Blogging in Berlin by Lia Stavros
- mpstavros
- Sep 4, 2024
- 3 min read
Hi! It’s been a while since I posted so, here I am! Last weekend we went to Berlin, Germany! Now let me tell you, there is a lot of history in this one single city! There is so much history and so many things to see and do that we went on a 6-hour walking tour throughout Mitte which is where the majority of the Cold War and Nazi era happened. The tour was very tiring and there was so much information that our tour guide gave us, that I think I forgot a lot of it already. Anyway, let me try to tell you a little about what I learned.
Hitler was a horrible man and he didn’t have a great childhood. His dad was very mean to him. He also was very poor. He sent many Jews, disabled people, gypsies, communists, and other ethnic populations that were not blonde and blue eyed to concentration camps. Unfortunately, some crazy people still think Hitler did a good thing so the government made places, like where Hitler died and lived, a little more secret so that people don’t go there to celebrate him. Our tour guide did show us the bunker where he died. Hitler did many bad things and people were always scared because they had no idea what could happen. On The Night of Broken Glass they were truly scared when Nazis came to their homes with trucks and stuck thousands of Jews in the back of the trucks. It’s called the Night of Broken Glass because the Nazis broke many glass windows to go and kidnap people inside of their homes. Many Jews died on the way to the concentration camps because people were packed so tightly that they barely had space to breathe and they were not given water or food for multiple days while traveling. Hitler hated the Jews and it didn’t matter to him if the Jews died on the way or died in the concentration camps. We got to visit one of the first concentration camps called Sachsenhausen and it was huge! 27,000 prisoners could fit in this concentration camp. People were beaten, tortured, gassed and executed there. We got to see what a gas chamber looked like and an execution bunker looked like, which was awful. I imagined what it would’ve been like to live in one of the houses there and I think I would have felt very scared to live that life of knowing I can die at any moment. In total, 17 million people died under the Nazis and 6 million of them were Jews, which is unbelievable!
We also visited many parts of the Berlin Wall. At the top of the Berlin Wall, it was rounded so no one on the East side could get a grip on the wall and climb over to the West. The people from Soviet Union (East) wanted to go to the West side of Berlin because it was the free world however, the Soviet Union didn’t want to lose all of its population to the US, Great Britain and France so they built that wall to keep them in. People hated the Berlin Wall because it divided families, and they all wanted to escape so some people came up with very interesting ways to get across the wall. These crazy ideas included zip lines and jumping out windows even if it meant they would land on a bed of nails on the other side. Some people were so desperate they would do anything just to see their family or just to get out of the East.
Overall, I thought Berlin was worth the visit and to actually see all the history in person instead of just reading about it from a textbook was much more impactful and easier to understand. Now I really appreciate the life we have because it is so much easier than we think. Especially if we compare it to the life that people had back then.
Love, Lia
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