Night train to Amsterdam

Tomorrow we travel to Amsterdam. We have to check out of the hotel at 11:00. We will take our bags to the train station and put them in a locker. Then we will have to entertain ourselves for the day. Maybe a walking tour or a bike tour. We can decide in the morning. I know we will repeat some things we have seen, but it will be helpful to have a tour guide. We would also like to spend some time in Tiergarten, Berlin's Central Park. Our train leaves at 00:16. I'm used to staying up that late, but not being out that late dragging around a huge backpack. I am looking forward to the night train experience after watching Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest when I was a child. Hope I can sleep.

A blend of old and new

Everyone who visits Berlin wants to see the bust of Queen Nefertiti. So we did, but it is the building she is housed in that will create the more powerful memory for me. The Neues Museum was badly damaged by WWII bombs. Parts were completely destroyed and parts were left without a roof, open to the elements, suffering even more damage before the renovations could begin. New and old, even damaged elements, are combined in its reconstruction, creating a powerful remembrance of the past. The architect, David Chipperfields, integrated new construction and renovation of existing elements to create a museum that does not just house Queen Nefertiti, but also testifies to the past. Queen Nefertiti is beautiful, but so is the Neues Musuem even with weather damaged paintings and bullet holes in the columns.

The Pergamon on Museum Island

The impressive Pergamon Altar, Market Gate of Miletus, and the Ishtar Gate, including the Processional Way of Babylon and the Alepo room in the Middle Eastern exhibit, made this a highlight of our day. We got the audio guide which helped bring the history to life. Imagine gathering the pieces of these antiquites and reassembling them like a puzzle. In the close-up photos of the wall relief you can tell where actual piece of excavated cornice is mixed with reconstructions-to fill in the gaps.

The Jewish Museum

These columns in "The Garden of Exile" are sitting at an angle. When you walk between them , it make you dizzy and even a little nauseus. The columns are filled with dirt and there are trees growing out of the top.


Berlin is a marathon. There are more museums than we can see in 5 days. Today we saw the Pergamon and the Neues Museum on Museum Island before lunch and the Jewish Museum and the Gemaldegalerie before bed.
Of course, the Jewish Museum was the main reason I came to Berlin. So after a morning on Museum Island, we made our way on the U-bahn to the Halles Tor stop to go the the Jewish Museum. The building is disconcerting. The architect purposely wanted to leave the visitor disoriented. Without the prior research it would have been quite possible to miss important parts of the exihibition, but I had Chad to help me find them before we left. The building itself is a zigzag shape, and to add to the feeling of disorientation, the floor rises in places and the ceiling does not. Halls lead to nowhere. The architect did not feel he needed to interpret the design, but felt it was important for each visitor to draw his or her own conclusions. On top of 1000 years of Jewish history represented in the museum there are two rooms which leave the visitor searching for meaning. Menashe Kadishman's contribution to the Jewish Museum Berlin is the installation titled Shalekhet (Fallen Leaves) in the Memory Void, one of the empty spaces in the museum. Over 10,000 open-mouthed faces coarsely cut from heavy, circular iron plates cover the floor making and unearthly racket as visitors walk over them. I was left feeling it was somehow disrespectful to walk on faces of people like walking over graves in a cemetary. The other empty space was the Holocaust tower. The room was completely dark except for the slit of a window high above in a tight corner. It seemed to be a place for quiet contemplation, a holy place of remembrance.

Church with Luise

It will be one of my fondest memories of my trip that Luise took me to church. The Berliner Dom is the largest Protestant church in Germany. It is a beautiful church built by Kaiser Wilhelm II between 1894 to 1905 in the Italian Renaissance style. Statues of church reformers including Martin Luther and John Calvin look down on the congregation during worship. The four authors of the gospels are depicted on paintings in the dome. Paintings of the passion of Christ circle the top of the dome. The noon prayer service was short with a greeting, organ interlude, message, prayer, and more organ. Tears filled my eyes as we stood to say the Lord's Prayer in this beautiful place with this beautiful girl who shared her faith with us.

Berlin - 5 days and counting

The Brandenburg Tor

The Alte Nationalgalerie where we saw Rodin's The Thinker

The Neue Museum which houses the Egyptian Museum which we will see on Thursday.

Luise shopping for books at Humbolt University where Albert Einstein lectured. He went to America for a visit when Hitler was elected chancelor and didn't return to Germany.

The steles at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

Exhibits at the Jewish Memorial telling the story of families killed by the Nazis.

Buying a 3 - day Museum Pass puts some pressure on us to be efficient. We are off to a good start clicking off 5 must-dos on day 1. I'm tired and not going to get much of the Lidice commentary written before sleep. Keep checking back as I will add more. Today Luise, the Rotary Exchange student from the Berlin area who stayed with us last year, was our tour guide. She made a reservation at the terrace cafe at the Reichstag, and we went right to the top without waiting in the block long line. Then we had lunch at a cafe, Shinkel-Klause, right off of the Unter den Linden "street." The trees have heart-shaped leaves and are flowering right now. Rodin's The Thinker is at the New Museum on Museum Island as well as a painting whose name is translated "Cinderella Goes to the Prom" which made me laugh. Then we went to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews and the small museum which is housed under it. (Pictures will follow) To get home we took bus 200 to the Zoo Bahnhof and tried to find a grocery store. There is a natural food store, but it was closed after 8:00. Cheap sushi for dinner at 9:30, and I am ready for sleep.

Lidice

The village of Lidice is north and a little west of Prague. Martina, my tour guide from Wittman tours met me at the lobby of my hotel at 9:00AM. She had a taxi waiting to take on us on a 7 hour tour of the Lidice and Terezin memorials. She introduced me to Johnnie, our taxi driver, but that is not what she called him. Lidice is 40 min away. A side benefit of the tour is that I got to see the parts of Prague where the middle class actually live. The old town area where I'm staying is all tourists. I also got to see the Czech countryside. which was soooo green on a rainy Friday mornng. We seemed to go back in time as we passed village after village. The church spire was the focal point of each village, the red roofs circling each one, and then green hills, field and woods.
Lidice was one of those peaceful villages until an important officer in the Hitler's inner circle, Reinhard Heydrich, was mortally wounded in Prague by British-trained Czech paratroopers. Hitler decided to send a message to all who would resist the Reich by ordering the village of Lidice to be razed(pronounced like "raised"), completly destroyed or erased as a warning to all who would resist.
On the night of June 9, 1942, the murderers set up their operation in a house north of the village. Using police records, all the men in the village, who could be found, were taken to Horak's farm and held until the executions began a 7:00 the next morning. Mattresses were lined up against the wall of Horak's barn, and then all the men and boys aged 16 and up were brought in groups of 5 and later to speed up the process in groups of 10 where they were shot by the members of the German Army field police. As each group of men were executed the next group were lead in to stand in front of those who had just fallen and the executioners took two steps back until the ground was coverin the bodies of 173 men and boys.
Two days later the women and children were taken to a grammar school where the women were told that they would have to give up their children, but would be reunited in 1 hour. It was a lie. The women were sent to Ravensbrück. The children were sent to Łódź with instructions to give them no special care. There the children were required to write postcards to be sent to relatives to inform them that they were alive. Many asked for some bread or for shoes. The Nazis wanted their relatives to believe that the children were safe, but that was also a lie because even before postcards arrived 81 of the children were sent to the extermination camp at Chelmno and gassed the next day.

Sculptor Marie Uchytilová was deeply touched by the tragedy of the crime in Lidice. In 1969 she decided to create bronze monument of Lidice children that should be also understood as “A Monument of children’s war victims”.
The Lidice Memorial and museum on the right.

Foundations of one of the former village homes.

The plan of the original city of Lidice.

The foundations of the church.

The Rose Garden

The Park of Peace and Friendship is a Rose Garden given to the memorial by a group called "Lidice will live" whose chairman was Barnett Stross, the deputy of British parliament. This idea was imediately widely supported by many different countries. Great Britain gave this garden the largest variety of roses, but there are roses from all over the world, including Oklahoma.

Interactive map showing where each of the preceding items are located on the memorial site.

http://www.lidice-memorial.cz/mapLm_en.aspx