Last day in Europe - life update!

Hello everyone!

I'm sorry about my sudden halt in blogging while I was on the March.  Our schedule got quite hectic to say the least, after my last post.  Running on about 5 hours of sleep each night, I was in no condition to blog by the time I saw my bed.  But if you'll be so kind as to check my blog next week, I've typed up my posts in word documents and will be posting them once I get to New York City next week.

The March was an incredibly transformative, educational, and inspirational experience.  So I will by all means be posting the remaining entries so that I can share my incredible experience with you!

After The March I flew to Istanbul, Turkey to meet up with Lucy for the week.  It was a nice and very interesting.  However I don't think I was able to fully enjoy what it had to offer for three reasons. First, I was very much still processing all that I'd learned and experienced on The March, and I was feeling a sort of academic withdrawal from it once I felt the impact of the sudden drop from the program and re-entry into un-guided traveling into un-chartered territory.  Second, and probably because of the above reason, I started becoming really anxious to just get the heck home. The fact that Turkey was so different from anyplace I'd ever been made me a want that even more.  Third, I got pretty bad food poisoning or something and was down and out for a couple days cumulatively.  But it was awesome to get a taste of the Middle East with Lucy!

Yesterday I flew back to Berlin - I was (and am) SO happy to be "home"!! This morning I went to school and picked up my luggage and chatted with Ella over tea and chocolate - I'd missed her a lot!  That made my day.  Then I walked around Mitte for a while, ate some food, and got a beginning Hebrew book at Dussmann :)

Now it's my last night in Berlin, and tomorrow morning I will head to the airport and then fly home mid day.  It's crazy.  I feel like the experience has gone by somewhat fast, but at the same time, I don't remember what it's like to be home in the States.  It's my personality to become really immersed in wherever I am (at HWS, on summer break, whatever it may be) at the time and forget about what it's like elsewhere or in real life.  But having been gone for five months, and in such a different place, I feel that more than ever.

It's sad to think that I won't be back in Berlin in the capacity of a (sorta-)carefree undergrad study abroad student.  But I think I've gotten so much out of my experience here (despite my deep-winter-stint of not liking Berlin. To my defense, it was -10 F for three weeks).  I'll definitely hold the city really close to my heart, and it'll be a really interesting and probably difficult adjustment period back into American culture and furthermore into NYC culture. But continuing to blog about The March, Turkey, and other things I haven't yet gotten to but am determined to record here, will help me through it.  That, and a lot of quiet time.  What can I say, I'm easily overwhelmed.

Here's a photo I took on a bridge here near school around 7:45pm while walking back from dinner.  One more thing I'll miss about Northern Europe - 9.20pm sunsets!!!

The River Spree from a bridge on Friedrichstraße

March, Day 2: Berlin

What a long day.  Our wake up call was at 6.30am and it's now... 1am!  After this afternoon's 8 hour bus ride to Krakow, Poland, I am ready for a good few hours sleep.

Today we saw many monuments and important sights related to the Nazi regime and even Berlin Cold War history.  Many of them were places I've seen before and even showed people when they've visited me, so it was really interesting to re-visit them with leaders who have infinite knowledge about the sites and the historical context.

One of my favorite sites from today was a Jewish cemetery about 3 blocks from my school, which I had no idea existed.  This site was a cemetery back before WWII, but during WWII the Germans did two things. (1) They were desperate for materials during the war, so they removed the tombstones and used the material for other purposes and b) since the city was completely obliterated when the allies bombed the city, they were also desperate for places to put dead bodies.  So they re-opened these graves (the Jewish burial tradition puts the deceased 6 feet down, thus there was (technically, and sickeningly) "room for more"), and put bodies on top of them.  Now it looks like a huge fern patch.  However, there is ONE gravestone standing, which was erected during the 1990s.  It's for Moses Mendelssohn, who was a great Jewish thinker in the 18th century.  He has a long and interesting history, but what he is most known for is studying/discussing the idea of living a life of faith in a world of reason.  Another way to put it; having one foot in a traditional (orthodox) world, and one foot in the modern world.  It's something that people are still struggling today in Islam, Judaism, and Christianity.  Since he is so important to Jewish history and German-Jewish history, they re-established his headstone in the corner of the cemetery where they believe he was buried.

The Jewish graveyard, and to the right (just right of the huge tree) you can see the sandstone colored tombstone of Moses Mendelssohn.

Another interesting thing I learned or realized today, is that a lot of experiencing or learning about a place that you go to is not in noticing the monuments, or buildings that exist, but in noticing what does NOT exist.  This is an incredibly difficult task.  It's not only hard to wrap your mind around and intellectually challenging, but it also is difficult if you didn't know what was there before that was now missing.  Along these lines, many memorials in Berlin (particularly those to Jews) deal with remembering and making visible this absence.  Some points about this:

1. This building is the most vivid example of this.  It was bombed during WWII, but only the middle section of it was completely destroyed.  During reconstruction during the 1990s (remember; the GDR left all the WWII-destroyed properties completely alone during their regime, and almost everything in the East was not reconstructed until the last 15-20 years!), they decided to leave this section of the apartment missing, to make visible that these people are no longer living there; as they've been killed. Not all of them are Jewish, but it's a very important reminder of the past.  This type of memorial is even more expensive than erecting a traditional 'memorial' or monument, because of the real estate value.

On the LEFT building you can see it clearer; you'll notice big signs or plaques on the side of the buliding.  Those state who lived in the apartment before it was destroyed.  

2. This initiative, which I may have mentioned before, establishes small plaques (another kind, not to be confused with the ones I mentioned above which are much different) on the sidewalk outside of businesses or homes from which Jews were forced from their homes and deported. (see below for what they say). I find it one of the best memorials in the world.  I have seen the plaques in Berlin, Bavaria, Austria, the Czech Republic, and Denmark.  It's a really amazing thing to just be walking down the street with your friends eating some gelato, and see a plaque, and pause to remember the severity and gravity of what happened there not even a century ago.  It's really powerful, and is a great everyday reminder for everyone.  Here's just one example of this, and this is actually the largest set of them I've ever seen (usually it's just 1-3 plaques in front of a building).

This was in Schoneberg, the "Jewish neighborhood" where 16,000 Jews lived before WWII. 

An up close view of the plaques.  They read (bottom left, for example):

Here lived

Ursula Salinger

Born [maiden name] Salinger

Year born. 1919

Deported 1942

 Riga 

Died

For reference, Riga (the capital of Latvia) was the site of mass executions by the Einsatzgruppen.  The Einsatzgruppen is a group of German officers (often formerly-normal police officers who were forced into the job) who moved from town to town each day and would dig trenches and systematically shoot the individuals into what became mass graves - this killed an estimated 1.1 million Jews during the Holocaust.  The biggest example is in Babi Yar, which is right outside of Kiev in the Ukraine, where an estimated 33,771 individuals were murdered in a two-day masacre.  Unimaginable. 

I know this is all really really emotionally difficult material to learn about.  Trust me. I've taken classes on it, read many books on it, etc., so I definitely know.  But I sincerely hope from the absolute bottom of my heart that those of you reading this will nonetheless continue to come back and learn, feel, and interpret these things yourselves.  As one of the daughters of survivors (who is helping lead this trip) talked with us tonight, she thanked those of us whose history this is not, for coming on this trip, desiring to understand, and desiring to pass down the education on the topic.  She mentioned that as a descendent it IS her story, but for some of us like myself it is not, and that's touching for her to see. I couldn't have thought of a more appropriate response, but one student said "It wasn't my story, but it very easily could have been".

And that is why I find this so very important to learn about and experience.

Thank you so much for reading and goodnight! 

March, Day 1: Berlin

So on Sunday (May 13) I left Copenhagen and returned to Berlin.  I spent a couple days here in my lovely city.  Then today I started another small but significant chapter of my story.

This morning I met the group of 63 HWS and Nazareth students, Holocaust scholars, 2 Holocaust survivors, their child(ren) and grandchild(ren), the President of my college, and a few engaged community members to begin the week-long Holocaust remembrance trip called The March.  As I sat at at their gate waiting for them to get off the plane (yes, airports are designed intelligently here, it's quite nice), I discovered that I was incredibly nervous.  I'm not exactly sure of what, but part of it was that I haven't interacted with that many Americans since... last time I was at HWS in December.  And I'm not the most fond of social situations.  So that was and is definitely a difficult aspect.

But! As soon as I saw my awesome professor and he gave me a hug, the nervousness was almost instantly resolved.  I soon found out that my roommate for the trip would be Beth, who is a WS student who just graduated, and is on this trip as a "student assistant" type position. She did the trip last time, in 2010, and was asked back to be a student assistant.  I didn't know her before, but we have similar interests and studies, so it's been SO great to have her to have intellectual conversations about instead of complaining about we're hungry and tired (I'll leave my complaints about other college students at that).   So getting to discuss and process what we see and learn over the next 7 days with her will be invaluable, especially since she's been through it once already.

We also have such amazing individuals with us as I briefly mentioned before.  Our professor is just incredible, as is the professor from Naz, we have two survivors who now live in Toronto, and the tour group through which The March is run/organized is out of Israel. The 4 people from that group are all very diverse and uniquely interesting, and are SO knowledgable about all things history.  In typical Devan fashion I find these adults a much better/more informative/more interesting group of people to interact with than half-engaged college students, so I'm looking forward to some thoughtful and transformative conversations with them in the week to come.

One beyond cool thing that happened today: 

We were in the Berlin neighborhood of Schöneberg, which was a primarily Jewish neighborhood before WWII.  While our guide was talking to my small group about an interesting monument that's been scattered throughout the neighborhood to remember the history, this man and his wife were also examining the map before us.  While we were off discovering the scattered monument, he apparently approached our guide and told us that he is visiting this place for the first time since his family was forced out of the neighborhood by the Gestapo.  He wanted to share his story with us (how amazing is that in itself?!... the strength it took for him to do such a thing), so through tears he pointed to the apartment where he lived, and told how his grandmother was dragged into the streets by young Gestapo punks, and how his mother tried to bribe their way into staying in their home and not being sent away.  Miraculously as his grandmother was being dragged away, a Gestapo limousine pulled up and someone inside ordered the ones dragging her to stop.  Inside was the family's doctor.  Because he knew the family so well, he spared them his lives with a few short words.  They successfully emigrated to the US (which is VERY rare, because the US refused to take more than a few thousand Jews per year, even though they knew what was happening [albiet not to the extent we know now]).

So that was a "God moment", that this man happened to be at that street corner as this bi-annual March  passed through.

I'll try to keep you posted throughout this week, because I feel that each day will be so significant and memorable that I'll need to share these reflections with you.

Until then!

Dresden, Germany [April 14-25]

About a month ago, I went on an IES trip to Dresden, Germany.  Since our program led it, we had a great city tour arranged and even had a private tour of the Volkswagon factory there!!

Dresden is about a 2.5 hour drive southeast of Berlin; it's half way between Berlin and Prague.  The city itself is known for being heavily bombed at the end of WWII by the Allies.  The Americans, British, and French chose to bomb Dresden precisely because it was a city of absolutely no strategic value; the purpose of the bombing was just a show of force to the Germans.  So, they essentially leveled the entire city of Dresden.  The amount of bombs dropped on the city was so great that what and who was not bombed directly was/were incinerated in fires as hot as what was experienced in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

So, the first day we took a tour of the city where I learned about these bombings.  We saw many buildings, museums, and landmarks that have been reconstructed since the fall of the wall. As I've mentioned before, cities in the East (GDR) that were severely effected by the bombings didn't really get much re-building attention until the wall fell in 1989.  Similarly, our guide (a native Dresdener) told us that she grew up in a "city of ruins" in the 1970s.  There was either still rubble, or just empty spaces lingering, until the 1990s.

Most of the buildings in Dresden are made of Sandstone.  I didn't know this, but with sandstone, when water gets into it it gets trapped in the stone, expands, and eventually (after 100+ years) turns the stone darker.  Now during the reconstruction process, they tried to use as many original pieces of the buildings as possible.  It's really cool to look around the city and see many really dark stones/pieces, in contrast to the many lighter ones (there are also some medium colored ones from the '30s or so) .  This shows which pieces were preserved from the late 1800's/early 1900's, in contrast to how much needed to be rebuilt.

Example: Dresden Frauenkirche.  After 13 years of reconstruction, the outside of the church was finished being rebuilt in 2004, and the inside in 2005.  Before that, it looked like this:

And when I visited, it looked like this:

it's beautiful. you can even see the dark pieces of sandstone, which were preserved from before the bombing.  You'll also notice the whole left side is dark, which you can also see pictured on the left side of the first photo.  The statue of Martin Luther still stands in the square, I just took this photo from in front of it. 

Even in the square in which this church is located, the buildings around it are all brand new (and quite deceiving; they look old!).  These ones here were finished very recently, some as late as 2009 I believe.

There's also a Catholic church in Dresden which I didn't get any good shots of.  It's a really huge church  because in Dresden the Catholics were really persecuted, since Protestantism was the way of the North.  Thus, instead of having processions through the town on holidays, as not to be victims of any violence, they would hold all of their processions inside the church.  So if you go inside, there is a really large aisle through the middle and around the outside of the pew areas that was used for these occasions.

On Sunday we went to a museum called the "German Hygiene Museum".  I'm not the biggest fan of museums and this one sounded particularly boring.  But it was actually - despite the name - quite interesting. I learned about everything from diseases to psychology to my hearing range. There was one interesting exhibit where you place an electrode headband on, and compete with another person to see who can have the most relaxed mind.  Based on how relaxed you are, a little ball on the table will move towards either your side or the other.  The goal is to relax your mind more than the other person's, to get the ball over to their end and win.  It was fascinating!

my psychology-major classmates playing the game (and not relaxing!)

After this we did the culminating event of the trip - a tour of a VW factory!!
This plant was created specifically to build Phaetons: the Phaeton is one of the most high-end VW cars and starts at about $80,000-90,000.
It's most popular in Germany and the surrounding countries, and isn't sold in the US anymore. At this factory I learned lots of interesting things (pertaining to this specific plant).  Here are some of them.
- 96% of the car is hand-made!!
- the factory is really new and state of the art, and all aspects of it are designed to make the workers comfortable and ensure that they're working in ways that are ergonomic.  It's their #1 concern, and that was really evident.

-the production floor is all wood. picture one of the luggage retrieval carosels at the airport integrated into a floor, and that's what this is. you can't even tell, right?! each station has 1-3 workers if I remember correctly.  the conveyor belt rotates appx. every 15 minutes. the workers can pretty much be standing up straight all day while doing their work, because the platforms that the cars are on can raise, lower, and shift accordingly, so that there is little (ergonomic) strain on the worker.
- the production floor is very quiet, even during production. all of the machinery is really quiet and the building has great acoustics.
- about 56 cars are completed daily at this plant
- it takes appx 24 hours to complete 1 car.  About half the time is the assembly, and a little less than half is for testing. They test it in all situations, including driving on the local autobahn.
- the plant's exterior is almost all glass. to prevent birds from flying into the windows, they've had a recording of bird noises designed that send the signal to birds "this place is already occupied, don't come here" and it plays out of speakers on the building's exterior at all times. how cool?!

Everyone who orders a Phaeton or CC can pick the car up personally at the plant in Dresden. I think she said about 80% of people in Germany & the nearby countries who order the car do come to pick it up.  It's a whole production, in which they get a tour as we did -but an individualized one, then get champagne etc, and their car is presented to them on a stage with lights and a curtain.

While they're waiting for the proud owners to arrive for the pickup ceremony, the cars are stored in this nifty, high-tech, 14-story, cylindrical contraption that holds around 300 cars. Don't ask me how it works!

After the tour we got to sit in a Phaeton and test it out... it was so awesome, and I'm anything BUT a car person! The one we sat in had all the cool accoutraments and cost €140,000 (that's $181,000 USD).  My favorite feature was that to close the car door, you just gently push it so that it looks like it's ajar, and then it automatically closes silently.  No slamming car doors! What a world that would be.

Sorry for the long post, but that was Dresden!