While the US watched our presidential election results the Germans were doing the same. And as the press announced that Obama would remain the president they celebrated.
Inez and I started the day in the studio making gelatin prints. Boy was that fun!! You put all this stuff on and watch it develope like photography. Well, at least like we use to watch photos develope before digital photos! It was wondereous to see the finished pages.
In the afternoon Inez got a rest while Sabastion and I got a long walk with my daily history lesson.
He took me to the historic Jewish area where they lived and worked before WWII.
Apartments were building that were built around common areas.
The buildings now house high end retail on the ground level and apartments above.
The square in the center where families would gather and now tourist gather.
A map showing how many buildings and open areas in this one area.
Squares have been placed in the sidewalks in front of apartment building where Jews were taken from their homes and sent to concentration camps. The squares 4 x 4 inches note the persons name, date of birth, the year they were taken and the camp they were sent to. It was very haunting to see rows of these in front of some buildings.
In this same area is a Jewish cemetery which holds the remains of over 2500 Jewish people. In front of the cemetery is a memorial for the gathering of the men, women and children that were brought together to the concentration camps.
Our walking tour next took us to the Berlin wall that fell in 1989. It includes a portion of the wall and a memorial. The wall was build over the period of years, starting in 1961. Families were separated, people lost their lives trying to escape through what was first a barbed wire fence and then concrete. That later became two walls that had a “death zone” between them with mines and manned guard towers.
As seen at street level, you can peer between the concrete and see the original Death zone.
And as seen from above at the memorial building
The length of the wall runs parallel to the street and a memorial in the form of a reminder of it’s length and heigth is done in steel bars
A church was demolished as it sat in the Death Zone when the wall was extended into two walls and this memorial was put alongside of where it once stood.
It was a day that there was much celebration going on in different parts of the world but it was a day that was full of much reflection for me of why we need to be grateful that we can celebrate our freedoms, one of those freedoms being choice of our leader. So much of the world does not or has not had that freedom and has suffered greatly.
