Ich bin ein Berliner

The next country on our tour was Germany, and more specifically Berlin. In Berlin we were going to be touring with a company/program called Germany CloseUp. It's a government funded program that brings North American Jewish young adults to Germany to educate them on current Germany. The goal is to have the students be able to separate their perception of WWII Germany from Modern Day Germany. When push comes to shove, it's about making reparations.
The entire time spent in Germany was incredibly fascinating to me. Studying the Holocaust is something I am incredibly passionate about, and I absorbed absolutely everything I could while being there. It was also a very thought provoking couple days spent with our group. Within the group here there are many grandchildren of survivors and people had very strong and averse reactions to being in Germany. That was also incredibly interesting to try and sympathize with. My thoughts on the Holocaust and being in Germany are incredibly extensive and too long to put up here, so I'll just share a sampling, and then I'll give the highlights of the time in Berlin.
First, I don't think Germany should be paying (for lack of a better word) reparations to our generation. They didn't do anything to us, and while it's important for us to have a more unbiased view of modern day Germany I do not think it's my generations right to forgive Germany. The people living in Germany now are not the people who committed the gross crimes against humanity, so while it is their role to not let it happen again why are they the ones left with the burden to make everyone forgive them? This goes along with the incredibly negative reactions to people within my group. I don't agree with everyone's reactions, but I do respect them, the Holocaust is an incredibly sensitive and personal subject and I have no right to comment or critique how anyone deals with it, but the people that are so holed up in their close minded perception that Germany was once bad and thus is still bad today is aggravating. Throughout our five day stay there there were people who were so angry we were in Germany that they spent the entire time shrouded with anger and resentment and didn't give themselves a chance to maybe, possibly, appreciate Germany the slightest bit. And my final thought for now, Germany has done an incredible job making reparations and making it so that Jews can be comfortable being in Germany and being open about being German. The country that has not done anything of that sort is Poland. Anti-Semetism in Poland is at all new high, it's worse than what I described in Hungary. You have to be so careful if you're Jewish there, and so wary of people finding out, and what is Poland doing about that? Absolutely nothing, the government may not be actively encouraging it, but they are certainly not doing anything to put a stop to it. During WWII while Poland did not initiate the persecution of the Jews, Homosexuals, and Gypsies they let Germany in with open arms, they got to be rid of the scum of society without being blamed for it. And to this day they have no huge fault in the Holocaust. Yes Auschwitz is on their land but it was the Germans who built it, not the Polish. There is no government funded reparations program in Poland and Jews go there all the time, without these incredibly negative reactions to the country. Instead when they see Auschwitz, they hate Germany.
The majority of our time in Germany was spent visiting Holocaust Memorial and learning about the Holocaust, and then the last day was spent learning about Modern Day Germany, the government and the Jewish life currently. The first couple days were far more interesting to me.
The first thing we did when we got to Berlin was to see the famous wall. The wall is divided into sections and each section is decorated by a different artist. And the artists change every couple years. Currently all of the art work is for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the wall. It was beautiful, art as far as the eye could see.

The Berlin Wall

We also drove through Checkpoint Charlie (the checkpoint between East and West Berlin). Now it's sort of a merchandise extravaganza, you can buy all sorts of things with the checkpoint insignia on it, and you can even get your passport stamped.

Checkpoint Charlie

There are remnants of communism everywhere, the pedestrian crossing signals are the epitome of the perfect communism man, the little figure wears a suit and when you're not supposed to walk he stand upright and proper. The public follows the pedestrian crossing signals to a T. There is absolutely no jay-walking anywhere in Berlin. If there is not a single car coming and it's the middle of a night, and someone is waiting to cross the street, they will wait until the crossing signal is green.
My favorite thing in Berlin was the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. It was designed and installed within the last five years and it was an incredibly powerful memorial. It was the first time that there was not some overwhelming significance and symbolism to the memorial. The memorial is made up of, honestly, these coffin shaped rectangles of varying heights, repeated over and over and over again in rows and rows and rows. As you walk into the memorial these rectangles rise up on either side of you and you feel incredibly small. There are no names on the rectangles, nor is there any significance to the number of them there. The number is 2107 or something like that, and it does not correlate to the 6 million who were killed. At first I was really put off that there wasn't some significance but as I walked into the memorial I felt so much more than I expected and it didn't matter than the names and the places were not listed somewhere, the feeling was enough. One of the most powerful feelings was standing in the memorial looking down these alleys and rows, and people would suddenly appear coming from some other direction, and they'd be within your line of sight for a couple seconds and then they'd disappear, and if they were a stranger you would never see them again. An eerie sort of coincidence is the company that makes the graffiti resistant paint that coats each individual rectangle in the memorial is the same company that made the gas that used during WWII for execution.

The Tops of the Rectangles of the Memorial

Within the Memorial

Another highlight of the trip was going to the Wansee House, where the Wansee Conference was held, which is where the Final Solution was decided. My favorite room here (it has since been turned into a Holocaust Museum) was a room with quotes from 2nd Generation people. But not just survivors, quotes from the daughters and nieces of S.S officers and people very high up in Hitler's regime. They talked about living with the guilt, and not wanting to acknowledge what it was that their relatives did. Even the quotes from the children of survivors were powerful. One man had a quote along the lines of; Every time I got poor marks in school and showed my mother she would sigh and say, "This is what I survived Auschwitz for?" Can you imagine living your life like that? Do well or make your mother regret surviving the Holocaust?

Partial Quote from the niece of a Regime Officer

It was such a cool concept and from all the Holocaust museums I have ever visited it was probably one of my favorite parts.

Also, we went to the Jewish Museum in Berlin and there was this incredible memorial here. It was this space filled with 10,000 metal faces and you could walk on them. And when you walked on them it made this incredible noise (of metal hitting other metal) and you could hear it throughout the building. The memorial was to all innocent victims of War.

Metal Faces (Not my Picture: Photo Credit: Lonnie Kleinman)

One final non-Holocaust related memory of Berlin was climbing to the top of the Parliament building. On the rood of the building is this huge mirrored, metal structure that you can climb and see a lot of the city.

Metal Mirrored Structure on top of the Parliament Building

Terezin

Before leaving Prague we went to Terezin, a concentration camp/ghetto during the second world war. It was really eerie to be there, I had never been to any camp in Poland or anywhere else, so that was a weird experience just being somewhere that people had been sent to and died at during the Holocaust. Also, Terezin is a fully functioning town now, with families and people who live there, so while we were walking by the crematorium there were people rollerblading. At first I thought it was incredibly rude, and while I don't think that they necessarily should be doing that by the crematorium and the cemetery, it is their home.
Terezin as a town now, has about 7,000 people living in it. During the was it held up to 70,000 at any point. Terezin was used as an intermediate camp. Those Jews that the German's didn't know what to do with, because they were so high up in society were sent there while the Nazi Regime decided. Poets, artists, high class members of society were the first people to be sent there. Also, it was not a death camp, 35,000 people died there from disease and sickness, but not from extermination.
Another unique thing about Terezin was that the leadership of the ghetto was Jewish, and those Jews were the ones who made the lists of transports out of Terezin, and to Auschwitz or another death camp. Could you imagine being the one deciding who got to go and who got to stay? Every so often the list of names would be posted and then people had a chance to appeal the decision. They could go in front of a board of people and tell them why they shouldn't be on the transport (family, life in Terezin, etc.). The sad thing is though, if you got out of it, someone would be sent in your place.
They told us while we were there that there were people who appealed to be taken off the list, but there were also people who went to the board and asked to be put on the transport, to be with a family member or a loved one. That is all incomprehensible to me. Knowing what we know now, about where those transports went and what happened to the people, knowing that some people voluntarily put themselves there is, I guess, uncomfortable.
We also went to the crematorium, where the people who died in Terezin were, well cremated, and there ashes were just dumped elsewhere. There was this room there in which the bodies were prepared for cremation, and it was run by people in the ghetto, and the bodies were prepared in a Jewish manner.
The whole experience was eerie, and heavy and got me thinking.

Central Europe Part I

My whirlwind slam bam bang tour of Europe being over, I certainly have a lot to report. First off, our trip managed to go smoothly and there was no interference from the volcanic ash that postponed and canceled a lot of other people’s travel plans.
So after some nervousness about arriving in Budapest we got there. We were only spending one day there so we had to cram everything in very quickly. We toured an old church that was this sprawling structure with turrets and courtyards and we spent some time walking around the downtown. The evening we spent there we got to meet some Hungarian young adults (twenty somethings) who shared their experience of being Jewish in Budapest. It’s not so good, you cannot say you’re Jewish or wear a Star of David for fear of inciting violence against you. That’s scary, coming from Israel and from the U.S where there is no fear about saying you’re Jewish, it’s really weird to think that it’s something you have to hide, and not be able to publicly declare. I know that they’re not ashamed of their Judaism, it’s still weird for me to try and comprehend.

The next day in Budapest, which we spent before heading to Prague we did the Jewish thing. We saw the Holocaust memorials, and saw the synagogue, that is not used so regularly, although on the High Holy Days it is filled with thousands of people. We also visited a Jewish School in Budapest.

The Synagoguge

The school, which teaches Hebrew and Jewish history, has a majority of students who are in fact not Jewish. The interactions between the two groups was a little bit difficult so it was hard to understand the reasons behind the non-Jews attending the school. After the school we went to see an incredible Holocaust Memorial. Along this one spot on the river Danube there are these cast iron shoes that remember all of the people who were killed and their bodies thrown into the river. There are hundreds of shoes, of all shapes and sizes, and rocks and flowers sticking out of them.

The Memorial

From Budapest we drove to Prague, with an hour stop for dinner in Bratislava, Slovakia. We finally arrived in Prague at about 2 in the morning, and after a confusion over which hotel we were supposed to going to, and a twenty five minute wait outside the right hotel, we finally got in, and went to sleep.

The next day in Prague was devoted to seeing the Jewish sites. Prague has a complex of Jewish Historical Museums, it includes one actual museum, several synagogues, a historic cemetery, and one Holocaust Memorial. The Museum wasn't all that interesting, at this point in the year the Jewish museums blend together a bit, so this one wasn't all that special. The Holocaust memorial was quite incredible, it was in an old synagogue and it was walls and walls of name, after name after name, of all the Jews from Prague and that died in Prague.

Holocaust Memorial

The cemetery was also incredible, it has been around since the 1400's and there's so many people buried there that at some point they ran out of space, so they started putting bodies, one on top of another. At the most concentrated point there are twelve layers of graves, and it's estimated that there are 100,000 people buried there.

The Cemetery; A small portion of the many gravestones

The rest of the synagogues were old looking, although they all had incredible thought put into their design and decoration.

We spent Shabbat in Prague, we went to services on Friday night at the Spanish Synagogue and the services were led by a Czech man, and the community there were mostly tourists. The next morning we went to another synagogue, called the Jerusalem synagogue, but the women sat in the back behind a big sheet and couldn't really hear or see, so we didn't stay there for to long.

While in Prague we went on Several walking tours. One on Friday night, and we say the city lit up at night, which was quite beautiful, especially along the river. The Charles Bridge (i think that's the name of it) is this huge pedestrian bridge that was really lit up and beautiful. The other walking tour was during the day, and that more historic sites, although we returned to the same bridge and saw a really peculiar site. It was Jesus on the cross with Hebrew words written in an arc above him (קדש קדש, קדש, and the continuation of the prayer). The legend goes that Jewish man defaced a previous image of Jesus and was ordered to pay for a new one, the entire Jewish community stood behind him, and so they left their mark on the statue.

The Statue

Walking Tour Views