Trip to Berlin and Krakow

Hello there! This last week has been unforgettable, and I wanted to share with you some pictures of the incredible experiences I have gained from my visits to Berlin and Krakow.

Reichstag and Walking Tour of Berlin 

Exterior of Reichstag

Russian graffiti in the Reichstag written by the Soviet Union in World War Two.

Bullet holes from World War Two.

Check point Charlie.

One of the three remaining sections of the Berlin wall.

Brandenburg Gate.

Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz

This is the house in which the Nazis held their meetings and came up with the 'final solution'.

Soviet War Memorial and Berlin Wall

Krakow

Visiting Auschwitz and Birkenau

On Sunday we visited the infamous sites of Auschwitz and Birkenau. I cannot even begin to explain to you what I felt that day. Our first stop was Auschwitz, which used to be Army Barracks before the Nazis occupied it and turned it into a concentration camp. Shockingly it was rather commercialised and close to civilisation, I was expecting it to be in the middle of nowhere but it was in fact surrounded by restaurants, shops and houses.

During our extremely emotional walk around Auschwitz we walked through an actual gas chamber that was used to murder over 1.5 million innocent people. The atmosphere in that room was one of the darkest things I have ever felt in my life. In the old barracks there were displays of people's belongings such as: suitcases, shoes and even people's hair. The humungous piles of these items really made me realise the scale of the horrors carried out by the Nazis. 

We then made our way over to the second camp, Birkenau. The sheer size of Birkenau was very overwhelming and daunting, it's many times larger than Auschwitz. This purpose built death camp was more isolated than the previous camp but still relatively close to civilisation. A single ominous train track runs through the entrance and ends in the middle of the camp, this is where selection for either death or living would have taken place. The huts in which people would have been expected to live in were absolutely horrendous and resembled sheds in which you would expect animals to be kept in. Towards the end of the holocaust the Nazis tried to destroy any evidence of what they were doing in Birkenau, so they destroyed the gas chambers and to this day the remains of them lie in the same place and position that they did in 1945. 

Meeting a Survivor of the Holocaust

We had the honour to meet a wonderful, inspirational woman called Lydia on Monday. Lydia found herself in Auschwitz-Birkenau when she was just a child. She told us the story of how her mother had worked outside the camp during the day and found food hidden by the local people in the bushes. Her mother would sneak the food back into the camp and feed it to Lydia under the cover of night. Unfortunately Lydia never saw her mother again after the camp had been liberated and she had to be given a whole new identity as she couldn't remember her name or her age. It's due to her mother that she's alive today.

It's safe to say that visiting Berlin and Krakow is an experience that I will never forget for the rest of my life and if you really, truly want to understand what Auschwitz and Birkenau are like, you need to visit yourself because it is a very personal experience.

xx Beth xx