Expatriating to Denmark brought a lot of goodies with it. The obvious weather change from the hot 35 degrees of Cochin to cool 8 degrees of Copenhagen, the pleasant walks across tranquil neighbourhoods and not to mention GATEWAY to beautiful and historic cities of Europe.
Coming to Copenhagen I had decided to explore each and every opportunity of staying at a place from where world would be much closer than it was, and the Christmas holidays gave me the required heads up!!
Me and my friend Kirti were sitting and making some Indian dinner when we starting planning our Christmas holidays. That is when we decided on travelling to a new city instead of sitting at home. This led to a little bit of googleing and then Berlin was zeroed in!! We booked our flights on Sterling.DK (they have some really cheap flights) and accommodation at Pegasus Hostel (can be found on Hostelbookers.com or hostelworld.com) and we were set for Deutschland.
Debouching from the Alt Tempelhof airport at 2130 hrs we picked up a map from the tourist information counter and stepped in Deutschland. Our hostel was located in Parisar Kommune which meant we had to take a metro till Ostbahnhof. The train system in Germany is simple with two types of metro’s called the S-Bahn and U- Bahn (http://s-bahn-berlin.de/) with tracks divided into different lines distinguished by different colours. Navigation is easy as these lines have different start and end destinations with interchange at various stations.
We reached Pegasus Hostel (www.pegasushostel.de) and were surprised to see a big building decorated with lights. The hostel was clean and the dormitories were spacious with comfy beds and clean baths. It had free internet and a kitchen were we could try our culinary skills. This was more than what we had asked for. The hostel also offered a free walking tour around the City and was a point of pick up for major guided tours. Having a Falafel for dinner in a nearby Turkish restaurant we planned our next day and set ourselves to explore the city with a brutal yet intriguing history.
Day One started with a bit of breakfast shopping at the nearby supermarket. We were surprised to see Maggi (you can call it noodles for Indians) and couldn’t hold ourselves from going straight to the hostel kitchen and cook some of it. After a nice breakfast we stood at the reception for our tour guide to pick us for an eventful day. The guide arrived on time and we accompanied her to Unter Den Linden - meeting point for other tourists taking the guided tour. The guided tour which we took is being operated by a tour company called Newberlin (www.newberlintours.com). Newberlin offers a free walking tour around the city and the guides generally work on tips. They also provide selected tours to Sachsenhausen – One of the concentration camps, pub crawl- a late night pub hopping in Berlin and other selected tours for reasonable prices.
Kirti and myself had initially planned to take the free walking tour on the first day and Sachsenhausen the next day. But call it luck we happened to ask our guide on the best days to visit Sachsenhausen and we were told that today was the only day Sachsenhausen was open during Christmas. So we narrowly missed not seeing one of the places which was one of Hitler’s machinations of Death.
Sachsenhausen is situated to the North of Berlin and we had to take the S1 line from Unter Den Linden towards Oranienburg which is also the station where we had to alight for Sachsenhausen. From Oranienburg it is a fifteen minute walk to Sachsenhausen. It was a cold and windy day, so instead of walking we took a bus to get us to our destination with our sweet tour guide Penn from Australia.
Sachsenhausen was a concentration camp operating between 1936 and April 1945. It was named after the Sachsenhausen quarter part of the town of Oranienburg. This concentration camp was the brain child of Heinrick Himmler- the right hand man of Adolf Hitler and the leader of the SS (Schutzstaffel – Protective Squadron) army. Sachsenhausen was mainly a concentration camp where later a part was added for execution. On the front entrance of the gates of Sachsenhausen is written ‘ Arbeit Macht Frei (Work makes you free). So this camp was basically built for slave labour where the Jews, political prisoners, homosexuals, the Juhava’s witnesses and many more were tortured and made to work in the most dreadful conditions. It was in April 20-21, 1945 when the allied forces had occupied most of Berlin and were heading towards the camp when Heinrick Himmler sent a dictum to the camp supervisor “Gather all your stock and head westward”. Stock was meant for the camp detainees. At that very moment some 33,000 detainees who were exhausted from malnutrition and beastly treatment were gathered and made to march - also called as the Death March. The weak and the frail were shot as they were slowing the others. After 13 days when the allied forces were able to catch up with these prisoners, more than three quarters were already dead and the bodies were lying all along the path. The Nazi guards accompanying the prisoners had abandoned them and fled.
After receiving this pre-entrance doze of history from Penn we entered the gates of Sachsenhausen through which some 200,000 prisoners had made entry but less the five percent had made exit. Argus-eyed I looked at a big compound where some blocks and structures could be seen. These blocks and buildings are a part of the reconstruction effort as most of this camp was bombed by the allied forces in 1945. Sachsenhausen was made on a theory called ‘Geometry of control’ which was based on the idea of controlling maximum prisoners with minimum number of guards. The camp was made in the shape of a triangle and the tip of the triangle was a building which housed a machine gun which could point to each and every Barrack(blocks where the prisoners resided). With this one machine gun literally the whole camp could be monitored. The prisoners were given different coloured triangles to be worn at all the times. This triangles were to distinguish the types and kinds of prisoners (like Jews, political prisoners etc). The barracks were the residence for the prisoners and each barrack housed some 700-800 prisoners with a block elder acting as the supervisor for that Barrack. Each and every morning the prisoners were lined up for roll calls and until and unless each and every prisoner was counted for, everyone had to stay. Then the prisoners were given there work details for the day. Legend has it - the longest a roll call went, was for seventeen hours and in the famous words of Pen ‘Just imagine what it would be standing in 2 degrees without a thermal underwear and vest , wearing a garment made of thick cloth!!’ and true we couldn’t imagine it as wearing a fleece and a long overcoat with a thermal cap and gloves – I was still shivering from the cold and that day the temperature was around 5 degrees!!
Moving from the entrance we passed through the reconstruction of barracks, the shooting place where the shooting squad performed their activities, the gallows, the tower which has been built in memory of those who lost their lives in this place, to station Z which was built to execute the prisoners in different ways, to the jails which were built for the notorious prisoners, to the site where Stalin’s oldest son was kept as a prisoner and later lost his life , to the small hospital where brutal medical experiments were carried on and finally the block where the bodies were kept to be sent to the furnace. A prisoner’s journey in Sachsenhausen started from Station A and ended at Station Z which resembled journey from the roll calls to the gallows.
History also has it that Hitler’s chief officer of the SS army was captured by the Russian forces and Stalin’s oldest son (a lieutenant in the Russian army) was a prisoner at Sachsenhausen. So Hitler wanted to trade Stalin’s oldest son for his officer. In the famous words - Stalin replied; ‘ I would not trade a lieutenant for an officer’.
Call it an irony but as Germany was getting ready to host the 1936 Olympics, at this northern side of Berlin a place for mass torture was being built in 1936. Sachsenhausen provided a model for all the modern concentration camps and was the control centre for a lot of concentration camps. Coming out of the gates of Sachsenhausen we were told by Pen – Genocides have been happening from ages and still continues , Hitler only added the word ‘Technology’ to it!!
Trying to be impassive we walked out for Oranienburg station for Unter Den Linden. Alighting at Unter Den Linden and coming to the streets decorated with Christmas lights helped me to unwind myself from the walk in history and return to the present. We went around the dazzling lights and beautiful decorations on the roads to the lively Christmas markets offering irresistible candies.
After spending two hours on the streets of Unter Den Linden, I walked back to Pegasus hostel wondering what Berlin had in offer for Day Two and the valuable history lessons I would take back as memories.
Coming to Copenhagen I had decided to explore each and every opportunity of staying at a place from where world would be much closer than it was, and the Christmas holidays gave me the required heads up!!
Me and my friend Kirti were sitting and making some Indian dinner when we starting planning our Christmas holidays. That is when we decided on travelling to a new city instead of sitting at home. This led to a little bit of googleing and then Berlin was zeroed in!! We booked our flights on Sterling.DK (they have some really cheap flights) and accommodation at Pegasus Hostel (can be found on Hostelbookers.com or hostelworld.com) and we were set for Deutschland.
Debouching from the Alt Tempelhof airport at 2130 hrs we picked up a map from the tourist information counter and stepped in Deutschland. Our hostel was located in Parisar Kommune which meant we had to take a metro till Ostbahnhof. The train system in Germany is simple with two types of metro’s called the S-Bahn and U- Bahn (http://s-bahn-berlin.de/) with tracks divided into different lines distinguished by different colours. Navigation is easy as these lines have different start and end destinations with interchange at various stations.
We reached Pegasus Hostel (www.pegasushostel.de) and were surprised to see a big building decorated with lights. The hostel was clean and the dormitories were spacious with comfy beds and clean baths. It had free internet and a kitchen were we could try our culinary skills. This was more than what we had asked for. The hostel also offered a free walking tour around the City and was a point of pick up for major guided tours. Having a Falafel for dinner in a nearby Turkish restaurant we planned our next day and set ourselves to explore the city with a brutal yet intriguing history.
Day One started with a bit of breakfast shopping at the nearby supermarket. We were surprised to see Maggi (you can call it noodles for Indians) and couldn’t hold ourselves from going straight to the hostel kitchen and cook some of it. After a nice breakfast we stood at the reception for our tour guide to pick us for an eventful day. The guide arrived on time and we accompanied her to Unter Den Linden - meeting point for other tourists taking the guided tour. The guided tour which we took is being operated by a tour company called Newberlin (www.newberlintours.com). Newberlin offers a free walking tour around the city and the guides generally work on tips. They also provide selected tours to Sachsenhausen – One of the concentration camps, pub crawl- a late night pub hopping in Berlin and other selected tours for reasonable prices.
Kirti and myself had initially planned to take the free walking tour on the first day and Sachsenhausen the next day. But call it luck we happened to ask our guide on the best days to visit Sachsenhausen and we were told that today was the only day Sachsenhausen was open during Christmas. So we narrowly missed not seeing one of the places which was one of Hitler’s machinations of Death.
Sachsenhausen is situated to the North of Berlin and we had to take the S1 line from Unter Den Linden towards Oranienburg which is also the station where we had to alight for Sachsenhausen. From Oranienburg it is a fifteen minute walk to Sachsenhausen. It was a cold and windy day, so instead of walking we took a bus to get us to our destination with our sweet tour guide Penn from Australia.
Sachsenhausen was a concentration camp operating between 1936 and April 1945. It was named after the Sachsenhausen quarter part of the town of Oranienburg. This concentration camp was the brain child of Heinrick Himmler- the right hand man of Adolf Hitler and the leader of the SS (Schutzstaffel – Protective Squadron) army. Sachsenhausen was mainly a concentration camp where later a part was added for execution. On the front entrance of the gates of Sachsenhausen is written ‘ Arbeit Macht Frei (Work makes you free). So this camp was basically built for slave labour where the Jews, political prisoners, homosexuals, the Juhava’s witnesses and many more were tortured and made to work in the most dreadful conditions. It was in April 20-21, 1945 when the allied forces had occupied most of Berlin and were heading towards the camp when Heinrick Himmler sent a dictum to the camp supervisor “Gather all your stock and head westward”. Stock was meant for the camp detainees. At that very moment some 33,000 detainees who were exhausted from malnutrition and beastly treatment were gathered and made to march - also called as the Death March. The weak and the frail were shot as they were slowing the others. After 13 days when the allied forces were able to catch up with these prisoners, more than three quarters were already dead and the bodies were lying all along the path. The Nazi guards accompanying the prisoners had abandoned them and fled.
After receiving this pre-entrance doze of history from Penn we entered the gates of Sachsenhausen through which some 200,000 prisoners had made entry but less the five percent had made exit. Argus-eyed I looked at a big compound where some blocks and structures could be seen. These blocks and buildings are a part of the reconstruction effort as most of this camp was bombed by the allied forces in 1945. Sachsenhausen was made on a theory called ‘Geometry of control’ which was based on the idea of controlling maximum prisoners with minimum number of guards. The camp was made in the shape of a triangle and the tip of the triangle was a building which housed a machine gun which could point to each and every Barrack(blocks where the prisoners resided). With this one machine gun literally the whole camp could be monitored. The prisoners were given different coloured triangles to be worn at all the times. This triangles were to distinguish the types and kinds of prisoners (like Jews, political prisoners etc). The barracks were the residence for the prisoners and each barrack housed some 700-800 prisoners with a block elder acting as the supervisor for that Barrack. Each and every morning the prisoners were lined up for roll calls and until and unless each and every prisoner was counted for, everyone had to stay. Then the prisoners were given there work details for the day. Legend has it - the longest a roll call went, was for seventeen hours and in the famous words of Pen ‘Just imagine what it would be standing in 2 degrees without a thermal underwear and vest , wearing a garment made of thick cloth!!’ and true we couldn’t imagine it as wearing a fleece and a long overcoat with a thermal cap and gloves – I was still shivering from the cold and that day the temperature was around 5 degrees!!
Moving from the entrance we passed through the reconstruction of barracks, the shooting place where the shooting squad performed their activities, the gallows, the tower which has been built in memory of those who lost their lives in this place, to station Z which was built to execute the prisoners in different ways, to the jails which were built for the notorious prisoners, to the site where Stalin’s oldest son was kept as a prisoner and later lost his life , to the small hospital where brutal medical experiments were carried on and finally the block where the bodies were kept to be sent to the furnace. A prisoner’s journey in Sachsenhausen started from Station A and ended at Station Z which resembled journey from the roll calls to the gallows.
History also has it that Hitler’s chief officer of the SS army was captured by the Russian forces and Stalin’s oldest son (a lieutenant in the Russian army) was a prisoner at Sachsenhausen. So Hitler wanted to trade Stalin’s oldest son for his officer. In the famous words - Stalin replied; ‘ I would not trade a lieutenant for an officer’.
Call it an irony but as Germany was getting ready to host the 1936 Olympics, at this northern side of Berlin a place for mass torture was being built in 1936. Sachsenhausen provided a model for all the modern concentration camps and was the control centre for a lot of concentration camps. Coming out of the gates of Sachsenhausen we were told by Pen – Genocides have been happening from ages and still continues , Hitler only added the word ‘Technology’ to it!!
Trying to be impassive we walked out for Oranienburg station for Unter Den Linden. Alighting at Unter Den Linden and coming to the streets decorated with Christmas lights helped me to unwind myself from the walk in history and return to the present. We went around the dazzling lights and beautiful decorations on the roads to the lively Christmas markets offering irresistible candies.
After spending two hours on the streets of Unter Den Linden, I walked back to Pegasus hostel wondering what Berlin had in offer for Day Two and the valuable history lessons I would take back as memories.
