I found the Rodin museum today and walked through the free public park on a clear warm spring day today! I was so excited! I was more excited to be able to sneak into the Hotel where the main exhibit was indoors and get my photo taken with my favorite piece – The Kiss. I have more pics from around the park and in the Hotel too.

Greetings from Paris!! We made it here yesterday after 8 hours of travelling from Munich that started at 4:30 am. Phew. But it was worth it. Paris is GORgeous!! We took a boat ride at sunset along the Seine and I had no idea where to begin sightseeing. Every building intrigued me, I wanted to spend hours in the Louvre, and I wondered how many nutella crepes I could eat in one day! Yum! My friends Jillian and Nicole were able to join me for a very late but very typically perfect French 3 course meal. I had the salmon, lamb, and crepes. Nicole enjoyed the shrimp and steak and profiteroles. and Jillian had the shrimp and veal medallions and caramel almond ice cream with a sugared pear. Oh yes we indulged before hitting the pillows hard and resting our weary feet for one more day in Paris on Sunday.

*written Friday April 25 on our LAST bus ride. Leaving Berlin on our way back to Munich.

Berlin was a beautiful city, although our hostel did little to comfort us. Let’s just say it was a “youth” hostel and for us adults, that meant 13 year-olds karaoke-ing “99 Red Balloons” all night long. And yet I still found it easy to sleep – every day has been so packed that I can find a way to fall asleep even in “Racer Car” wooden beds! I learned a ton today on the tour, given to us by a local PHD student who really knew his stuff. I was particularly interested in Hitler’s vision of Germania and to see the city’s tribute to the Holocaust. Little remains of Hitler’s attempt to build an empire in the city. We saw only two buildings standing from his original plans, and they were unmarked or abandoned. It is clear that the Germans want to move on from their ugly past and rebuild. And when it came to the rebuilding, the new architecture put in place is amazing – attractive and innovative all at once. We spent the afternoon after the tour resting in the open air under a glass dome that spiraled and coiled above our heads.

We began our tour at Starbucks, which made me do the “happy dance” because the hostel’s “coffee” didn’t exactly do the job on my post-Racer Car bed crankiness. I got a view across the plaza of the balcony where Michael Jackson dangled his child before we embarked on our walk through the city. We saw what remains of the Berlin Wall and photos of the Gastapo jail cells. It is incredible to think that two vastly different societies lived in one nation divided by a cement wall.

Our guide spoke about how each person in the regime played a specific role that they could focus on, and therefore they could feel detached from the larger, more heinous plan that was set in motion. For example, the man in charge of switching the train tracks did not feel responsible for the fact that the trains were switched to take prisoners to death camps. He simply focused on his task.

It was fascinating to learn about T4, the offices where the practice of eugenics was first experimented with in the 1930s, with participation from American scientists and doctors. We were only able to note the approximate street location of where the groundwork of genocide was laid.

I was most intrigued, however, by our visit to Hitler’s bunker – or rather, the sign that told us we were close to where it used to be. Again, there is no ability to tag or commemorate the life of Hitler in Germany, and justifiably so. Only a subtle trail of the historical context of his life remains there. Nonetheless, his suicide as the Russians approached, the burning, burial, movement, exhumation, re-burning and scattering of his ashes in an unmarked spot of a river makes for interesting history, of which we only got a taste on the tour.

We ended our tour at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, an outdoor monument, composed of 2,711 rectangular graffiti-proof stones that stand in rows and columns as a dedication to the Jewish population who suffered and died. Much debate lies in the artist Peter Eisenman’s actual intentions (why 2,711 stones? what is the intended experience for the viewer?), and in his decision to commemorate only the Jews, when so many other European nation’s peoples were imprisoned and murdered. As I walked through it, I became disoriented, at times able to see the horizon, and then losing sight of any way out from under the shadow of the looming blocks. And when I stopped to look around me for the people I knew, they disappeared and reappeared so rapidly, that I felt as if their presence were an illusion. I was alone and lost unless I just kept moving forward blindly and the blocks finally subsided. And I was free in the sun again. I looked around to see who else made it out.

• Slide show of Lublin
• Slide show of Dachau concentration camp
• Slide show of Majdanek concentration camp
• Slide show of Auschwitz concentration camp

 

MajdanekOriginally uploaded by BornToRunND00

In Majdanek, the walk is long and cold and today it was raining as well. This camp was really really difficult to get through. I walked in and out of the barracks alone this time, having fallen behind the group. I entered the last of the barracks and was immediately startled. All around me were cages of shoes but at first I was not sure what was piled in them. No display cases, no glass, no signs, no tour guide, no warning. I walked alone between the cages of rotten shoes that looked like dead mice piled upon each other, discarded and disowned. And then I saw a cherry red heel. I thought of my sisters and their love for sassy red shoes and even as I write this I am overcome with emotion. “what if it were me” became “what if it were my sister” and I broke down with the thought of their suffering as this woman did. Material things may mean nothing compared to life and freedom, but they are a part of who we are and how people remember us. This was a young woman’s shoe, a woman maybe much like my sister. The material possessions of the prisoners seem to resonate the most with me, because they give me a way to connect with who they were before they were prisoners and the life they lost and could not become. This shoe was in her closet in the 1940’s, maybe it was her favorite pair, and it ended up in a pile at an abandoned death camp in 2008.

  I have soooo many pictures and videos but NOT enough time on this trip to pull it all together AND post it. I wanted to post my reflections now (which are already late anyway), so that I could share them with you while I am away. I have so many clips that correspond with what I describe in the posts below…but perhaps, the words are enough for now. Well, they will have to be, but expect media to come. Thanks for following. 

Tuesday April 22, 10:50am*The rain drops beat up against the front window of the bus as we leave Krakow. We leave Auschwitz behind us too. But only in relation to our physical locations. I know that I will take Auschwitz with me everywhere I go from now on.

It doesn’t seem right to say that one concentration camp was more difficult to visit than another, but Dachau was not nearly as terrifying as Auschwitz. Dachau left more to the imagination. Auschwitz spared no one from the reality. From the moment we set out on our guided tour, there was no relief from the horror, and the evidence was everywhere. Our guide spared no detail as she walked us through the barracks, the sanitation room, to the wall of death, into the crematorium, and around the dismantled gas chamber. Just when I thought I had recovered from one shock, I was confronted with another photo, artifact, story, statistic or tour that shook me. I was mesmerized by the billows of human hair, but more so by the fact that this display only represented 1% of the estimated 1.1 million who died here, most of them unregistered and therefore unidentified. They looked like clouds, having turned over the years as grey as the ashes of their owners have been since they died. I felt compelled to touch the glass encasing the children’s clothes and shoes, and the wall of death that was the last thing many had seen before being executed. The evidence was everywhere and I stood witness to it despite my fear…out of obligation to the ones who suffered, out of anger against those who persecuted them, out of my search for the answer to why this happened. It was grimly clear what had happened. At the wall of death, prisoners were shot in the head or hung. In Block 11, people were forced to stand in a 4×4 foot cell for days or placed in the starvation cell. In Block 10, children underwent unthinkable experimentations, especially twins. The large photos of women nearly starved to death looked back at me, their eyes so tired and sad and ashamed. I was ashamed to realize my own vanity.

 

I was struck by the textures of the barracks – stone, brick, cement, pebbles, wood, barbed wire, chains, dirt and mud – uninspiring, uncaring, cold, cramped and cracked. And the landscape – this hell stretched on for miles and miles, and despite the sun today, seemed to have no horizon, no end in sight, and no sign of life. I walked the railroad tracks into the camp just as the Jews had rolled in from the Ghetto, with the harsh wind whipping my back and pushing me along to the selection spot. Here the commandant would have chosen whether I would go to the left or to the right. In a matter of minutes my fate would have been decided by this one man, this stranger who judged me. If I were sent to the right, I would work until I died or by luck survived and was freed. If I were sent to the left, I would have been sent directly to the gas chamber further down the tracks, and suffocated to my death, my body stripped of my hair for textiles, my identity never recorded, my body piled like firewood and burned to ashes, my ashes shoveled into a pit and left in still water. I don’t think anyone can go through the camp and not ask themselves “what if it were me?”

One of our students asked the guide if there were a lot of suicides and she answered that surprisingly, no, there were not, but of course not all were recorded, and some were recorded falsely to mask the murders. As I looked into the eyes of every face posted in the museum of those who were registered and died, I stood in awe of the human will to live. Once these men and women were sent to work, they lived in conditions that were unimaginably cruel. Whether one man survived only one month, six months, or one year, and then died, I respected each man’ s determination to survive and wondered what gave them the hope and the strength for each minute they lived. Would I have been able to endure such horror? What would have kept me going? Why not end my suffering against the barded wire fence?

The ruins of the gas chamber looked like the charred remains of a monster still growling and clenching its jaws in defiance to its destruction, self-righteous to the end. Whereas right beside it, the innocent people it turned to dust lie still and calm in the pool. I’ d like to think that these people are in fact at peace and that the Nazis are as torched and twisted in hell as the ruins they left behind on earth.

I walked the long dirt path out of Auschwitz with my back to the chamber, past the endless stretch of barracks on either side, straight through selection point and onto the train tracks again, this time against the wind. I fought to keep my head up as the cold wind relentlessly beat against my face, bringing tears to my eyes, trying to push me back. Although I felt guilty about leaving, I knew that I couldn’t stay, I didn’t want to stay, but Auschwitz will stay with me.

 

Sunday April 20*

 

On the bus (again) for another 6 hours to Krakow from the Czech Republic. Our hostel, the Czech Inn, was super neat and tidy and modern. The showers were soooo fabulous. We had our own kitchen too and a roof deck in the suite I shared with the 3 other female chaperones. I spent a painful 2 hours online after check-in, struggling to post the “reflections on Dachau” video to the blog.The connection was soooo slow even checking email was tedious. But I have been determined to keep our readers engaged and the media posts in sync with the kids’ reflective text posts each day.  Basically, edublogs.org will not render the video embed code provided by Flickr. We tried alternatively to use Teacher Tube, but their code too was not allowing the video to embed. We resorted to linking to the Flickr video from a thumbnail photo or text link. I’d prefer to keep all of the video and photos in one online account anyway. Another slight bummer is the Twitter. The phone works internationally but doesn’t text! So we’ve been updating it online each evening. We just don’t have enough time at the end of the day, and the bus rides prove too cumbersome to get any editing done (plus I am getting a bit car sick typing this up!). The #1 priority is to make sure the kids are happy, healthy and safe (and in bed!) so more time is dedicated to them than anything else, understandably. I am psyched to see so many comments from friends and family on the blog and the kids get a kick out of it too. We are trying to post short “shout-outs” to home by each kid in response to their relatives’ posts, but again the time and troubleshooting is slowing that all down. I know it’s a learning process, but it was a goal of mine to post “in the moment” as much as possible on this trip to keep the blog engaging for our captive audience, and relative to our daily activities. I haven’t posted to my own blog since Day 1 in Munich! I hope to post this offline note sooner rather than later but I’m afraid the connection to upload video and photo is weak.

 

*this post was originally written offline on the date included within this post. 

Friday April 18*

 

It’s about 6:45 pm in the Czech Republic now, and we are still on the bus. I’m enjoying a piece of Ritter chocolate and two seats to myself. We left Munich at about 8:30am and stopped for a tour of Von Ludwig’s castle, Schloss Neuschwanstein,the inspiration for the Disney Castle. We hiked uphill through plush green moss and clear mountain springs to behold the mad king’s castle perched among the mountains. Once inside, we visited the king’s chambers, dressing room, and music hall. Von Ludwig only spent 172 nights in his decadent home, about half a year, and left the castle incomplete. Architect Christian Jank had designed a third floor of quarters and a garden but when Ludwig died suddenly, all construction ceased and the castle was turned into a museum only six weeks later. Tours have been conducted ever since – 120 years straight. Von Ludwig’s death remains a mystery. He was declared “mad” by the government, dethroned, and sent away, and just one day later, was found dead, drowned, along with his doctor. It had never been determined whether his death was murder, suicide, or accidental. I think it’s worth reading up on. Von Ludwig’s rooms were ornately decorated including oversized gold chandeliers embedded with colored glass gems, porcelain swans to symbolize loyalty, and large paintings dedicated to his favorite operas. Sadly, due to his untimely death, he never entertained in his home. The decadent castle was quite a contrast to the desolation at Dachau we saw just 24 hours earlier.

*I hand wrote and/or typed each reflection on the date and time included with the post. 

Written Friday April 18, 8:00 am* Just left Munich Hostel, on a bus to Prague.

Dachau. What are the words to describe how I felt being there? First impressions of my first visit to a concentration camp…the desolation despite the tour groups shuffling about was a mixture of eeriness and loneliness. The Nazis burned all of the barracks down during the liberation, so very little breaks the monotonous horizon when I enter. I could stop and scan the vast campus and see nothing of interest within its barbed borders for acres. All is grey, dull, and dead, and only when the cold air stings my cheeks am I awakened to shuffle over stone to the museum. I looked down at my feet and wondered who else took these same steps into the main building when they first arrived here…I wanted to know who each and every one of the prisoners were. I felt obligated to know each person’s story not just of who they were in the camp, but who they were before the camp – on their way into the main building, just as I was.

In the main building, which is now the museum, the prisoners were ordered to strip down, their hair was shaven, their personal property confiscated, and their identities written down as data. The display cases held photographs and passports taken from prisoners. I felt the urge to touch and hold each one and look at every face, say each name in my head. And these were only a handful of the 60,000+ who were imprisoned here. Videos played and I watched a survivor recount getting his head shaved. He went into great detail about the process which would normally be ignored in conversation as superfluous or uninteresting, but I hovered on every detail…I felt obligated to hear his story. And of course every detail does matter…for some, the hair cut may have been the first time they were injured in custody, as many bled from the haphazard shave.I read through the displays about the conditions leading up to the creation of the camp in 1933…the effects of World War I on the economy, the Treaty of Versailles blame on Germany, the rise of the Socialist Party enabled by their promise of the return of German pride…in every paragraph I searched for the answer to “why?” How could this have happened? How could a place like this be built? I was particularly interested in the role of the media – where were the newspapers? What did the surrounding town know? Why was this accepted, and for so long? 

The truth was not reported. It is mesmerizing the depth and breadth of the Nazi regime into every aspect of society. Propaganda depicted the death camp in a far more humane light – these people were political prisoners who were being “re-educated” and would re-enter society as willing workers for the Party. Red Cross investigations interviewed guards dressed as prisoners, and corpses were hidden in medic vans. The deception was meticulously calculated and amazingly controlled to allow the Nazi crimes to continue unchallenged for so long.

I moved further into the museum where the prisoners “showered” or were basically hosed down en masse. The brock (sp?) and steel whip was displayed in the center. Here, prisoners were whipped for as minor an infraction as missing a button, and were forced to call out each flog. If they passed out, they had to start over. Hooks high above me strung up  people by their wrists. In the next room, medical “examinations” were conducted. Photos of a man undergoing experiments about the effects of air pressure were displayed, and I read about the “doctor” on site. What kind of person permits himself to treat another human being in such a way, especially when it is his job to care for them? I wondered how that doctor could look that man in the eye during the torturous experiments.

The names and faces of the guards and commandants of the camp were displayed. I thought, My God, these people will always be remembered like this…as monsters…as murderers…as scum. And yet…the scariest part of it all is the fact that they were people too. Each guard was someone’s son, had children that they cared for, believed in a God…They each had their own stories too. This is what frightens me most of all – the capability that is in each one of us to be evil. And given the right conditions, as they were in place from 1933-1945, that ability can become a reality.The one barrack that stood was a reconstruction – all of the others had been destroyed by the Nazis during the liberation.

The conditions depicted were unimaginable…People slept in wooden shelves, basically, and had no possessions of their own, and no identity besides a number and a symbol on their outfits. I wondered what kind of companionship and comfort they found in each other, these strangers thrown together and suffering together, literally piled on top of each other.

The gas chamber was very difficult. I felt a deep sadness in there, like a wailing was coming from the walls. It was dark and small and my eyes fell to the floor where so many had fallen. I touched the walls. I shivered at the peep hole. And I left – I couldn’t stay in there very long – only to enter the crematorium. The kilns looked like pizza ovens! This was a factory of death.  I left quickly, lingering only in the room where the liberators found corpses piled to the ceiling.  

Pebbles and dust crunched beneath my feet as I closed the steel gate into Dachau behind me. Not everyone left this place breathing the cold crisp fresh air as I did. But I too, left the camp as a different person from when I entered.

We are stepping off the bus now, to tour Von Ludwig’s Castle. Today should be a lighter day. I know there are more stops like Dachau on our journey to come, but the ability to live life and enjoy it is still a reality, thankfully, and so we must continue to celebrate living now as much as we must remember life lost.

*I hand wrote and/or typed each reflection on the date and time included with the post.