We stayed at the Euro Youth Hotel, which I would definitely recommend to any of my friends or anyone in general. It is a great place. Sadly, we only had two days in this fine city and since one was New Year's Day and the other was a sunday, we were not going to be shopping. But that was fine, we were savingour shopping for Alexander Platz.
After we arrived in Munich at about three after our one hour train ride in which I had discovered the playlist "Ibe blackish" on my cousins iPod, we checked in and then wondered about aimlessly, checking things out and looking for somewhere to eat. The city is just really pretty first of all. It is big and tall and crawling with giant old buildings and public tranportation.We ended up eating at a KFC.... just because my cousin can't exactly get fried chicken in Azerbaijan. In the morning we took the NewMunich tour of the Dachau Concentration Camp. Our tour guide Kai was very friendly and spoke fantastic English even though he was originally from China and had never been for English exchange anywhere.
We boarded a train to Dachau and then took a bus to the concentration camp itself. Löki, taking every chance she could get of drinking a quick cup of coffee while she could, treated me to a hot chocolate as well from a big hot drinks machine in the cafeteria area before we walked down to begin the actual tour. We got a basic, yet somehow very thorough background of Hitler, the third reich, and the holocaust. then we walked through those gates with that message that everyone knows, that has been translated to so many languages and every language knows that on those gates it is a lie.
"ARBEIT MACHT FREI"
"WORK MAKES YOU FREE"
Kai also breifly explained about the alternative entrance to the concentration camp, a small pathway around the gate wall, put there for the survivors who come to visit the place afterward. put there so that they do not have to walk through those gates ever again.
The camp was big. Before the gates stood a wide, open, empty lot which was the place where all the prisoners of the camp came twice a day to assemble and stand at attention. Prisoners that could not walk were carried out to their spots, as were the dead bodies of those who had died the night before because if just one prisoner was absent from their assigned spot in the line up, the remaining prisoners could be whipped for hours on end while standing at attention. The museum was set up to begin in the room all the prisoners themselves would have started in and continued that way from being human beings with pictures and house deed and names to numbers in color-coded prisoner garb that did not fit correcting.
We learned about the tortures they went through... count to 20 in German, each number punctuated with a hit from a metal rod. If you didn't speak German or pronounced the words not exactly the way the guards wanted you would have to start agian, and again, and again until you got it "right" or you passed out. Or the Tree where a prisoners were tied to the high rafters with their arms behind their back for hours or days causing arms to never again work the same way or perhaps never again move. Or the last where prisoners were placed in a small closet-like space where they were forced to stand for days without food or water.
We saw the re-built versions of the barracks and the rows and rows and rows of block foundations that were once all barracks for the prisoners of 1933-1945 and the gas chamber and the creamatorium. It was an excellent tour and long elightening day plunging us into the realities that real humans lived and died in for over a decade. It was quite unbelievable and hit me probably the hardest as I thought of my family. My family, that, were they subject to it, would never have survived the holocaust wholeand reminded me how lucky I am to have my family, to have clothes on my back, to have a warm bed.
And the next morning we left for the airport early bringing our trip further into the depths of Germany to discover the themysteries of Berlin!
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