Ari’s Adventures Abroad: London Edition may have come to an end (*cue audience “awww”*), but there is still one final installment before I lay the chronicling to rest! The week after my program ended, my parents and I traveled to Berlin, Germany. The main purpose of the trip was so that I could visit a concentration camp, given my keen interest in studying World War II and the Holocaust, but we also saw other aspects of the country’s history, including the longest spot where the Berlin Wall still exists in part and Checkpoint Charlie, which divided the East Berlin and West Berlin.

Tuesday, May 16, 2017

On Tuesday, we had a fairly simple day as we left our hotel in London and took a flight out of Heathrow airport at 12:45 p.m. After a few hours, we arrived at Waldorf Astoria Berlin and after washing up, went to dinner at a local restaurant, Litter & Wegner.

Wednesday, May 17, 2017

Our first full day in Berlin was certainly treated as such; we saw a lot. After leaving our beautiful hotel in West Berlin, we traveled to the Brandenburg Gate, which is located in Pariser Platz. The area was being set up for what appeared to be a LGBTQ+ event, which would eventually make more sense since the locale is near the memorial for homosexual victims of the Holocaust. Next, we visited the exterior of Das Reichstagsgebäude (The Reichstag), which is now the seat of the German Bundestag. The building was remarkable, especially having taken a course on the Third Reich where I learned that Adolf Hitler and Albert Speer, Hitler’s chief architect, modeled many of the National Socialist German Workers Party’s buildings on the Roman Empire — meant to last for over a thousand years. When we looked at the buildings nearby, it was even more jarring since many of them were made of glass and were incredibly modern in comparison.

Our next stop was to the nearby Holocaust Memorial. The memorial featured hundreds of large, stone blocks that were lined up in rows for people to walk through. The ground as you walked through was also sloped, which gave a slightly disorienting feel to the memorial. Nonetheless, it was an extremely powerful display in such an open and prominent area of the city. Next, we went to Berliner Kindl, where we stopped for some lunch before proceeding to our next stop of the day: Checkpoint Charlie.

Evidently, the Berlin Wall was taken down on Nov. 9, 1989. However, when we went to Checkpoint Charlie, a Berlin Wall crossing point between East Berlin and West Berlin, one could see where the wall once stood as a physical and ideological division. After visiting the checkpoint, my father and I spent some time in the museum, which was incredibly cramped, and extremely tall, and learned about some of the history of the area.

Finally, our day began to come to a close as we returned to the area we were previously near for the Holocaust Memorial. We ended up walking to Grober Tiergarten Berlin, where we saw Denkmal für die im Nationalsozialismus verfolgten Homosexuellen (Homosexual Memorial), Denkmal für die im Nationalsozialismus ermordeten Sinti und Roma (Memorial to the Sinti and Roma Victims of National Socialism) and Sowjetisches Ehrenmal (Soviet War Memorial). Each were different from one another, highlighting the difference in regard that each of these groups were given in light of the atrocities directed at them during the war by the Nazis, and even those afterwards who refused to acknowledge their suffering. The memorial for homosexual victims was a large block with a screen on the inside, which shows different same-sex couples from generations ago. For the Sinti and Roma, there was a long wall of their history and persecution from the 1930s until the end of the war in 1945, as well as a reflecting pool behind the wall, set away from the general passerby. Lastly, the Soviet War Memorial is a large statue of a Soviet soldier, and there are also nearby Soviet tanks.

Thursday, May 18, 2017

The thing that you need to know about my family is that it’s not a vacation or excursion without us getting lost. For once, though, our confusion was not our fault, but that did not make it any less frustrating in the 80-degree weather. On Thursday morning, we decided to take a City Circle Bus Tour so that we could see more of Berlin, more efficiently. Thinking it would be more convenient, we got our tickets at the concierge desk in our hotel and he instructed us where to go to hop on the Purple line. After telling our taxi driver the hotel we were told that the bus stop was across from, we were brought there, only to walk around for over an hour looking for where the stop was supposed to be. Finally, we realized that we were so close to our hotel that we had walked in a complete circle. It was only when we spoke to a ticket seller for the bus tour that we found out we were brought to the wrong hotel, and we were supposed to be near a train station instead.

Once we finally settled that confusion, we got on the bus and using our audio guide, followed the tour around Berlin. On the bus, we saw many things, including remnants of the Berlin Wall, Berlin’s oldest beer garden, the Television Tower c. 1969, which is the tallest tower in Berlin, and Soho Club. The bus also took us down Karl-Marx-Allee, which was renamed in 1961 and exists today as popular residential quarters. Next we saw an area called Friedrichshain, where there is a publishing house with a circulation of approximately 38,000 in mostly East Germany. When we got off the bus, it was to visit the East Side Gallery, where we saw the longest remaining area of the Berlin Wall. The wall had political and social artwork all over it, which made for some incredibly artsy photos. The artwork was not limited to depicting German life either; different countries, including the United States, were represented on the dilapidated wall.

Finally, our last stop for the day was to the Jewish Museum. We walked through the permanent underground exhibition that featured three axes: an Axis of Exile, an Axis of Continuity and an Axis of the Holocaust. Each of the axes depicted different aspects of Jewish life, including the suffering leading up to and during the Holocaust. The exhibition itself had the personal touch of donations being made from family, friends or sometimes even strangers who learned of the significance of certain items in their homes, and presented it for permanent display in the museum. There were two other areas of the exhibition, the first being the Holocaust Tower, which was a narrow room with a slight light in the ceiling when you look up. The room itself echoed and it was eerily haunting to be in almost complete darkness with so many people, which leant itself to the unsettling, and perhaps intentional, feeling of claustrophobia. The final area that we visited was the Garden of Exile. Surrounded by stone columns, everything feels as though it is tilted on its axis, and although there are plenty of ways to “escape”, one feels just as disorienting as the next, which creates a degree of psychological distress.

Friday, May 19, 2017

The reason we had chosen to go to Germany is because I had hoped to visit a concentration camp, so we went on Friday to Sachsenhausen concentration camp with a guide who showed us around. The camp is located not too far outside of Berlin, and we spent the late morning and early afternoon touring the site. There we saw the remaining barracks, the kitchen, the laundry area, trenches, punishment cells and museum exhibitions that were in the buildings. One of many disturbing facts that we learned while we were there was that it was the target for Neo-Nazi vandalism and attack on several occasions. In September 1992, there was an arson attack that damaged barracks 38 and 39, which are part of the museum. One part of the tour that stood out for me in particular, though, was when we went into the kitchen and on the pillars there were drawings by prisoners who were looking for ways to express their unfathomable situations. Leaving the camp later that afternoon, it was impossible to imagine the terror that once occurred there, and remembering how hot we were on that day was also met with an inevitable degree of guilt since we had complete access to water all day and could leave at any point.

Despite not leaving Berlin until Sunday, our last full day on Saturday was a wash since I ended up with another high fever of 102-degrees. Sufficed to say, it did not make for an enjoyable plane ride back to the states, especially when we had to go to the ER upon arrival, but thankfully, we had seen all that we had wanted to see when visiting Berlin. Now, believe it or not, here is where I officially conclude Ari’s Adventures Abroad. Until next time …