Ich Bin Ein Berliner

Written Tuesday afternoon en route to Salzburg.

A few things about Prague before I dive into our week in Berlin:

A little shout out to all the Bachelorette fans out there - the marionette shop that Emily and Jef went in on their date in Prague this past season was RIGHT next door to our hotel. Literally, smack dab next door. Several girls and I confirmed it through video footage, and took a picture outside the shop.

The Czech currency was also quite an experience to use because the exchange rate is about one dollar to 20 Czech crowns. So, when six of us shared dessert and hot chocolate on our last night in Prague, the bill was 600 crowns! Sounds like a lot, but really it was only $30. Whenever I bought something, I had to remind myself that I wasn’t spending an exorbitant amount of money. And when I got a 2,000 crown note from the bank, I took a picture with it.

Leaving Prague was also an experience worth mentioning. Imagine 40 Westmont students pilgrimaging across Prague, with a semester’s worth of luggage in tow, to reach our coach. That deserves a whole post in itself. Lets just say, we stopped traffic at a busy intersection with a spontaneous police escort. Thankfully, we all made it safe and sound. It’ll be a miracle if we make it this entire trip without anyone getting hit by a car, bike, or bus. Pray for us friends, pray for us.

Speaking of wild things, our schedule in Berlin was insanity with a shot of crazy. Last week hit all 40 of us with lightning speed. It was a bit disorienting, because we went from playing in Prague to the reality of early morning lectures and concentration camp visits. We were up by 7 and sometimes not back to our apartments until 10, with reading still to be done for the next day. It was a wake up call, loud and clear, but we all made it though, and we made it through together. It was one of our busiest weeks of the entire semester, and I can say with certainty that most of us are ready for the quieter pace of Salzburg.

If our time in Prague was very surreal, the past week in Berlin was very real. The city is bustling and loud and very livable. We went from beautiful, historic Prague to the gritty reality of city life, with streets littered with graffiti and cute coffee shops and lots of construction zones. We stayed in apartments on the corner of Gormannstrasse and Linienstrasse on the edge of East Berlin’s fashion district. We spent most of our time in East Berlin, which was the communist sector before the reunification of Berlin twenty-two years ago.

History came alive before our eyes this week, whether we were ready to face it or not. Even though I know that history is coming alive today and is going to come alive again tomorrow, each time it does it hits me like a little electric shock. We saw bullet holes in the columns of museums because the city got turned into Swiss cheese during the war. We saw the area that used to be Hitler’s Nazi headquarters. If it hadn’t been for our guide, Gabe, we never would have known the historical significance of those blocks. Instead of looking up at Hitler’s balcony, we were looking up at apartment buildings and a Pecking Duck Restaurant. A few hundred feet from that, we saw what was Hitler’s garden and the bunker where he committed suicide, which is now under a parking lot. And a few hundred feet from that is the Holocaust Memorial, with its 2,711 concrete blocks. The deeper I walked into the monument, the higher the slabs got and the more disoriented I felt. The ground sloped in arching waves and it was hard not to drift off to one side and run into the concrete slabs. Just down the street from that we came to the Brandenburg Gate and later saw pieces of the Berlin Wall at Postdamer Platz. Bam, hit with all that history on one walking tour.

Friday, instead of having class at our normal classroom here in Berlin, we took the U-Bonn and a train out to Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum, the former concentration camp in a suburb just outside Berlin. We had class in the old armory building and spent a few hours walking the camp, hearing stories of hope and faith and strength that helped people survive in these awful places. The wrong thing happened at the wrong time for these people. But, instead of leaving the camp feeling hopeless and defeated, I left feeling hopeful, which may leave many of you shaking your heads in confusion. It was chilling to hear the stories of Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, but I didn’t feel anger. With the sandy gravel crunching beneath our feet, we walked the same walk prisoners and guards walked, day after day. Prisoner and guard, victim and persecutor, all of a sudden everyone blended together and all that I was left with was a longing sadness, a seed of hope. The average age of the young men training to be guards at Sachsenhausen was 20.7 years of age. The old commandant of Sachsenhausen eventually moved onto Auschwitz. 9 tons of human ashes were thrown into the river nearby. Sachsenhausen was a concentration camp, not an extermination camp (those were only in Poland), so it wasn’t a prime location of the killing of Jews in the Holocaust. Instead, political prisoners, socialists, Jews, career criminals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and others were forced to stay in the camp and work in the forests or factories near by. Over 10,000 communists were killed on the grounds of the camp in Compound Z and their bodies burned in the furnaces. Walking through the camp, I thought about my grandfather. He fought in World War II, and he was one of the first to come across one of the concentration camps in Germany, most likely Dachau, possibly Sachsenhausen. I can’t imagine what he saw. I had one of those moments that I do every so often, because even though he’s been gone for over 10 years, I wish he was still here, so I could ask him about his experience. I’ll never know if I walked through the same concentration camp that he walked through all those years ago. There’s a part of me that’s convinced that he couldn’t have felt an ounce of the hope that I felt in Sachsenhausen, but then again, maybe he did, because even though awful things happened, they liberated the camps, and many lives were saved. What can be gained from hate and resentment?

What resonated with me from my time in this camp were the stories of hope. How Martin Niemöller, a preacher held in solitary confinement, held an Easter service with the Commandant and 2 guards. One guard, Iron Gustav, murdered more than 400 people with his own hands. After the war, if you can imagine, he found faith in God. He allowed individuals to testify against him without claiming innocence, like so many other Nazi guards did at their trials. Iron Gustav was convicted, spent time in prison, and died in a retirement home in 2004.

Take just a second and stop.

Think about what a story of grace that is, that God would be so gracious on this man, and that he would find faith after being so far away. Harry, the senior prisoner at Sachsenhausen, was in and out of concentration camps for 12 years. As he left Sachsenhausen for the last time, he stole an SS teaspoon. When friends from the camp would come visit him for tea, he would give them that spoon until they recognized it and practically jumped out of their skin, giving Harry a belly laugh every time. There are ways to live strong and happy lives, and the prisoners’ here field-tested them all. From the cabaret Harry put on in the laundry barrack to the cartoons of potatoes on the walls of the kitchen, it’s all about perspective. You can’t deny the terrible things that happened in Nazi Germany, but when you walk into Sachsenhausen, you can’t deny the hope and strength that most of us felt leaving the camp. I’m thankful for Gabriel, our trusty guide here in Berlin, and that he would narrate such stories of hope and faith during our time at the camp. It was fitting, though, that the sun peeked out from behind the clouds and filtered through the trees as we left Sachsenhausen, together, a community 44 strong, and stronger because of the day we spent there.

For how heavy and real this week was, we had plenty of fun in Berlin. The whole group went out bowling on our last night, and earlier in the week some girls and I found a Russian restaurant with the best Russian food we’ve ever had. I got a caprese salad at a little Italian café down the way from us two nights in a row because it was so good. The memories and friendships the group is making over food and drink makes me so happy. We tried to have a karaoke night, but after getting to the karaoke bar (an adventure in itself with 30 of us navigating a sketchy part of town after dark) we found that it was 21+. Since when is anything 21+ in Europe? We improvised, as we have so often on this trip, and managed to have a really fun night despite the lack of karaoke. Some random tidbits to wrap up Berlin:

Sometimes, I feel like we’re on our own version of The Amazing Race. A Europe Semester example of a detour: the U-Bonn you need to take to the Jewish Museum is under construction. Find another way to get to the museum, or you may be eliminated. Everything we do, whether it’s roaming the streets for a place to eat or navigating subways or “minding the gap” and trying to keep our group together, everything we do is an adventure.

We got weeklong U-Bonn passes, so we could ride on Berlin’s extensive subway system whenever we wanted to. By the end of the week, after a few failed U-Bonn attempts going the wrong way, we were navigating the system like pros.

In our nationalism class this week, we’ve been talking about identity. Of course, at church this Sunday “who am I?” was the title of the sermon. Some girls and I went to Berlin International Community Church, and I was so encouraged by how diverse and welcoming the church was. Sometimes I forget that I have brothers and sisters in Christ all over the world, but the warmth and love of God radiating off of BICC was incredible.

Imagine us, a group of 44 Christians traveling Europe, living in East Berlin, one of the most atheist parts of Europe, for a week. We sang worship songs during Vespers at Gabe’s apartment on Sunday night, and people stared up at his open windows, stopping for a double take at the sounds they were hearing.

Today is a travel day, and probably our most complicated travel day of the whole semester. We got out of our apartments this morning by 7:30, all of our luggage was loaded onto the coach and we were off for the quick ride to the train station. It was the epitome of community getting all 44 of us, and our luggage, onto the train in about 3.5 minutes. It felt like game day, all the guys throwing the luggage through the door and everyone jumping on so no one would be left behind. 10 seconds after our last person and last piece of luggage were on board, the doors closed. Europe Semester 1, Train 0. The train went from Berlin to Munich, and now we’re on another train from Munich to Salzburg. I’m currently looking out the window, so thankful for the lush green scenery of Austria rolling past me. After a week in a dirty city, the dense forests and bright green, rolling hills are precious gifts. Fun fact: The Sound of Music was filmed in Salzburg! And they play the movie on repeat at the hostel we’re staying at. Some girls and I are going o try to take the Sound of Music tour! This movie was a huge part of my childhood, and needless to say I’m stoked. We’re onto country #3. I’m thankful for the journey so far, I’m thankful for the crazy times in Berlin, without anytime to process or think or breathe, and I’m thankful for the quiet that this travel day has been. We’re stopped at a trainstein for a minute, and I just saw two women wearing traditional dirndls. We’re in Austria, all right.

“Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” –Miriam Beard

That quote basically sums up how I’m feeling. I’m learning and living in community and my ideas of living are growing and being molded by my experiences on this side of the ocean. We’ll arrive in Salzburg within the hour, check into our hostel, have dinner, and then trek up to a castle. So here’s to a new week, a slower week, a little more time to breathe in the countryside of Austria, and all the lessons we will learn from this beautiful country.