Journey to Berlin & Warsaw - Part 1
At the very first preparation meeting for this journey back in October, the students read what Hermann Cohen, a German Jewish philosopher, wrote amidst the turmoil of World War I: “We, as Jews, are proud to be Germans… We recognize the important role that being German plays in our religious and cultural lives. We see ourselves as German Jews, aware of our ability to unite people and promote a sense of shared humanity.”
This morning, we visited Platform 17, the site from which Martha, Hermann Cohen’s widow, was deported to Theresienstadt 27 years later. Our goal for the next six days is to try to understand how these two truths coexist in one reality.
While greater achievements have been recorded in six days, this remains quite a challenging—if not daunting—task. Without wasting any time, we dove right in. Shortly after our arrival in Germany’s capital, we paid an introductory visit to the city’s renowned Jewish Museum. While we could have easily spent six days in the museum alone, our local museum guide, Dennis, did an excellent job in providing us with snippets of history to awaken our curiosity for the week ahead. From the intriguing and ultra-symbolic architecture of the museum, designed by Daniel Libeskind, son of Polish Holocaust survivors, to the unique treasures and artifacts it holds, we began to get a sense of the inconceivable extremes the city of Berlin holds, particularly as they pertain to Jews.
Later in the evening – which seemed to set here around 2pm – we embarked on a short orientation tour of the city. While one could explore Berlin by foot, bus, bike, scooter, or even boat, we chose a more traditional—and local—means of transportation. The Trabant, or Trabi, was the Volkswagen of East Germany, so to speak. This was the state-issued car, with a waitlist longer than Tesla’s in its early years. In just 90 minutes, we zipped past most of the city’s landmarks—from Brandenburg Gate, through Unter den Linden, to Potsdamer Platz. Our chauffeur and tour guide, Sebastian, did his best to share every important detail about each site with a group of jetlagged teens. A brave man indeed.
On our first morning in the city, we hopped on the U2 subway line at Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz (whom we encountered at the museum last night, minus the Platz) and met our local guide, Ioana. Ioana is a historian specializing in genocide studies and in keeping teenagers’ attention, who has lived in Berlin for over 15 years. We began the guided portion of our trip at Platform 17, the site from which Berlin’s Jews were deported to concentration camps initially, and later directly to Auschwitz. Located in the middle of a sleepy residential neighborhood, the platform commemorates these transports, which began as early as October 1941 and continued until March 1945.
From there, we proceeded to visit a picturesque suburban mansion, nestled by Berlin’s largest lake. Its serene beauty stands in dark contrast to the pivotal event held there in January 1942, known as the Wannsee Conference. Inside the very same room we visited—now a small museum—top Nazi officials, including Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann, plotted the Final Solution. Among the many documents and photographs it houses, the banality of evil is on full display. If you haven’t already, watching Conspiracy, which was filmed on-site and based on the meeting’s protocols, is highly recommended.
We returned to the city to visit Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in the western part of Berlin. The old part of the church stands as a living monument to the destruction of Berlin in the later stages of the war, with shrapnel holes and cracked mosaics left untouched.
Moving eastward, our next stop was the Topography of Terror Museum. This museum is located at the epicenter of the former Nazi government and military headquarters, most of which were obliterated during the war. While the majority of exhibits cover the years 1933 to 1945, Ioana wisely focused on the war’s end and aftermath, detailing the Nuremberg trials and the social, moral, and legal dilemmas faced by a fractured and defeated German society.
Although this wasn’t the focus of our visit, the museum’s proximity to the Berlin Wall and Checkpoint Charlie allowed us to learn a little about Germany’s postwar division and its surreal complexities. When asked why the remaining stretch of the wall is so damaged, we learned the interesting fact that one of our participants’ parents is what Germans call a “Wallpecker.” We’ll see more of the wall on Saturday when we visit the East Side Gallery.
Our final educational stop of the day was the world-famous Reichstag building, which was burned down in 1933 as part of a plot to portray communists and Jews as enemies within. The building, which resumed its original function following the city’s reunification, is now topped with a glass dome symbolizing the transparency of the new German government. While the Reichstag is one of the most visited government buildings in the world, one perk of visiting Berlin in winter is that most people don’t.
After a long, complex, heavy, and somber day, our teens wasted no time unwinding at one of the city’s many Christmas markets, immersing themselves in local German cultural and culinary traditions.
These were our first 24 hours in Berlin. We’ll share another update after Shabbat, as we make our way to Warsaw for the second leg of this journey.
With apologies: These lines were written by a semi-jetlagged, sleep-deprived, non-native English speaker individual who spent the last 30 or so hours witnessing representations of some of humanity’s most horrifying events, all while trying not to lose a group of teenagers traversing one of Europe’s largest metropolises by subway, train, and bus.
