Berlin was quite stunning, lots and lots of big grand buildings. Of course the history of the place is amazing and sad too. There's a vast holocaust memorial - which consists of about 100 sq metres of concrete blocks, varying in height and shape. The meaning of which of this is left open to interpretation. The site of Hitler's bunker is nearby. It's now just a carpark with only a small recently erected sign to mark it as a place of historical note. You can also visit areas where parts of the infamous Berlin wall still remain.
The socialist history is also interesting, there are still whole streets of communist apartment blocks built in the late 1940s as a showcase for socialism. The towering buildings of what was then known as 'Stalin's Allee' still house thousands today.
Some of the old propaganda murals around the city have been preserved. They generally depict utopian scenes with everyone happy, workers shaking hands with leaders and enough food and drink for everyone. A few things I picked up on about the way these were painted was interesting. Everyone would be of equal height and build and if you look very closely black lines are drawn around features like the mouth, to emphasise the happy smiling faces of the people.
Unfortunately the reality was quite different and it seems the masses were only equal in their poverty and the leaders became the new aristocrats they were supposed to do away with.
It showed how unhappy the people of the socialist East were that the wall had to be built to keep them in. Apparently before it was built levels of immigration to the West were so high it was an embarrassment to the Soviets.
There was another memorial to hundreds of protesters who died in 1953 after troops opened fire on a crowd in one of the main squares and lots of information about the next major protest movement that eventually led to the downfall of the wall in '89.
After Berlin we travelled south to Wroclaw in Poland, which is a grand town with another interesting history. It was formerly the German city of Breslau but after WWII the map was redrawn and the city gifted back to Poland by the soviets (who had taken some eastern territory of Poland for themselves). All of the Germans were evicted and a lot of Slavic people from the eastern states moved in.
The next stop was the southern Polish city of Krakow. Krakow is a city I'd been to before. It has a castle overlooking a picturesque river and something like a hundred pubs and restaurants all emanating from a magnificent old town square. It's a really fine European city which is becoming more and more well known.
An hour or two by train from Krakow is Auschwitz concentration camp which has been preserved as a memorial. Obviously the visit there was quite harrowing. At Auschwitz I they have preserved the prisoner's belongings to serve as a testament to their ordeal. Tonnes of hair, thousands of suitcases and shoes, registration photographs with arrival and death dates (mostly under 3 months) were the most memorable though although there was so much I may write have to write more later on this.
A few kilometres away Auschwitz II or Birkanau was purely an extermination camp. It's vast in size; like a town and reminded me of a giant machine albeit in an serene countryside setting. 1.2 million men, women and children were killed there and burnt in giant crematoria. Those that perished were mainly Jewish but a significant number of other groups like gypsys, homosexuals, the disabled and prisoners of war were also put to death.
It's very quiet there now, and only the ruins and serenity remain.
This network of camps was just one of hundreds across occupied Europe.
When seeing the camps it makes you wonder what the world would have been like had the result of the second world war been different.
I imagine this 'ethnic cleansing'* would not have stopped at Europe. The Nazi machine would have stretched to all continents enslaving, occupying and exterminating those that didn't fit their image of ideal citizens...
I think everyone who has the opportunity should visit Auschwitz or another memorial and see for themselves what people can be capable of. It certainly makes you think about everything from your own personal convictions to your political principles.
As a plaque at the entrance to the museum reads 'We must learn from history or else we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past'.
* It's especially significant to note this term was coined only recently during the Balkan wars of the 1990s.
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