to the ovens here. Some of them still have coal and ashes in them. We spend a long time in this room, trying to make sense of it all. We gather ourselves and visit Majdanek’s gas chambers. In one room, you can see the blue stains left by Zyclon B gas and fingernail scratches on the walls.
Majdanek also has warehouses full of artifacts. We walk through one literally brimming with shoes. Supposedly, when Russian troops first opened the door after taking Majdanek, shoes just poured out from behind a door nearly bursting. We then travel to our final stop; an exhibit deducted to the children of Majdanek. The haunting sounds of a Polish children’s lullaby play as we follow the paths of four children brought to the camp, three of whom survived, one of whom was killed. It is an incredibly touching exhibit that resonates powerfully with our group.
We leave the camp with one of the designers of the exhibit who is a member of a local Jewish group from Lublin. His group is committed to maintaining the Jewish community in the town and remembering the victims of the Holocaust. He gives us a tour of his town, and leaves us to have dinner at a local restaurant. We reboard the bus, and take our five-hour bus ride back to Krakow. As the group’s mood re-equilibrates towards a less somber one, I wonder. What can we take from today? This was the emotional equivalent of being bunched in the stomach. There were images and artifacts at Majdanek that almost no on e can be prepared to see until they are there. Does this mean that we will be different people? Will we be ready to stand up against the evils of the world? Has viewing this camp made us all less likely to succumb to group pressures that are unjust? I hope so.

Berlin Sunday 2.15 & Monday 2.16

After a quick walk and a subway ride, we were at the Reichstag. They have an extremely through security check there, but once you have made it through security, the German Parliamentary building is remarkably open to visitors. We toured several interesting exhibits within the building. One was a room with crew boats hung from the ceiling, which rise and fall irregularly to represent the fluctuating nature of politics. Another was a section of corridor where the walls were covered with Russian graffiti, left by soldiers when they took the capital in 1945. There is also a hallway with the name of every member of the German parliment who was murdered or disappeared by the Nazi party in the late 30's and early 40's. One square in the display is black, representing all the members whose fate is unknown. Following this site, we were able to sit in the room where the German parliment currently meets, and votes on bills. The German crest, which was a very intimidating eagle with large talons pre World War 2, now resembles a far less threatening "fat chicken" according to our tour guide. Following our tour, we went up in the tower on top of the building for some beautiful panoramic views of the city of Berlin.
After lunch, we went to the monument to the murdered jews of Europe. This is one city block filled with granite blocks resembling tombstones turned on their sides. There are one person wide paths between the blocks, and as you walk between them you are filled with an eerie sense of disorientation. The ground is uneven underneath you, and varying amounts of light reach you as you pass stones of varying heights. One feels very uncomfortable while walking through, presumably as one who was taken away from their home to a concentration camp would have.
After walking through the memorial, we went belot it into the museum to the murdered Jews of Europe. This museum focuses on the personal records and stories of Jews taken to the concentration camps. A story that particularly resonated with me was that of a Polish family, who's wedding photo was displayed in the museum along with information about their family. The picture of the bride, groom, and their families, was taken in 1940. By 1942 more than half of the people in the picture had been murdered at Aushiwitz and Birkenau. I was married less than two years ago myself; if my history had followed the same path as theirs, I would be in a concentration camp now. The people in the picture looked very happy and proud, but that was not to last.
After the museum, we took a walking "Third Reich" tour of Berlin, where we saw artifacts including the site of Hitler's bunker, the former office of the Nazi Minister of Propoganda, and lots of post World War 2 arcitecture. Our somewhat frigid tour culminated at the remaining section of the Berlin wall, and then the informative and simultaneously campy Berlin wall museum.
Our next experience was anything but campy. We traveled to the Berlin Underwelten, which is a preserved bunker that was utilized during World War 2, and was kept up in anticipation of nuclear attack during the cold war. Our guide brought us through the underground maze of bunk rooms, electric/manual ventilation systems, and a very special scheizenhaus. A particularly surreal moment on theis tour was when we exited a room in the bunker and stepped out into an active Uban station. What a relief to leave, even for a couple of minutes the cold, cramped confines of the bunker. I can't imagine what would be like to live there for weeks and weeks.
Following our tour of the Berlin Underweltin, we took in some more history above ground. The highlight of teh afternoon was the Pergamon museum. This is a giant Hellenistic sculpture and temple that was excavated and returned brick by brick from Turkey. The piece is so large that it was assembled outside, and then had a museum built around it. After some more touring, we returned to our hotel to warm up, eat dinner, and prepare for the next stage of our journey.
At the end of our time in Berlin we had seen a lot. Memorials, museums, tours and artifacts are all pieces of Germany's history leading up to and including the events of World War 2, and ultimately, the Holocaust. It has been, and wil be, our job to put these pieces together into a cohesive, if incomplete, understanding of the events surrounding the Holocaust. Next, in Poland, we will visit some of the sites where it happened.

Pictures are included in the Berlin album.

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

A well oiled machine...

Organization is pretty important when you are coordinating forty six students and four chaperons getting a busy after school neighborhood to the airport with tickets, and through security between the end of the school day and five o clock. It helps to have a system for keeping
track of passports:













so that you can safely board your plane:
















and take pictures!














Once we got to Paris, we had a bit of a hike to get to our terminal:

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But we made it to Berlin on time. So far, so good.