World wars and cold wars

Berlin. The headquarter of the Nazis, the capital of the most serious country in the world, the city that was divided up by communism and is basically famous for all the wrong reasons. We really didn’t expect it to be any fun, but boy were we surprised. After a long train journey from Bruges, we got straight to the hostel and checked in to rest and then instead of resting, went straight for a walking tour. This was the best walking tour of the trip! Berlin isn’t as compact as other European cities, but still in 3-4 hours, the tour managed to cover a lot of very interesting sites. We started at the Brandenburg gate then went to the Reichstag building, the holocaust memorial (which has a long and politically correct name), Hitler’s bunker (where he spent his last days and died), check point Charlie ( the place to cross over from East Germany to West Germany and effectively the place where US and Russian forces stood in front of each other, creating a face for the cold war) and finally the Berlin wall. Apart from this, we also covered some other interesting sites, but basically in 3 hours we got too much information and all of it was worth it.

For someone as ignorant about the world wars as I was, the walking tour is something that you simply can’t miss. After the tour, we walked towards our hostel. The thing is, before our Eurotrip, we were told everyone to be extremely careful since Europe is full of scams and pickpockets and muggers especially in Italy and Spain. The only place you can rest assured is Germany. So imagine our shock when we placed some 40 Euros on the cup which had the ball under it, but when the street scammer displayed the contents, there was no ball. This was despite the 10 odd people standing around us telling us to bet and us having witnessed someone win just before us! Well, lesson learned, mind your own business and never let your guard down, cause that’s when you will have a problem when travelling.

After that, we spent the evening coming to terms with the fact that we had been made complete fools out of. The hostel where we were staying had nice food and I spent the day on the net basically. The next day we went to a concentration camp, Sachsenhausen, which was also a guided tour by the same company, Sandemans. This was not a free tour, but was still worth it. The guide was actually very good, the same as the one from a day before. He told us about all the various things that the Nazis did during the 30s, 40s and how they tortured their prisoners. The main difference between this place and a death camp was that the people here were made to live in horrible conditions and then work for the Nazis as opposed to places like Auschwitz, where they were taken just to be killed. There were many shocking things there, like the fact that some of the jobs that were given to prisoners were basically death duties. One such duty was the testing of shoes on a track which had several different types of terrain. The person would run with bags on his back, wearing shoes that were not his size, often 3-4 sizes smaller continuously for 2-3 days sometimes or till when he died. Another surprising thing was the way they lived. With small dorms willed with 200-300 people, they had 1 loo for 20-30 people and a total of 20-30 minutes every morning for everyone to use them. They had to report every morning early at like 6 am for attendance and the attendance could go on till 8 in the evening. They had to stand there if anyone was missing. These people were often starved, given no water and then made to stand without food or water in the sun or after the attendance made to work. Many died simply during the attendance itself.

When you visit the place, it is really moving to see the sadistic nature of the place. Its likely that such things would have happened in other places as well, but something so recent and so well documented really moves you. In the place you will find quotes from some of the prisoners and the sheer hopelessness that the people had then is crazy. At sachsenhausen, you could also get a glimpse of the Nazi strategies and how they thought at the time. Another shocking thing was that there were doctors there who conducted experiments on the prisoners. These experiments were also especially inhuman and what’s more, there experiments went on even after the war had ended and the Russians took over the camps. The Russians maintained the concentration camps for their own prisoners of war!

After the heavy day at the concentration camp, we came back and went for the much famed pub crawls of Berlin. Now I’m not much of a drinker, but still it’s one of those things you just have to do. The thing is that I frankly found the pub crawl in Barca to be better. The one here had fewer people and although the people were nice and the pubs were also pretty cool, there was nothing that was like wow. So we left without going to the last place, which was supposed to be the largest pub, but was also a fair distance from the other ones. We also had to catch the morning train to Poland, so decided to “bounce”. The next morning, we went first to the East side gallery. That’s basically the wall. Most of the wall has been broken down, so this is the part that has been kept as a memorial. It has been painted by famous graffiti artists from all over the world and some of the art is interesting and basically if you’re going to Berlin, there is no way you get out without visiting the site of the biggest event of the last 30 years, the site where the cold war sort of came to an end. But with that, our trip to Berlin also came to an end. It really was much better than I had expected and although it wasn’t scenic or anything, the history completely takes you in and is one of the most interesting places I’ve been.