The Hardest Day So Far - Mjdanek

Last night’s concert was really fun – an opportunity to dress up a bit and experience some European culture.  I originally thought the concert would be held in a large church, but instead it was held in the last Polish King’s summer palace!   I also thought it would be a large affair with hundreds of people, but instead the 30 of us were in a room just for us.  It was great.

Our tour guide took us to the grounds of the Summer Palace and we had an opportunity to walk around and look at some things.  The palace (dang it – I didn’t take my camera!) looks like it’s straight from Versailles, France.  It was beautiful – inside and out.  I kept looking for a grandstand or something where the concert would take place and was surprised when our tour guide took us inside the palace and upstairs to a small (by palace standards) room with a Steinway grand piano at the frfor the ont. 

We were all seated on plush chairs that looked like they were made in 1750 and in a few minutes our performer came into the room.  He is an accomplished pianist who had taught for 15 years at the Chopin (a Polish composer) Academy of Music.  I had a good view of his hands and it was fascinating to watch how they flew over the keys. 

After a few pieces of music, we took a short intermission where we were all offered champagne.  Not being a drinker, I declined and we all filed into other upstairs rooms in the palace.  The furniture was finely crafted an all of the paintings on the wall were real oil on canvas paintings – no prints here!  

After the remainder of the concert was finished, we all went back to the bus and then the hotel. Our dinner at the hotel came next and for the first time I felt like I was dressed properly (white shirt and tie) for the occasion – It is a very nice hotel.

This morning we all checked one of our bags (we’ll be back in 4 days) and climbed aboard the bus for a 2 ½ hour drive to Lublin and the Concentration Camp Majdanek.  It’s time for a little rest before this new experience. 

I’m back with a little break before dinner, so I’ll write a bit about our visit to Majdanek.  We came into the camp from the main entrance – where the prisoners were trucked to the camp in 1942 through 1944.  The prisoners were brought into Lublin on the train and then trucked to the camp.

The main gate - to the right

This camp was originally created as a prisoner of war camp for Soviet prisoners and then expanded into a concentration camp.  Then Jews began to be sent there so gas chambers were built and a crematorium.  Eventually a larger crematorium was built on the outskirts of the camp.  Plans were made to enlarge the camp, but the German gains in the Soviet Union were reversed and they began retreating, so the expansion plans were never realized.

This camp is the best preserved of all the camps.  The Nazi’s didn’t build camps to last.  They were temporary structures designed to do their awful work and then be dismantled.  As the German army was retreating and the Soviets advancing, plans were made to destroy the camp.  However, the Soviets were pushing so quickly into Poland that the Germans didn’t have time and the camp was captured nearly intact.  The gas chambers and crematorium are still standing and all of the barracks were there as well.  Only one “field” of barracks (out of 5) are standing today but you can certainly get the “feel of the place” by going into those.

The first structure we entered was the “Bath/Delousing” building.  This is where the prisoners were stripped of their clothing, dunked in delousing baths and then showered.  One of the myths of the Holocaust is that gas came out of the showerheads.  This did not happen.  Zyklon B was used in pellet form and it wouldn’t work that way.  If you went into a room with showerheads in the ceiling – you were getting a real shower. 

"Bath and Disinfection" Building - for Men.  There were 3 gas chambers inside as well.

Shower room showerheads - remember, these only brough water to the prisoners - no gas!!!!!

Those prisoners who had been “selected” to die, however, never went into the real shower room.  They were moved from the undressing room through another door in the building to the gas chambers.  It was there that they were gassed to death.  (I won't share pictures of this one.  I'm trying to be as sensitive as I can.)

We were able to move through these rooms and peer into the gas chamber.  I can’t describe to you how eerie it felt to look in this room and see the blue-stained walls (zyklon B reacts with the cement walls and stains them blue in patches).  I cannot imagine the terror of being packed in so closely in this room.

I went outside after a short time and looked at the doors on the other end of the room – those doors for removing the bodies of the victims.  Such ordinary steel doors.  They could be to anything – a storage room, a cold-storage locker, anything. . . . .but they’re not.  They have become symbols of a most barbarous age - an age when a people were sold a belief that it was OK to kill an entire group of people.

I was told the story of a prisoner in the camp who had medical expertise.  He was given the task of essentially autopsying the dead looking for valuables (since when are human beings more valuable after they are dead than before???????).  He went to report and saw no bodies to autopsy.  He asked his SS supervisor, “Where are the bodies?”  He was told, “They are still walking all around here.”  In other words these people were already dead to this SS officer.  It was just a matter of time and a little work for the process to be completed.

We continued through the camp and went into the storehouses.  This particular camp was used as a collection point for all the valuables collected from Jews and other prisoners in 3 different camps.  From Majdanek the valuables, clothes, shoes, and other things in good condition were shipped back to Germany.

The first storehouse we entered had a large display of shoes.  When the Soviets liberated this camp they found 430,000 pair of shoes (that is not a type-o, I carefully typed in that number – almost half a million pair of shoes!).  I saw only a small fraction of those shoes and it is still mind-boggling.  I immediately remembered Edward R. Murrow’s (a radio reporter who had to describe what he was seeing to the folks back at home in the US) quote from when he visited a camp at the end of the war:

“One shoe, two shoes, a dozen shoes, yes.  But how can you describe several thousand shoes?”

As I walked around the room of shoes I tried to visualize who might wear such a shoe.  It was all too easy to envision the owners of these shoes. 

Just a few of the shoes found at the camp

We moved on to the living barracks.  We saw the barracks sitting in a large field of tall grass.  Maintenance workers were busy mowing the grass and tarring the roofs of a couple of the barrack buildings.  Then we were told we needed to visualize it without any grass at all.  Why no grass?  Did were the prisoners so tightly packed in the area that they had trampled all the grass to oblivion like a large trail through the forest?  No – it was explained to us that if any grass lived in the camp area it would have been eaten by the inmates.  There would have been no grass in the camp – no grass at all.

I don’t know why this fact affected me so much, but it did.  I can still remember walking through the rest of the barracks area repeating, “They ate all the grass” over and over in my head as if trying to convince myself that it is true.

Our final stop at the camp was a large dome covering ashes left from the largest single day of murder during the Holocaust.  18,400 people were moved into ditches in shifts (music blaring from loudspeakers to muffle the sounds of rifle-fire lest the prisoners revolt) and shot.  18,400 people in one day.  The Germans tried to burn the bodies in the crematorium, but soon realized it wasn’t going to work.  So, they burned them in place in the ditches.  After the war, the pits were opened and those ashes were placed in this memorial dome area that had been prepared. 

As I looked at the ashes two things impressed themselves on me.  First, the sheer size of the mound of ashes.  I compare the number of people who can fit in the BYU-Idaho auditorium – 3 thousand more than can fit in that auditorium – all in one day. . . . . Second, as I looked at the ashes, I noticed more than ashes.  I saw bone fragments.  I cannot describe the feeling that shot through me when I recognized these fragments.  Shoes are one thing – bone fragments are another.  It became all too real at that point. 

We read a few poems and lit some candles in memory of the murdered and from there we walked to the “new” crematorium which was not destroyed by the Germans as they retreated.  I looked around, but honestly, I was so numb from the previous half hour’s experiences that I’ve recorded what I saw (in my mind) and will work on processing it later.  I simply made it to “overload” and had to shut down for a while.

These experiences remind me of something I heard a few days ago.  President Franklin Roosevelt and Felix Frankfurter (Supreme Court Justice and a Jew who emigrated from Europe as a boy with his family in 1894) met with someone who had escaped from Auschwitz in 1943.  The former prisoner described what he had seen, what he knew to be true.  Justice Frankfurter told the man, “I don’t believe it.”  The former prisoner became agitated – he had told what he knew to be true – what he had seen with his own eyes.  How could it be disputed?  Justice Frankfurter explained further, “I do not deny what you say, but I don’t believe it either.” 

That’s exactly how I felt today.  I am seeing all this proof, all this evidence of the atrocities and I still have trouble processing the truth.  How could this be?  I believe it in my head, but my heart is reluctant to accept the realization that ordinary men could do this to other ordinary men.  They weren’t psychotic, they weren’t brain-damaged, they didn’t have significant mental illness.  They were ordinary men who believed in an ideology that elevated them above their fellow-men. 

I was also reminded that no one has ever uncovered any specific order from Adolf Hitler instigating the mass murder of the Jews.  He sure talked about getting rid of them, annihilation, etc., but no specific order to get the machinery running has ever been found.  What if there never was any specific order?  That means that ordinary men took what he was saying and put it into practice.  They understood what he wanted and they took those steps to please Hitler.  One historian called it, “Working toward the Fuhrer.” 

And, to take that idea to the next step, I quote from Primo Levi (an Italian Jew Survivor), “It happened, therefore it can happen again.” 

We (I talked with others in the group later) really needed some time to decompress and to process what we had just seen and learned, but we were sent to the bus and off we went back to Lublin. 

After a leisurely lunch we went on a walking tour of Lublin.  It was very interesting, but my mind was still on Mjdanek, so I paid little attention.

Our final activity of the day was to have a group meeting.  Elaine took charge in this meeting and told us stories of her family – particularly of her father (remember, Elaine is one of our tour leaders and the child of two Holocaust survivors).  My heart broke as she related these stories.  Here they are as best as I can remember them:

Elaine’s father and his older brother (18 and 20) were “on the run” hiding from the Germans and were living in a “bunker” (hole in the ground) that they had dug.  Her father had even fashioned a water pipe that came into the bunker to provide water so they didn’t have to leave as often.  They only left at night to scavenge for food or trade for it from sympathetic farmers living in the area. 

One night her father was out at night – using no light lest he give himself away – when he stepped on something.  He couldn’t see well enough to figure out what it was so he carefully struck a match and looked.  He had stepped on the body of a woman.  She was dead, but there was an infant trying to nurse at her breast. 

Her father was now faced with one of those “choiceless choices.”  He wanted to take the child back to the bunker and care for it, but he knew that he couldn’t.  The baby would cry and give them away, etc.  So, he left the child there and walked away. 

The next experience happened to her father and his older brother once they were in Mauthausen concentration camp.  They came to the camp after working as shoe repairmen (their family did that before the war) and so they had built small secret compartments in their belts. 

Upon entering the camp, they were stripped, but allowed to keep their belts and shoes which were checked carefully by the guards.  They were given new uniforms and sent to roll call. 

One day at roll call her father noticed something in the ground.  He bent down and pulled up a harmonica that someone had hidden in the gravel of the yard.  He tried to quietly play it but it wouldn’t make a sound.  He looked up into it and noticed something inside so he dropped it on the ground and smashed it with his boot.  Inside there were hidden 3 diamonds.  Those diamonds would save her father’s life.

The brothers split the diamonds, the older brother keeping 2 and Elaine’s father keeping the last one.  They hid them away in their secret compartments in their belts. 

Later, the brothers were separated and Elaine’s father was sent to the rock quarry which meant certain death.  They were made to haul large stones quarried nearby up a large flight of steps carved into the cliff.  Men would collapse and fall and die, or they might be pushed by SS guards.  Either way, you were not going to make it.

Elaine’s uncle learned that his younger brother had been sent to this detail and he decided to try and bribe a Kapo to get him removed from that duty.  He didn’t know if it would work.  The bribe could cost him his life, cost his younger brother his life, or both.  Fortunately, the Kapo took the bribe and Elaine’s father was removed from the detail.

The final story happened years later, after both brothers had immigrated to the United States and after Elaine was born and had a family of her own.  The two brothers wanted a marker to remember their family that had been murdered in the Holocaust so they could go to a specific place to remember them.  They ordered the plaque and organized a day of celebration for both their families to come and see the plaque.

When the day arrived Elaine saw the plaque before her father and noticed an unfortunate mistake.  She had been told that the two brothers had three younger siblings that were murdered – two sisters and a baby brother.  The plaque had their names, but also had a fourth name, Sarah.

She ran to her father to tell him - she just knew he would be so upset.  He then told her that there had actually been another child.  The very day the Germans came into their town to round up the Jews, his mother was in the hospital giving birth to a child.  They learned that the child was a girl, but nothing else.  The child was most likely killed at the hospital.  Their mother was then deported to Belzec and murdered there – the family never saw her again.

The two brothers (after the war) consulted with a Rabbi who told them that they should call the girl “Sarah” as she had never been given a name.  That was the Sarah who was on the plaque.

When Elaine asked her father why she had never been told about this additional child he said, “I didn’t know how much to tell my children.  I was afraid that if I told them too much they would stop being children.”

I have no commentary on those stories only to say that I was devastated when I heard them.  But, I’m glad she shared them with us as now I can share those stories and keep alive the memory of her family that was murdered not so long ago.

It has been a really tough day.  I’m exhausted but not sleepy.  I need to process a lot of thoughts and emotions.  Fortunately we have a long bus ride to Belzec camp tomorrow and an even longer ride to Krakow after we’ve finished touring that memorial.  Much to process. . . . .

The Warsaw Ghetto

Our agenda for today was to see what little there was left of the Warsaw Ghetto.  By the way – the Nazi’s never called them “ghettos,” they were called Jewish Settlement Districts (much nicer to the average citizen who doesn’t know exactly what’s going on). 

We first went to see remnants of the Ghetto wall.  There are no signs, no markings, nothing to lead you to the site.  You have to weave throughout apartment buildings to get to the area.  When we arrived we could see part of an old building who’s rear wall was one boundary of the ghetto and then portions of bricks running at a 90 degree angle from that wall. 

There is a 90 year old man who lives right by the wall who has done some extensive research into the history of the wall.  He even created a map that has been put on a metal plate and affixed to the wall so you can see exactly where the original ghetto was inside Warsaw. 

He brought out a few books that he had put together – scrapbooks, mostly – with certificates from Yad Vashem and other Holocaust organizations who honored his work.  He also told us that he chose that apartment on purpose when he moved to Warsaw after the war because he wanted to see for himself where all this had happened.  He said he was sympathetic to the Jews (not being one himself) because of the 3 years he spent in a gulag (prison camp) in the Soviet Union.  He said the conditions in the two (gulag and ghetto) were pretty much the same. 

After kissing a couple of the young ladies in our group on their cheeks (one called him a “sniper” because of his speed in going in for the kiss) he asked us for donations in keeping his history going (we happily obliged with a few Zlotys) and then went back in the house. 

The "Sniper" :)

Jews made up 33% of the population of Warsaw – the ghetto began with less than 10% of the territory of the city.  And, it was reduced in size periodically from there.  There are only a couple of buildings in the entire ghetto that were not totally destroyed when the German army came in to stop the Jewish uprising.  But, most of the ghetto was burned and then razed. 

Next, we went to the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw to see a couple of things.  First, we saw the graves of prominent Jews who contributed significantly to Jewish and Polish culture.  Playwrights, authors, doctors, etc.  Our second purpose was to see the graves (or memorial stones if their bodies were not recovered) of some of the Warsaw uprising fighters. 

I was really intrigued by this cemetery.  During its 200 year use, in a few areas (very prestigious areas) they had put more earth on top of the existing graves in order to bury even more people – on top of them!  Then they built a retaining wall and used the headstone fragments of broken and deteriorating headstones to create the outer coating of the wall – no disrespect at all. 

We saw the memorial stones for Vladka Meed’s family (read her book “Both Sides of the Wall”).  They perished in Treblinka so no bodies are there.  We saw memorials to other fighters in the uprising of 1943 as well. 

My favorite memorial was to Janus Korsach (I’m sure I’ve spelled it completely wrong).  He was a child psychologist and educator who advocated that parents treat their children more kindly and more as individuals rather than little kids who need to be told what to do and not heard from otherwise.  It was very revolutionary at the time.  He wrote several books and even had a regular radio broadcast in Warsaw.  He also started a couple of different orphanages where his theories were put into practice. 

Once the ghetto was established, he organized an orphanage.  He did all he could to make sure the children were protected and had enough food.  Friends repeatedly tried to get him to leave with them (as such a prominent individual he had a good chance of getting out of the ghetto, out of Poland, and away from Nazi controlled territory), but he refused each time. 

Eventually, the children of his orphanage were chosen for “deportation.”  Rather than let them go alone, he told them to put on their best clothes, walked with them hand-in-hand toward the Umschlagplatz (gathering place) where they were put on train cars and sent to their deaths in Treblinka.  He refused to leave those children even though he knew exactly what would happen.  Word of the death camps had been brought back to the ghetto by an escapee, so there were no real secrets – only unbelief that this kind of thing was possible.

We also went to the portion of the cemetery that was used as a mass grave.  As people began dying of the horrible conditions and of starvation in the ghetto, their bodies were brought to the cemetery and placed in huge mass graves.  Thousands  were brought there.  Approx. 5,000 were dying each month so they were placed in a large pit and then covered with a little paper or earth, maybe some lime (as in pulverized limestone – to absorb odor) and then another layer of bodies were placed in the grave. 

Photo showing how deep the mass grave was when first dug

After the grave was closed and the war ended, the bodies decomposed so the grave began to sink into the earth.  Today there is a large depression where the mass grave is located and white markers are placed around the perimeter of the grave.

Our final stop of the afternoon was a Jewish museum next to what used to be the most ornate Synagogue in all of Warsaw.  The Synagogue was destroyed during the war and an now there is a large office building standing on the site. 

After the museum, we went to the only Synagogue from before the war that is still standing.  The Germans used it as a stable and a storehouse so it was spared total destruction (yet another way to degrade and humiliate the Jews – using their Synagogue in this way). 

Today (Sunday) my thoughts have often turned to my church duties as a Bishop.  I feel bad leaving my counselors to do all my work for such a long time, but I’ve also thought about the religious leaders of the Jews and what they went through at the time of the Holocaust.

Many of them were killed quickly by the Nazi’s, but they were also often used in the Judenrat (Jewish Council) and they had to make “unmakeable” decisions.  They were the ones who had to decide who was next for deportation, they were the ones who distributed the ration cards entitling Jews in the ghetto to 184 calories per day (pick up a candy bar and compare).  They were the ones who had to implement the decisions of the Nazi’s.  How do you make those decisions?  How do you do that to your own, the people you love? 

The first Judenrat leader in Warsaw did all he could to help his people (I believe his last name was Czerniakow), but in July of 1942, the deportations began and he was ordered to select the first several thousand.  The next day he wrote, “They want me to kill the children of my people with my own hands.  There is nothing left for me but to die.” With that, he committed suicide. 

I cannot seem to get this out of my head.  How do you make those decisions?  How do you escape those decisions?  How do you protect your own family while looking out for a congregation of 400 (the size of my ward)?  I don’t know how any of these men could do it.  These situations seem to be nothing but a series of “unmakeable” decisions.

After the cemetery we drove back to the hotel for a little rest and some time to freshen up for our Chopin concert this evening.  Chopin was Polish and it will be nice on a Sunday evening to sit in a church and listen to an accomplished pianist play selections from Chopin.  Two years ago in Germany we went to the Berlin Philharmonic play Beethoven and I just kept thinking, “I can’t believe I’m in Germany listening to a symphony play Beethoven!”  I’m sure tonight’s experience will be similar. 

Tomorrow we leave Warsaw for a few days to go and visit more concentration camps.  I’m going to need some rest and preparation. 

Till then. . . . .    J

Two Concentration Camps and Two Museums in One Day!

Our first camp of the trip was Ravensbrueck.  What a beautiful setting – it’s on a beautiful little lake with an idyllic little German village across the water.  What a bizarre site for such a horrible place. 

Ravensbruck

This camp was primarily for women.  The prisoners worked for various German corporations like Siemens. 

Our first stop inside the camp was the crematoria.  It was built right by the lake so that the ashes could simply be thrown in the water.  This camp was not a killing center, so there were no gas chambers – the women were there as slave laborers and to be removed from German society.  The crematoria were used when women would die of malnutrition, exhaustion, etc. 

There were three ovens – not original to this camp, but brought in to complete the reconstruction of the site.  We had a fascinating discussion about the German engineers who would have received the request to build these ovens.  What kind of questions would they have asked?  They must have known what they were to be used for – what kind of engineer builds something without knowing it’s function, it’s purpose? 

Crematoria

After a few minutes, Elaine asked us – no, told us – to get out of there.  She was clearly unnerved.  If I haven’t mentioned this before, Elaine Culbertson is one of our tour directors.  She has been one of the leaders of this trip for years and years.  She is also the daughter of two Holocaust survivors (Jewish).  Her mother was sent to Auschwitz and then went on the Death March when the camp was evacuated as the Soviets approached from the east.  Somehow this 17 year old girl (weighing about 60 pounds) survived the march and made it to Ravensbruek.  It was there that she was liberated. 

Elaine had never been to this particular camp before and she was really struggling (I can’t even imagine what she was feeling).  I think many in our group were glad for the excuse to get out of that building. . . . 

Inside the camp itself there is little to see.  The only original structures are the workshops where the women worked.  However, one of the instruments of punishment remained.  There is a large concrete wheel – like the front of a steamroller – sitting in  a corner of the courtyard.  There is a handle attached to the front.  Women were forced to pull this around camp as a punishment for some kind of infraction. 

After walking around the camp for a few minutes we went into a little information room.  Here we saw hundreds of pictures of the women who were imprisoned here.  All kinds of different expressions stared back at me – proud, fearful, timid, pained.  It was difficult to look into their eyes. 

On a table in the room was a large book with hundreds of pages.  On each page were the names of all the women who died in this camp, their approximate age and their nationality.  We flipped through the pages for a while. . . . . and then it was time to move on.

Our last point on this visit was the main gate – it seems that we went through the camp backwards, having started at the crematoria.  I felt the gate was pretty unassuming – no large building, no “Arbeit Macht Frei” on a gate, no train tracks.  But still, the result was the same.

Main Gate

The strangest thing about both camps that I visited today is the fact that they are right on the outskirts of a town or city.  No one could have been fooled as to what was happening here.  No one could have missed the stench, the sound, the sights of the camp.  But, in Nazi Germany – not knowing things could often keep you out of trouble.  I think people chose not to “know” – even though they had to know.

After a lengthy bus ride – somehow we our bus got stuck behind a tractor pulling some kind of farm implement – we made it to Sachenhausen.  I’ve been to this camp before so I knew what to expect.  However, this visit focused on things that I didn’t notice on my first trip to this camp. 

We spent some time looking around and going through the barracks.  We also went to the cell block (a prison within a prison) where “special” prisoners were housed.  Josef Stalin’s son was imprisoned here, as well as Martin Neimoller (sp?).

However, what I really didn’t know from my first trip to the camp were the medical experiments conducted on the prisoners in the camp.  I don’t know how I missed it the first time, but there is a building in one corner of the camp where experiments were done, bodies were autopsied – complete with a morgue in the basement. 

The rooms are all tiled in white and we all filed into the room with two tables with drains in the center.  I can’t even imagine what kind of pain – physically and emotionally – was caused in this building, but it seriously creeped me out.  The morgue rooms downstairs were pretty unnerving as well.  I was all too happy to get back outside where I could breathe normally again. (I decided against including the picture of this one)

Another new bit of information that I discovered were the semi-circular paths around the camp that had different kinds of surfaces.  Some were sharp stone, some smooth, some smooth stones.  We were told these were to test shoes for the German Army.  Inmates were forced to march for approx. 40 kilometers (around 26 miles) each day on different terrain to test how that terrain affected the wear on different types of shoes.  Inmates would occasionally collapse and die as a result of these “tests.”

terrain "track" for testing shoes

Other than the bookstore, that was the last stop on our trip to Sachenhausen.  We skipped “Station Z” where the gas chamber, the killing room (rifle shots to the base of the neck), and the crematorium were.  I’d been there before, and at that point, I didn’t feel any particular need to see them again. 

Now it was time to head back to Berlin.  We have an early train to Warsaw in the morning and we need to get things packed and ready to go.  But before dinner, Jason and I have a little excursion to complete.

Jason mentioned that he would like to find the memorial to Col. Stauffenberg (sp?).  He’s the guy portrayed in the movie Valkrye (Tom Cruise).  He played an integral part in the July 20, 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler and take over the German government.  Unfortunately, the plot did not succeed and he, along with many of his co-conspirators were executed.  The memorial to those victims of the Nazis is at the site of their execution.  I thought it was a great idea to go find the memorial, so off we went.

We found it on the street that bears Stauffenberg’s name (now).  In a courtyard there is a memorial as well as the entrance to the museum for German resistance to the Nazi government.  It didn’t close for about 20 minutes so we went in. 

Courtyard where Stauffenberg was executed

The whole exhibit was in German – no English – so about all we could do was to look at the photos.  They were powerful, and even with our very limited understanding of German (we should have asked Shauna if she wanted to come with us) we were able to get the general idea of what the exhibits were all about. 

On our way out of the museum at closing time, we were walking down the stairs and notice another little exhibit.  It was just a little room with photos and the stories of siblings caught up in the Holocaust.  Entitled “My brother, my sister” it sounded kind of interesting (and it had translations in English), so we went in. 

I was fascinated to see one quote from a young teen-age girl who (now as an adult) explained that she no longer believed in God – though she did believe in good and evil in people.  She described being on the train car being transported to Auschwitz with her mother.  They had been without water for days and were in bad shape.  At the next stop the door was opened and a bucket of water was put in the car.  A massive commotion – fight, really – broke out among the women to get at the water.  When the German soldier saw that this girl and her mother didn’t get any of the water, he forced the others back so they could drink.  This man – working in the middle of this evil campaign to kill the Jews – showed her kindness. 

I was touched by the quote and noticed a picture of the girl from 1960.  She had survived and had grown into a beautiful woman.  Jason, beside me, noticed her name and we were stunned.  She was Hannah Kent – the wife of Roman Kent.  We had met them in Washington DC as we began the trip!!!! We couldn’t believe that we had made such a fascinating connection on our little side-trip in Berlin. 

Hannah’s brother also survived and now lives in Chicago.  She wrote, “My brother and me – we talk a lot on the telephone.”  What an amazing find.

Authentic Holocaust Sites in and around Berlin

Today was a day for authentic sites – where stuff actually happened, not just a museum about something that happened somewhere else.

First we went to the Olympic Stadium where Germany hosted the 1936 Olympics.  This was the new Germany’s “coming out party.”  It was quite the festival, as it is in all cities and nations that host the Olympics. 

But, the Nazi’s had a lot of cleaning up to do before they were ready for the world stage.  All anti-Semitic posters and signs had to be taken out and many of the concentration camp inmates (mostly political prisoners at this point) were released.  But, as soon as the Olympics were over – everything changed back.

Unfortunately, the stadium itself was closed today so we were only able to go into the outer courtyard and go up the rebuilt bell tower (the British blew it up at the end of WWII) to look around. 

1936 Olympic Stadium

There was a great video in the visitor’s center on the power of Nazi propaganda – especially the idea of self-sacrifice to the nation’s youth.  There is even a shrine at the stadium to those German soldiers who died in WWI – with earth from one military cemetery.  Nobody knew about the shrine at the time, but Hitler and a special detachment of SS went there and had a little ceremony before the opening of the Olympic games.

And, of course you all know about Jesse Owens, the African-American athlete who won 4 gold medals at the Olympics.  There is even a street near the stadium named after him today (it was changed after WWII – certainly not while Hitler was around!)

Our next stop was the Wannsee Villa.  This is where the decision to murder all the Jews of Europe – “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question” – was organized and began to be implemented.  There had already been mass murders of Jews (approx. 1 million) but now things were going to speed up significantly. 

Wannsee Villa

They were originally scheduled to meet on Dec. 8, 1941, but with the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese, they decided to postpone until January 20, 1942.  The meeting was organized by Reinhard Heydrich and attended by 14 others.  The meeting was simple and direct.  They met for 2 hours and basically did math.  They figured out how many Jews were still living in Europe (their figures added up to 11 million) and then began to figure out the logistics of murdering them.  Adolf Eichmann figured out how many trains would be needed, etc. 

Fascinating Fact: I learned today that the transport of Jews (the Holocaust) and other victims of Nazi brutality by train accounted for less than 1/1000^th of the train traffic in occupied Europe.  Hard to believe – I had always assumed that massive quantities of resources were used to murder the victims.  I guess the Nazi’s were even more efficient than I had thought.

It was a short meeting, but so important in history.  Here we see “middle managers” completely buy in to the awful goals of their superiors and cheerfully go about carrying it out. 

Today’s lunch was pretty fun.  I ate a “Donor Kabob.”  It sounds really gross because it doesn’t translate well, but it’s a Turkish sandwich with shaved lamb (roasted on a large vertical rotisserie), onions, cabbage, lettuce, and hot sauce – all in pita bread.  It was quite good. 

Donor Kabob - got this one off the internet.  I forgot to get a pic of my sandwich!

I think my favorite site of the day was Platform 17.  This is the railroad platform near the outskirts of Berlin where some 50,000 Jews were “deported” to Theresienstadt.  It’s a great memorial with one large metal platform that represents each known deportation from Berlin from this station.  There are even three blank ones to represent any that may not be known.  It is a very powerful memorial.

Platform 17

Metal plate commemorating this transport of 1002 Jews who were sent to the Lodz ghetto in Poland

We then went on a little walking tour of “Jewish Berlin” to see major sites connected to the Jewish history of the city.  We went to the first place the Jews were allowed to build a synagogue in the city.  The synagogue was torn down during the Communist days of the ‘60’s because there were only 300 Jews left in East Berlin, but there is a nice memorial there now. 

Jewish memorial at the site of the first synagogue in Berlin

Part of the memorial deals with the demonstrations of Christian wives and mothers.  What happened was Jewish men who had married Christian women before Hitler came to power were not treated as harshly as other Jews.  However, many of them were eventually arrested.  When this happened, their wives went down to police headquarters and protested for three weeks!  Then their husbands and sons were released.  Later, it was learned that they were not going to be deported anyway, but still the bravery of these women is amazing.  This is one of the few open demonstrations by German civilians during the war. 

A few years ago I attended a conference at the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington DC.  I met a survivor who was in that group of men arrested.  His father was Jewish and his mother was Christian.  He and his father were picked up and put into jail and his mother joined the other women on the street protesting.  It was special for me to hear more specific information about that event and to stand where it happened to build a stronger “link” to that survivor’s experience.

We also saw some brass "cobblestones" in the streets in Berlin.  These are placed in the street to commemorate a specific Berlin Jew who was deported and murdered.  over 27,000 have been placed in Berlin.

Our last site visited was the one with the greatest story of the day.  We visited the brush-making shop of Otto Weidt.  He was a blind man who employed mostly other blind people in making brushes (shoe brushes, brushes to polish metal, etc.) to the German army.  He also  employed several Jews in his shop. When times became difficult he hid the Jews he employed in a secret room in his shop.

Otto

However, the Jewish employees were doing such a good job making brushes that there were too many piling up in his shop.  If the German Army found out, they would revoke the special permits his Jewish employees had and they would be deported and murdered.  So, one of his employees, Alice Licht, came up with a brilliant idea – they would take the extra brushes and sell them on the black market.  It worked great and Otto became very wealthy as a result. 

Alice

Then, disaster.  Alice was arrested and scheduled for deportation to a concentration camp.  Otto used some of the fortune he had amassed to bribe an SS man to make sure she was sent to Theresienstadt camp.  This camp was supposed to be the best in terms of living conditions.  He even sent over 200 food packages to her in the camp while she was there.  This was very dangerous because he had to buy food on the black market and ship it there.  Others had to be involved not to be suspicious. 

Then, unexpectedly Alice was sent to Auschwitz.  She was able to get ahold of a postcard and wrote what was happening to her and threw the card out the small window of the train car as it was moving.  She had also written a little note asking whoever found the card to please mail it to Otto Weidt and he would pay the postage.

Unbelievably, someone found the postcard and mailed it.  When Otto learned of Alice’s transfer, he traveled to Auschwitz under the guise of selling brushes to the guards there and checked on Alice.  She was still alive and had been sent to the part of the camp that sorts through the belongings of murdered Jews and sends the items back to Germany. 

Otto uses more of his fortune to bribe officials to get her out of the camp and he brings her back to Berlin where he hides her with his family for the remainder of the war.  She survived the war.  Amazing. . . . .

It just goes to show you how much good one person can do in the life of another.  Wow.

Well, that’s about it for today.  Tomorrow will be another amazing day of authentic sites.  We visit two concentration camps – Ravensbruck and Sachenhausen.  I’m sure I’ll have much to write about tomorrow.

Till then.  J