Back in the UK!

We have touched down, and though it took a while to sort ourselves out at Gatwick, we are on the road back.

ETA Oakham 1830 hours

Snowing in Krakow

It is snowing in Krakow... time to be going home!

A Bohemian night out in Krakow

We ended our last full day of the trip with a Bohemian evening at a restaurant just off the main square in the city centre. The evening brought us a welcome lightening of tone after everything we had seen and heard that day, and everyone was soon in high spirits, as each course was interspersed with music and dance from a local group of artistes. They picked out some talent from our group (the most handsome and beautiful) to join them in some of their dances.

Delicious food and lively entertainment made it a perfect night out and spirits were high as we walked through the square once again to appreciate the beautiful surroundings and stopped for one more photograph. Then it was out to the tram line for our last journey on Krakow's excellent tram system back to the hotel for our last night...and packing for tomorrow's flight!

A tour of Schindler's Factory

We returned to Krakow for a guided tour round the Oskar Schindler Factory Museum. The Museum gives a fascinated explanation of Krakow from the outbreak of the war through to 1945, the treatment of its people and especially the 25% who were Jewish. Its use of visual material and artefacts is very full and excellently done. Our guide was a little difficult to follow as the spaces were cramped, and we found some of her speech hard to hear.

The Schindler material is a significant but in fact small part of what is shown. The use of German orders and the tableaux of home and work scenes brought home very powerfully the impact of war-time occupation, and the narrow border between life and death.

Auschwitz

This morning we were shown around the two largest camps in the Auschwitz complex: Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II – Birkenau. For more words you must ask one of the group, as this page cannot effectively summarise all that we saw and heard.

You can see photos here.

Bowling in Krakow

In the evening we went out again on the tram; this time it was fifteen stops to Krakow Plaza, a big entertainment centre where we enjoyed an hour and a half's bowling. Good fun for all, but the champion bowlers who wanted to explain lower scores complained of a slope that prevented them from achieving their usual quota of strikes.

Witnessing Nazi persecution

After lunch in the city centre, we walked to the Galicya Jewish Museum in the old Jewish quarter of Kazimierz. We were shown round in two groups by two enthusiastic student fellows of the Institute. The permanent exhibition 'Rediscovering Traces of Memory' is based on the photographic collection of Chris Schwarz, a British photographer who made it his mission to photograph and collect photographs of the people and places of the Jewish community in the region, as in so many places the communities have disappeared. Seeing the photographs of men and women enjoying life and then the few traces in stones and inscriptions of destroyed communities was tremendously effective and moving.

The highlight of our visit was our two-hour session with Mr Rezolowski. He was sixteen when he was captured for his part in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 and sent to Mauthausen Concentration Camp. With the aid of an interpreter he spoke to us of his experiences in the camp and its terrible regime. He then answered frankly all our questions about his experience and the effect it had on him. As a living tale of the survival of human spirit through appalling times his testimony held us gripped and left us with a profound emotional impact that we will not forget.

Krakow medieval city centre: A World History Heritage Site

Our first excursion in Poland took us by tram into the centre of Krakow, which until 1598 was the capital of Poland. Some of us spent longer on the tram than intended--the Polish street names confused one of the leaders.

The buildings that dominate the main square--the Church of St Mary’s with its two differently styled  towers and the Cloth Hall in the centre--both originated in the 13^th Century, when Krakow’s position on main trading routes to southern and central Europe made it very rich. We were there for the moment when a trumpeter plays a warning call from each of the four sides of the south tower to commemorate an attempt to seize the city by invading Tartars that was beaten off thanks to this alarm. Other attractions include the Bell Tower and nearby Francsican Church with its amazing Art Nouveau stained glass by Stefan Wyspianski.
For some the real attraction was the shops, with the Cloth Hall's long arcade of stalls selling all kinds of art and folk work from the region and around the square plenty of shops servicing those who need to have the latest branded items.

Arrived at Hotel Galicya, Krakow

We have arrived and settled in comfortably at our hotel in Krakow, the Hotel Galicya. Galicya is the south-western region of Poland which historians will know was part of the Austrian Empire until 1918. We have had a very good Polish breakfast and are resting before exploring the attractions of the city centre: historic culture going back to the medieval period...and shopping.

Our overnight coach journey from Berlin was uneventful but not particularly smooth near the border as we bumped over miles of snow-covered, rough concrete, but once in Poland proper the motorway system was very good. We got here in time to be the first in line for breakfast and are now enjoying our very comfortable beds.

Night out in Potsdamer Platz

After a tasty evening meal of spicy chicken it was time to go out on the town one last time, and we were drawn to the magnet of Potsdamer Platz, full of glitz and glamour, with the Berlin Film Festival in full swing. The café-bars and entertainments in and around the Sony Centre had to be sampled, and we were able to test some of the delicious varieties of ice cream available.

Studying German History: Deutsche Geschichte in Bildern und Zeugnissen

From the Olympic Stadium we returned to the heart of the city to explore the German History Museum, which explains through artefacts and images a thousand years of German History. While a few headed upstairs in search of medieval emperors and Protestant reformers, most of us stayed closer to the present with the twentieth century.

These were still different worlds, and what gets a mention on a page in a textbook was brought to life in powerful displays which illustrated the turmoil in Germany after World War I, the propaganda of the Nazi regime, and its eventual consequences. Finally we found material that showed us the two Germanies that existed following the Second World War until 1990.

Berlin Olympic Stadium, 1936-2012

From Sachsenhausen our coach took us to another Nazi construction: the Olympic Stadium. This has also been preserved as a fine, functional building that has been developed to meet the needs of a sports arena for the 21st century, including the FIFA World Cup and World Athletics Championship. 

We were taken on a guided tour that allowed us to see the impressive facilities for VIPs and elite sportsmen that the public do not get to see.  We sat in the seat taken by Chancellor Angela Merkel to watch Usain Bolt break the 100m World record and then see the indoor track on which he warmed up before his race.

Our visit ended back outside, where we admired the external developments of the Nazis’ stadium, looking at where the original sculptures and inscriptions from the 1930s  have been conserved, and thought about how the Nazis made use of the Olympics, a movement with ideals completely at odds with their own.

Into the bleakness of Sachsenhausen

This morning we took the coach out of Berlin to Orianenburg to visit Sachsenhausen concentration camp, preserved as a memorial to those the Nazis persecuted. Sachsenhausen was set up as a model camp and housed political opponents of the Nazis sent there for punishment and later some prisoners of war and some Jews. The camp was organised in a triangular shape with watchtowers along each side. Within this, some huts have been kept to show aspects of the regime: the punishments, medical experiments and the tough daily existence.

Besides the preserved physical remains there are numerous artifacts to demonstrate the violence and death meted out by the SS on the inmates, and records of some of those inmates, showing their varied live before they ended up in this place. Walking round in the snow is a miserable experience, but its large numbers of visitors have a need to understand how a tyrannical regime can justify crimes against human beings in what they saw as a greater cause.

Viewing the Reichstag

Our final excursion of a busy day was to the Reichstag where we were able to go up to the glass dome that caps the famous building and which is the work of British architect Sir Norman Foster. Nine stops on the U-Bahn took us to Potsdamer Platz, the commercial hub of Berlin and busy in the Film Festival with all of the cinemas nearby.

A walk up towards the Brandenburg Gate gave us a chance to explore the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, regular blocks of varying heights set into a parabolic ground base.

At the Reichstag, having negotiated the high security, we entered to take in the striking views of Berlin outside and the lawmakers' chamber inside. The excellent audio guide gave us an informative explanation of what we were looking at and the design of the building.

Return to the hostel for celebrations

On our way back to the hostel we took in some of Berlin's historic attractions: Checkpoint Charlie, Gendarmenmarkt with its two beautiful cathedrals and the Schiller Theatre, Bebelplatz where the Nazis burnt books, the Neue Wache memorial to the victims of war and tyranny, and the Berliner Dom, Berlin's main cathedral, before heading to Alexanderplatz to get the U-Bahn back.

Having enjoyed a tasty evening meal we capped it off with birthday cake for Fergus, who very kindly arranged to have his birthday during our time in Berlin.

Saturday Afternoon: Jewish Museum

In the afternoon we took the U-Bahn to the Jewish Museum. We divided into three groups to get guided tours which brought out various aspects of the Jewish experience in Europe. One of the guides, Adam, was keen to explain the significance of Daniel Liebeskind's building, which is one of the most striking pieces of 20th Century architecture and is an integrated part of the interpretation of Jewish life in Germany.

Adam made us think about how the exhibits in his chosen areas of the 19th Century showed Jews in Germany legally excluded from public life then increasingly assimilated as the German Empire developed. He successfully encouraged us to reveal our stereotypes and then showed how we could compare similar ideas in British and German society at the time. All this has prepared us for our visits to the concentration camps that were to come

Berlin Wall: 1961-1989-2012

Back in Berlin we stopped at the Berlin Wall East Side Gallery--a long strip of the Wall that has been preserved with some of the original painting on the West Berlin side. Some more contemporary art was added on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Wall in 2009
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We then went on to the Wall memorial park, a stretch of wall that has been preserved, complete with observation tower and the death strip behind the wall. Next to the park is an information centre where we listened to eyewitness accounts of the building of the wall and some of the escape attempts. These brought out the human costs and the brutality of the East.