Europe 2012; Part 3

Sun 30 Sep Moscow

Red Square, Moscow with St Basil's in background

We arrived in Moscow  just before eight and were efficiently ushered out into a chill autumn morning.  As we walked down the platform with the same hymn playing, all the attendants lined up with military precision opposite the entrance platforms to their coaches.   Then after about 3 minutes, and without a word, they all got back aboard as the train pulled out, presumably to be serviced for the return run that evening.  Quite an experience! We then made our way to the Metro get to Red Square.

Kremlin wall overlooking the river

Due to our early arrival we had time on our hands until doors open so we took a leisurely walk around the gardens beneath the Kremlin walls.   Then with some trepidation we left our back-packs with security as no packs etc. are allowed in the Kremlin, bought tickets and made our way to the Kremlin Museum which houses a fantastic display of Russian historical items.   Pat was blown away with the display of Faberge Easter eggs and other delicate jewellery items designed by the talented master jeweller.

Guards coming off watch

Later during our walk around Red Square we saw Lenin’s Mausoleum which was partially hidden behind a temporary rock concert stage and then on to St Basil’s Cathedral which from the exterior looks like a collection of red brick towers capped with the iconic Russian multi-coloured onion domes.   Unlike most other cathedrals it does not have a large central nave just a seemingly endless maze of small chapels, rooms, passageways and spiral stairs. Whilst exploring the interior we heard a male choir singing as only a Russian choir can.   Expecting to find at least 20-30 men we were taken aback when we found that it was just three men with truly wonderful and powerful voices.

I was surprised that Red Square was not a lot bigger than it actually is.  Hard to believe that the many tanks, missile carriers and massed troops shown on  old news clips of the May Day parades could all fit in.

Gum store mall

We paid a visit to the famous Gum store which is in reality a series of shopping malls with nowadays some very fancy names.

We watched the guard change at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, three very smartly uniformed sailors goose stepped up and relieved the previous guards who then equally smartly goose stepped away.  

Later we made our way back to the Metro and then the AeroExpress train to the Airport. Here we encountered a little drama at passport control.  Pat was first to face a not unattractive but unsmiling, taciturn, late 20s uniformed Russian blonde official.  She was highly suspicious of Pat’s passport.  She placed it under the scanner a few times, frowned and looked something up on her monitor, scanned the passport again, sighed and called the supervisor. He arrived and carefully scrutinised the offending document scanned it, scowled and had a long serious discussion with Blondie.  Meanwhile Pat was getting agitated and so was I watching from behind the red line.  Thoughts of all the counterfeit SA passports flashed through my mind.  Were we going to be detained etc.?  But then, after a final nod from the supervisor and without a word of explanation, she stamped the passport and carefully placed it on the counter. Pat visibly relieved, grabbed it and quickly exited.  My turn now, but the beautiful cold- eyed blonde simply glanced at my passport stamped it and gave it back to me without a word.

We than caught the Polish Airways evening flight to Warsaw, great flight and friendly crew, an airline I would use again given the chance.  Very different reception at Warsaw Airport, minimal passport control and cursory Green line customs which was followed by the express train to Warsaw Central and a short walk to the Holiday Inn Hotel having been shown the way by a most helpful Pole.   It was just great to finally relax in our hotel room after a very long day.

Monday 1 Oct. Warsaw

Warsaw

 Our first task after breakfast was to find the Post Office to collect the letter containing our train tickets to Krakow which was hopefully waiting Poste-Restante.  We found our way there despite much of the city centre being dug up to facilitate the building of a new metro line.  Tickets safely in hand we then made our way to the Warsaw Uprising Museum.

Warsaw Rising Museum

Warsaw Rising Museum.  This museum is all about the 1944 Warsaw Uprising by the Polish Resistance Home Army with the objective of driving out the hated German occupying army before the advancing Red Army arrived. An event not to be confused with the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. 

Model of what Warsaw was reduced to during the Rising

Running low of ammunition and supplies the Poles appealed to the Allies for help.  Denied by Stalin landing rights in Russia, the Allies, forced to fly from bases in Italy, carried out over 200 air-drops to the city. Two SA Air Force Squadrons took part in this airlift. Betrayed by the approaching Soviet Army who refused, on Stalin’s orders, to assist, the uprising ultimately collapsed.  

This modern well laid-out museum is an acknowledgement of the incredible guts, determination and ingenuity of the starving Polish resistance fighters who used every means possible to defeat the Nazis.  We could have spent more time in this fascinating place but we had to get back to the station in time for the three hour train journey to Krakow in a most comfortable carriage through the very flat rural heartland of Poland.

Tuesday 2 Oct. Krakow

On Tuesday we had booked a tour to Auschwitz and our driver arrived at the hotel on time to drive us and two other couples the sixty odd kms to the town of Oświęcim.  On the way I was surprised to see that horse-drawn ploughs and carts are still common in rural Poland.  After about a ninety minute drive we arrived at the Auschwitz museum site. Despite being autumn there were many hundreds of visitors already waiting around.  The museum is well organised with different language guided tours available. No access is allowed unless you join a guided tour group.  All this had been pre-arranged for us and our driver made sure we all joined up with the right guide.

Entrance to Auschwitz I

Auschwitz. No amount of reading can really prepare you for the retrospective feeling of profound sadness and outrage brought on by the act of actually walking in the footsteps of those many thousands of doomed people and seeing first-hand the barbaric circumstances under which they were forced to live, work and almost inevitably die. 

Auschwitz actually consists of three main camps Auschwitz I- a Concentration Camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau [II] the Extermination Camp and Auschwitz III a Labour Camp for IG Faben.  In addition there were 45 satellite camps.

Gas chamber and crematorium

We started our guided tour through Auschwitz I- a former Polish Army barracks which holds a comprehensive museum revealing in stark detail the atrocities carried out by the Nazis on their victims. Huge floor to ceiling displays of confiscated spectacles, hair brushes, tooth brushes, suitcases and prosthetics and most telling of all 4 ½ tons of the hair shaved off the heads of the murdered Jews. 

Cattle truck used for "transportation"

Our tour continued through the barracks where Polish prisoners were summarily tried and sentenced, many to death which meant having to strip naked and then taken out into the adjourning courtyard to be shot in the back of the head.   We saw the actual cells in Block 11 where prisoners were tortured and incarcerated until they starved to death or others which were airtight, so that the prisoners slowly suffocated.  Then we saw the tiny cells which just had room enough for four standing people.  Here prisoners were left overnight then dragged out to face a full day’s work.  This cycle was repeated the following day and sentences to this form of punishment often extended over weeks.

We learnt that the prisoners were given only a set of thin stripped cotton “pyjamas” and made to work outside without any other protection in the depth of winter when the temperatures were well below zero.   Many lasted only a day before dying from the exposure and malnutrition. Others somehow survived for months such was their inner strength. 

Prisoner's baracks

We were shown into the gas chamber with its opening in the roof through which the Zyklon pellets were dropped.  In the heat and humidity caused by so many bodies packed closely together, hydrocyanic gas was released by the pellets which quickly killed those trapped inside the chamber. Later their bodies were cremated in the adjacent ovens.  It is estimated that 1.1 million people were murdered at Auschwitz.

After a short lunch-break we drove over to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the infamous extermination camp.   Here our guide continued the tour by walking us down “death road” with the railway line down its centre leading from the infamous Auschwitz gate and tower behind us.   A single railway cattle truck stands sentinel to the memory of the millions of Jews who were “transported” in this type of truck from all over Europe, some spending days confined in them without food or water. 

3 tiered bunks each for 3 to 4 people

On arrival they were separated into two lines men in one, women and children in the other.  This was immediately followed by selection.  Told to go left and you walked your last as you were herded down to the gas chamber.  Go right and you were spared for the living hell of forced labour, starvation diet and a pitiful existence in one of the many barracks until you too died from a combination of illness, exhaustion, starvation and the results of extensive beatings by the guards.

We saw the site of the hut where Dr Mengele kept twin children for his hideous experiments on them and the block for women no longer fit enough for the work parties, kept without food and water until they could be gassed.  When this barrack block was full they were simply thrown into an open courtyard exposed to the harsh winter cold or summer heat.

The end of the line

We visited the gaunt stone memorial to all who died there and the plaques- one for each nationality of Jews who were transported to Auschwitz.   It was heartening to see the many groups of younger people who reverently laid small bunches of flowers at their specific memorial plaques. They had not forgotten.   We passed the grim remains of the two big gas chambers and crematoria which the Nazis blew up just before the advancing Russian Army liberated the camp in January 1945 in an attempt to hide their hideous actions from the World. 

Although I know that most nation-states and ethnic groups have their own dark and shameful historical examples of cruelty, the sheer number of victims, the extent of the logistics involved, the utter depravity of the guards and the scope of inhumane treatment meted out in many cases by learned men in Auschwitz and the
other similar Nazi camps, remains for me a puzzling and inexplicable horror in the history of mankind.  To the Holocaust denialists I say go there and see for yourself.   George Santayana immortal words “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" are a succinct reminder as to why Auschwitz should remain a museum for all time and should be visited by all who can.

Memorial

After our harrowing afternoon tour was completed our driver returned us to Krakow where we had time for a short walk around the older parts of the city, take a boat ride along the river and witness the fire breathing dragon in action.  That evening we had supper in a quaint restaurant in an ally leading off the market square.

Wed 3 Oct Berlin

Brandenburg Gate

We had to be up early to catch the morning Air Berlin flight to Berlin’s Tegel Airport then the U-Bahn to
Moritz Platz where our hotel was situated. That afternoon we joined a four hour walking tour of Berlin which was a thoroughly interesting way to see the locations and hear about the historical events which took place.   Our guide was an English speaking history graduate whose interest was German History.  He gave us a fascinating insight into the many factors involved in Berlin’s past and what led up to the aberration of the Nazi regime.  Our tour passed many historic

Parking area over Hitler's bunker

buildings including Goering’s massive bleak concrete office block which housed the Luftwaffe Headquarters. We continued past the famous mural depicting the utopia of the communist dream and then we walked over Hitler’s bunker which is deliberately unmarked and buried beneath a car park. We visited the impressive Jewish memorial and finished up at the famous Brandenburg Gates.

Thu 4 Oct Potsdam 

Schloss Sanssouci

We took the S-Bahn to Potsdam and spent the morning visiting Schloss Sanssouci the palace of Frederick




the Great and its surrounding gardens and then after our guided tour through this lavish palace we hiked in the steadily falling rain up to Schloss Cecilienhof where the Potsdam conference took place at the end of WW2 between the Truman [USA] Churchill and

Interior of Palace

Sanssouci gardens

Atlee [UK] and Stalin [USSR] to determine the post war order and the fate of Germany which had unconditionally surrendered two months previously. After a quick look around we made the long and wet return the station and back to the hotel.

Cecilianhof

Friday 5 October

Tempelhof Airfield.  In the morning we took the U-Bahn to Templehof airport which was, in its hayday, one of the world’s iconic airports.  It was closed as an airport in October 2008 and the airfield is now a vast recreation space but the runways and the famous curved concourse, the focal point of the Berlin Airlift in 1948 remain.  I have long been fascinated by this feat of airborne logistics when, at its peak, 1500 flights a day were made delivering 5000 tons of supplies to the besieged Berliners.  This was as a result of the

Tempelhof

Soviets who in June 1948, halted all road and rail traffic in or out of the Western sectors of Berlin.  The West had two stark choices-either give up Berlin to the Soviets or to supply its citizens with all their essentials by air.   The outcome was the Berlin Airlift which for the next eleven months supplied the 2.5 million inhabitants with all their basic food and fuel requirements, surely one of the most incredible feats in aviation history.

Outside of the main entrance to Tempelhof is the Air Bridge Memorial commemorating the humanitarian efforts of the post war Allied airmen and displaying the names of the 70 who lost their lives in this humanitarian action to feed the city. 

Air-bridge Memorial

Topography of Terror. From Tempelhof we then made our way back to Alexanderplatz in the centre of town and on to the Topography of Terror which is an outdoor museum located on the site where the headquarters of the Gestapo and SS once stood.   The one boundary is formed by a still standing section of the infamous Berlin Wall erected by the East German authorities in August 1961 to prevent East German refugees escaping to the West.

Photographic display under the Berlin Wall

Under this wall a transparent roof has been erected to provide shelter for the impressive yet stark photographic display of life under the Nazi regime. In the centre of the site is a modern building housing more exhibitions of the Nazi atrocities and practices as well as providing a documentation centre and library for books, publications and documents focusing on the history of the Third Reich, National Socialism and its various elements such as the Gestapo, SS  forced Labour Camps and the Jewish Extermination programme.

The rebuilt Reichstag in Berlin

Like Auschwitz this is a brutal reminder of the depths of depravity that mankind can descend to.  Yet I found the openness and frankness of the displays encouraging as here at least no-one was trying to deny history or claim it’s all a hoax.  It is well laid-out display which enables viewers to study this era of German history and form their own opinions on these tragic events.

From The Topography of Terror we walked through to the Brandenburg Gate then into the park on the other side for a quick peep at the Reichstag. It was then “times up” so back to the hotel, collect our back-packs and set off for the airport and the long flight home.