Last days in Berlin

May 25

Today was a wonderful day of adventure as we went underground for two separate tours presented by Berliner Unterwelten E.V. (Berlin underworld) - the same organization that had provided the exhibit of Germania yesterday. Our first tour in the morning was called Dunkle Welten (Dark World) which was a tour of a still-existing bunker built during WW II to be used by the citizens of Berlin in times of air raid attacks. It was most eerie. Our tour group of English speakers gathered at the entry of a currently-working U-Bahn station. We were met by our tour guide a wonderfully energetic Greek woman married to a German citizen. She unlocked a non-descript doorway which we hadn’t noticed, we walked in, and presto we had been taken back sixty-eight years to the time of the Third Reich.

Nothing had been touched – the walls, the signs, the paint, the stairways. We were immediately warned not to touch the walls, especially where it was painted yellow – this was a phosphorescent paint which had the amazing quality that in perfect darkness it still showed itself light. Thus it was used to guide people to doorways and stairwells, but it is incredibly poisonous and it was suggested that “licking the walls” would not be good for our health, and that a good scrub of our hands later would also be useful. What a beginning for a tour.

Next we were shown two signs: Frauen Abort and Herren Abort. While normally the word “toilet” would have been used instead of Abort, during the war no words which were derivative of French or English were to be used in public places. So the word “Abort” which is derived from Latin and means to rid oneself, was used instead. We were then led down three levels into the depth of the shelter. It turns out that this was not built uniquely for the war, but rather they took space which had existed between the ground level and the trains below and turned it into a three-level bunker. The citizens at that time were told that this was perfectly safe, but in actuality they would have been just as safe had they stayed in their own basements.

Naturally the military had fortified bunkers which would withstand a hit, but then, what were a few citizens more or less. The group - Berliner Unterwelten - have a long-term lease from the train authorities to use this bunker which is one of the deepest in Berlin. Their organization has cleaned-up and resurrected this site borrowing pieces and objects from other places to help to tell the a more complete story of life in a German bunker. Some of the pieces of information which we found interesting were: Every German during the war was asked to purchase a blue light which was not inexpensive. It was not able to be spotted from the air, nor by the British cloud-penetrating radar. When people would come down to the shelters they would wear all their jewelry and fine clothing in layers, and put water and food in the suitcases which they carried. Thus the few photographs of people in the underground appear to show very well dressed citizens. People who died in the bunker died not from gas attacks, but from the dirty and polluted air shared by others; the constrained space which led people to commit suicide or to go mad; and suffocation when the air got too dense to breath. At the end of the war women would go into the Women’s Abort and break the mirror glass and commit suicide rather than be raped by the incoming Russian troops. The mirrors were removed and women hung themselves from the water pipes. Originally the rooms were designed to hold bunk beds and appropriate places to sleep since it was assumed they would not need to be used very often. As the war progressed beds were removed except for new mothers and children (those who were to procreate the master race), and people simply sat on hard benches, crammed together in very tight spaces. We were asked to sit in such a room with the lights out and imagine sitting there with the fetid air; the people crying or moaning; people going to the bathroom in the room if they couldn’t get out; the coughing of people who were sick, and the sound of planes overhead. Not a pretty story.

We were shown objects that would have been below – games for children showing the victorious German army conquering the world, and children living in a happier future. We were shown an example of an object not from the bunker, but from a factory where there was a card-data-base of all slave workers assigned to the factory. This material was helpful after the war to track the location of many missing people.

We were shown a bunker that was used by an official of the government which was of course quite nice – table, Bavarian carved wooden chairs, and a real place to sleep. We were shown what happens if you put a person against one of the phosphorous-painted walls and shine a bright light at him. When you turned off the lights, the shadow of the person still existed as if painted on the wall…and it would remain that way for many hours. It ensured that none of us were touching those walls. The best ventilation in the bunker occurred when a train went by below – a beach ball which lay inside an airshaft would suddenly rise up with the gusts of air provided as the trains passed by and that would be all the fresh air that came through.

Since all the men were at war, women were left to do a lot of hard labor in the city of Berlin. This included cleaning bricks from fallen buildings so that they could be re-used. And even today when an old building is torn down, this patchwork of bricks is still visible. One very sad story we learned was that during the war Ukraine citizens arrested when Germany went East, were used as slaves in Berlin. When the war ended and the Russians came into Berlin, these same people were treated as traitors and collaborators and send to Siberia. Thus they had no life, and only recently have their families been compensated for their misery.

We learned that like in Belgium there remains under the ground a good deal of unexploded ammunition. When Potsdammer Platz was rebuilt it took special crews to clear the ammunition, and only recently during excavations, bombs exploded and killed construction workers. The whole experience was chilling. To think that this still existed, as if in a time capsule, and probably other unexcavated sites do as well. It was truly going back to another time and when one finally came out again into the train station it took a minute to shake off sixty-eight years and realize that all was well and safe.

No sooner were we above ground than we were met for our second tour called U-Bahn, Bunker und Kalter Krieg (cold war). This tour was led by an Ecuadorian woman whose last name was Morales. She was less emotional than our Greek guide, but very dramatic in her presentation. As Bob said, she had the character of a teacher who knew what she needed to tell us, how she wanted it told, and when it was necessary to be dramatic or stern. This time, our tour guide led us out into the sunshine through the square of Gesundbrunnen to a non-descript cement structure covered in vines where there was an above ground entrance into another former WW II bunker which was to be used during the cold war in case of nuclear attack.

Once inside, with the door slammed behind us, we stepped back forty-five years to the time when East Germany was controlled by the communists. Our tour guide sat us down on benches, asked us where we were all from, and then gave us a preliminary history of the cold war and why the bunker was constructed. Our tour was made up of a school group from Denmark, and people from Spain, Canada, France, Germany, Poland and Belgium. We were the only Americans in the crowd. This tour had less dramatic objects to show, but was as chilling. Not only was the tour about the usage of the underground as a place to hide from nuclear attack, but also it was about the use of the underground, as well as the sewer systems that were used by people to try and escape when the wall had been erected in 1962.

The daring and frightening risks that people took to escape were told in chilling detail by our guide. She explained how the East German guards tricked people who were up to their wastes in sewage. As the escapee arrived at various barriers they would snip the wire or saw the bars, but inside these bars would be a trip-wire which signaled people above ground. As the escapee arose on what he thought was a safe exit, there were the guards ready to pick him off. At one point rather than shooting them on the spot, they were hauled off to Leipzig, where they were guillotined. A new and most frightening piece of data. This went on until the 1980’s, and only recently has the address in Leipzig been discovered.

This series of nuclear shelters had been rebuilt in the early ‘70s by the French government (we were in the former French Zone) at a time when Soviet ‘saber-rattling’ threatened an attack on Berlin. The complex had been filled with tons of pre-packaged food, water, and medical supplies. The food was to be cycled every three years to ensure it was safe, but of course, some creative entrepreneurs decided to sell the ‘old food’ which resulted in a wave of food poisoning until this little business was closed. What was eerie was when our group had to go from one underground bunker to another, we simply poked out of another non-descript door into a modern-day U-Bahn station , took the train one stop, got off, and poked back into another non-descript door. A million Berliners must go past these doors every day and yet there is nothing to tell people what lies behind them. It leads one to wonder just how many such doors and hiding places still exist below ground.

After we passed through the second non-descript door in the wall of the Parkstrasse station, a huge, thick, air-tight door was opened. Once our group was all inside, the door was sealed, and for a minute we were in a small room caught between two doors. (Not good for those with claustrophobia). In case of an attack, people would have stripped off all clothing, and been sprayed with de-contaminating chemicals. Then a second hermetically sealed door on the opposite wall was opened and we went through into a large medical facility. The entry room where we had first entered was obviously also where one would be sealed off and checked to see how ‘radio-active’ you were before being led to a deeper and cleaner room. In America there were places just as secretive, such as the ones in the mountains of Virginia, which were meant to hold vast amounts of VIP’s and government officials during a time of nuclear war, but I certainly have never seen them. All I remember in the 1950’s was our famous air-raid alarm exercises in Hartford Avenue Elementary School: all children were led into the basement, told to face the wall with our head against our folded arms. And we would be saved. Right!!

As our tour guide pointed out, the disaster in Chernobyl illustrated just how impossible it would be to survive a direct nuclear attack. What I didn’t know was that the USSR tried to hide the impact of Chernobyl by taking those who had been affected and shipping them to Russia where they were hidden from view. Only when the number of affected grew too large to hide did the real impact become known to the world. We came away from our second tour equally impressed. We have seen Churchill’s bunker in London, but it was prettied-up and made into an historic site. These two tours in Berlin were raw and very real. Nothing was made pretty and the horror of both periods in German history made our re-entry into the modern day Germany just a wee bit weird.

We headed to a wonderful square where we sat at a restaurant named Rocco and talked about what we had seen while in the background there was a weird trio made up of a trumpet, bongo drums and an accordion. Thoroughly back in the 21st century and quite foot-weary we returned to the Hotel Adlon to bone up on the sites we were going to see the next day.

May 26

We awoke and ordered our room-service breakfast while watching a HUGE bike race which went past our hotel. They let the stars start out alone as they do in all races, but then for the next hour, in waves of 100 riders at a time, they peeled away from the starting area, went under the Brandenburg Gate and off down Unter Den Linden. It was a sunny day and everyone, spectators and riders alike, was in high spirits. Once the race had passed and traffic was moving again, we took off to visit the sites along Wilhelmstrasse – mostly small signs indicating where some significant building had once been. The only building standing is the old Ministry of Aviation (Luftwaffe headquarters) which is now the Finance Ministry. In its first incarnation it was part of the Third Reich; during the GDR it had a huge mural added lauding the power of the state and strong healthy communist workers… and now it simply collects taxes from the citizenry.

Not too far from this huge fortress-like-building is an outdoor display located at the basement ruins of what was once the Gestapo Headquarters, also running along a last remaining segment of the Berlin Wall. It is called the Topography of Terror and provided a photographic time-line of the Third Reich from start to finish. It was housed under a shed-roof along the cellar prison walls of the now-demolished building. This seems to be a temporary location for the exhibit until a proper museum is built. It seemed to repeat a lot of what one had already seen in books, other museums or sites and so we spent only a moderate amount of time. But it was quite crowded for a Sunday morning with all manner of curious people. At this point most Germans were born at the end of the war or after and I truly wonder how many museums need to exist to remind everyone of this hideous time. It certainly is important that no one forget it, but I somehow think that in about 25 years, once the Wall itself is history, that all these sites will be no more than a small plaque on a wall similar to all the plaques one sees in other cities.

Germany certainly needed to go through some form of cathartic atonement, but what is the right measure of remembrance? To cap off our own museum tour, we went in the afternoon to the Jewish Museum of Berlin. It is the largest museum of its type anywhere and covers the entire history of Judaism from the middle ages to the present. The building itself presents a story. One enters through an old Baroque museum of what was once the old Jewish Musuem, where one goes through a scanner, buys tickets and an audio tour on a real iPod. Then one goes into the new building built by Daniel Libeskind. The building, which was opened in 2001 is a story in itself with its austere walls, jagged window treatments, confusing layout and threatening mood. It took quite a few wrong turns to find oneself at the exhibits of interest and this too seemed intentional. Once we had found the main exhibit which follows a time-line progression, we found it very interesting. The exhibits are made up of video, photographs, memorabilia, Q &A quizzes, and text. Depending on one’s curiosity one could spend an hour or simply 5 minutes in each time period. Bob and I went quickly to the displays of Jews in Germany in the 1800’s and onward because that was the period I could relate to more easily.

There was a very interesting exhibit which explained that since Jews were not accepted into many parts of city life that they chose to convert to Christianity hoping that this would open more doors. But as the exhibit made clear, conversion left one neither an accepted Christian nor a practicing Jew, but simply a converted ‘three-day’ Jew who might remember the three holidays of the year. This is what Daddy and Walter’s family did and the exhibits showed that for a brief period there were opportunities in government, medicine, academia as well as the ‘traditional careers for Jews which were trade and finance. But this was a brief period, and in the 1930’s it all ended in Germany. It is the period that I think all my family remembered when the life of a middle-class Jew was almost normal. But as privileges were taken away and people were stripped of property and career, the message was quite clear. It leaves me again with the question of why my family waited so long. Unfortunately, I’ll never know the answers since all those who have that information have passed on and I didn’t know that I should have asked the questions sooner.

Accompanying us through our visit to the museum was Sylvie Ivery, the secretary of Frau Keinen, our lawyer in Berlin. She and her ten year old son had never been to the museum and since Sylvie works for a law firm which is trying to make reparations to Jews, I think she felt this would be an opportunity to learn things herself. After three+ hours we left filled with knowledge and headed out for a beer before parting ways. We learned that Sylvie had lived in California, Australia and England at different times, and thus had acquired quite excellent English, though she herself had been brought up in eastern Berlin. She told some stories of life under the communists…some which were down-right chilling. Bob and I went off for an early dinner where I had my last opportunity for white asparagus – this time with new potatoes and hollandaise sauce and then we headed to the hotel amidst all the other Sunday evening strollers. May 27 – Last day in Berlin We are almost ‘touristed-out’. We had only one appointment in the late afternoon but we could hardly think of what else we wanted to do. Amidst a combination of travel weariness, sore feet and a kind of malaise we chose to visit the huge department store of Berlin – Ka De We – eat a late lunch along the K’damm, and then head to the lawyers office for a last visit with Frau Keinen, Herr Von Trott and Dr. Monika Tatzkow.

It was an appropriate ending to our trip since it was the work of these three that allowed me to write and publish the book of the boy’s journey, and to make this trip itself. They summarized all the work that has gone on over the last six years tracking down the properties of various members of my family, I thanked them profusely for all the work which they had done on our behalf, and after a formal  'Lawyer-Hour', we left for our hotel to pack and get ready for our very early wake-up tomorrow at 4:45 am.

May 28th – Berlin to London

Other than the fact that neither the wake up call or my alarm worked, things went well. We woke later than planned, raced around like mad people, and were at the Hauptbahnhof with time to spare. While Bob guarded luggage I scurried around for a carry-away breakfast for the train. And off we went. Our last train trip with two changes in Cologne and Brussels… and I think, as Bob said, we’re ‘trained-out’. We counted that on this trip we’ve been on 17 different trains, hauling luggage on and off platforms, and I think it may be awhile until we’re ready for the next adventure. I would never have wanted to do this with airplanes, but next time it will be less luggage, and perhaps a hired butler to do the heavy lifting. We arrived at St. Pancras station, hopped into a cab, and voila – we’re in London for a few days of theater and shopping before heading back to The Queen for our sail home.