We woke up with an extra hour of sleep in us (dear day light savings, we love you!) and headed to the Berlin Hauptbahnhof for breakfast and a trip to Oranienburg (a city right outside Berlin). We got some tasty pastry treats and Starbuck's lattes and hopped on our double decker train to Sachsenhausen (the concentration camp in Oranienburg). It was a really cool thing to see and something I've wanted to see since arriving in Berlin.
Sachsenhausen itself is SO HUGE, infinitely bigger than Dachau (the camp I've visited in Munich) and after liberation was used by the Soviets as a prison. Here are some pictures. I would love to tell you all about it but its obviously really depressing and really well, sad so if you want to know more check out my good ol' friend Wikipedia (aka, my only credible source used in any assignment this semester)
Here are some pictures from the day:
The entrance to the Memorial
The entrance into the camp: Arbeit macht frei = work makes you free.
A look at the barbed wire around the camp
The shoe testing track around the roll call area. Here the prisoners were forced to try out different materials to be used as boots for the German army. The shoes were distributed without regard to the size of foot of the prosoner and therefore had crippling effects.
One of the execution trenches.Afterward we had a mediocre lunch at the only restaurant in the area, missed our train back to the station and had to take the slow S-bahn all the way back. yuck! But no big deal because it gave us plenty of time to plan out the next 2 days of activites in Berlin! Once we finally made it back we went to Hackesher Markt and had a wonderfully authentic German meal at Weihenstephaner. And, like the old people we are headed back and were in bed by 9:30. You only think I'm joking.
**Important note that doesn't seem appropriate for a serious blog post. When we first arrived in Oranienburg I had to go to the bathroom which long story short led me to McDonald's to get change. There I translated an order for 3 Brazilian women who spoke only spanish! "quattro Big Macs? = Vier Big Macs", "quattro aqua = vier wasser" im practically a professional!!
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