January 31st

This morning we went to the Holocaust Museum of Budapest. I think that this museum was the most powerful one that we went to the entire trip, it presented information in a very straightforward way and focused on the victims of the holocaust. There was also a lot of information about the antisemitic laws passed by the Hungarian government before any killings had begun. Many Jews lived in Hungary and of those that lived in Budapest half were able to survive, however almost all of the Jewish people who lived in rural Hungary were killed. There was also a lot of information about the Roma (Gypsies) and the similar ways in which they were restricted and killed. One of the things that i was very surprised about that I learned today was that there were only killings in Hungary starting in 1944 and that people were only deported to concentration camps for about six weeks until the government ordered that to stop. After that the arrow cross (Hungarian Nazis) took power and started organizing the killings of Jews right in Budapest. At the end of the museum there is a synagogue attached that has been around since before WWII, inside it is a working synagogue but there is also a memorial for some of the victims who were killed in the Holocaust as well as a memorial for the survivors. 

After that we had a quick lunch and then went to the largest synagogue left in Central Europe. It survived the night of broken glass because the Nazis did not control Hungary until 1944 and was able to open for use right after WWII ended. Its a beautiful building and was very similar to a Christian church in many ways. After seeing what is left of the destroyed synagogue in Berlin it was hard to believe that this buildings is pretty much exactly what that one would have looked like. Behind the synagogue there is a memorial garden for those buried in a mass grave found by the soviets after they took Budapest  There is also a memorial that was erected in 2012 for Raoul Wallenberg who was a Swiss man who managed to save many Jews through issuing them Swiss passports. 

Tomorrow morning we leave Budapest to travel back home, its a very bittersweet feeling because I've absolutely loved this trip. Its been an amazing experience to travel and learn about the Holocaust in the countries where it occurred  it has also been a great experience to travel through Europe with such an awesome group of people

January 30th

Today we took the train to Budapest, where we'll be until we leave to go home on Friday. It only took us about 3 hours to get from Vienna to Budapest. After checking into the hotel and getting some lunch we did a walking tour of Budapest and saw some of the major sights of the city as well as a few places that had a lot of history entwined with the Holocaust. We took a trolley up hill to get a better view of the city and saw the castle which was actually destroyed during WWII and then rebuilt. Not too far from the castle is the Presidents house and next to that there is a building that still shows shelling damage that has not been repaired as a monument to WWII. After walking around up on the hill for a while we took the subway under the Danube and walked to a monument on the riverside that was in honor of the Jews that had been shot in the river in late 1944. 






The monument is a line of cast iron shoes where people has been shot with three plaques, one in English, one in Hebrew and one in Hungarian. I think that this monument did a good job of being honest and out in the open, however there is no convenient way of getting to it.

January 29th

Today it was actually pretty warm, it was about 30 degrees outside (instead of being below 20 with an additional wind chill). We took a walking tour throughout Vienna to try and find some of the buildings that had history involved with the Holocaust, however very few of these buildings are even memorialized so unless you know where to look its almost impossible to find them. We first went to an active synagogue which survived the Night of Broken Glass because it was very small and attached to other buildings, so a fire there would have burned down the whole block.

After that we went to the third district where a group of private citizens have been raising money to place small plaques around the city to try and memorialize what happened in Vienna that is connected to the Holocaust. They raise the money on their own and are not funded by the government in any way, these people just want to find out about the history of their home and make sure that others are aware of what happened. The first plaque that we saw was on the sidewalk in front of a building that had been a school for Jewish children during the 30's.

Then we walked around the corner to another site that was memorialized with a plaque, this one was a house where 380 Jewish people were held for a few weeks before being deported to camps. Of these 380 people only 2 survived the camps. This house was also not all that large, its almost impossible for me to imagine what it must have been like for so many people to be locked into that house together with no idea of what was going to happen to them.

We walked a few more blocks until we came to the next plaque which was in front of an apartment building where 29 men, women, and children were taken from their homes and deported. For 29 people to be taken from that building, half of the units in it must have been emptied out in a matter of days.

The next place that we went to was just another few blocks walk from the apartment building. This used to be a small synagogue which was almost completely destroyed by Nazi sympathizers on the Night of Broken Glass. The building is still there, however it is now used by an Artist as a studio.






Its really hard for me to understand why there are no memorials created by the government of Austria to Holocaust. I feel like it is a history that cannot be ignored and the only way to stop some things from happening again is to have some type of education that shows why these actions are wrong and to show the extent of what actually happened instead of trying to cover it up would probably be the first step. I also don't understand why people will live and work in places that are so closely related to the holocaust and to what happened in Vienna. I feel like if people refused to live and work in these places then the government would be forced to take some steps to correct their lack of memorization or education.

The last thing we did today was visit the site of one of the biggest synagogues in Vienna, it was completely destroyed during the Night of Broken Glass but there are pillars and a large plaque showing where it once stood. The site is owned by the Jewish community still and they have some type of office on that lot now.

January 27th & 28th

January 27th

We went to an amazing buffet for brunch this morning and then we went to the Vienna Museum which had the history of the city of Vienna. There was also an exhibition featuring games played throughout the years and there were Nazi propaganda games on display. I knew that propaganda was very widely used and there were even anti-Semitic children's books created by the Nazis but I had never heard of pro-Nazi board games before.

January 28th 

When we went outside this morning it was snowing pretty hard which is exciting because the weather is going to warm up to about 40 degrees by tomorrow, and we probably wont be seeing any more snow this trip. This morning we went to the Vienna Military History Museum. The main reason that we went was to see the World War One exhibit, however we first went through exhibits about the 30 years war, the siege of Vienna by the Ottoman empire and one wing that just had general descriptions of  military maneuvers in the late 1800's leading up to world war one. A lot of the WWI exhibit was closed off however we did get to see the room dedicated to the assassination of Franz Ferdinand which is important to learning about the Holocaust because WWI was a decisive influence on WWII. The car still has bullet holes in it and they have his uniform with the bloodstains as well as some of the other uniforms that he had worn. There was also a WWII section of the museum which is sloppily done, there is very little information given on plaques and the Holocaust is never mentioned. I feel like there are a lot of good intentions involved in creating some type of memorial, however people just don't know how to go  about creating these memorial or even about bringing that history up. 

January 26th

We went to the judenplatz to see a memorial to the holocaust. I think that the intentions were good, however the execution of the memorial was not well done. It’s a square concrete building that is supposed to look like books are covering it and there are the names of the camps that Jews were deported to engraved into the stone at the base. To me this was not a successful memorial because if you didn't know where to find it and if you didn't really know what it was it would be impossible to tell that it was a memorial to the holocaust and the Jews who lost their lives.

After that we walked over to the Sissi museum at the city palace. It was an interesting museum and I thought that the palace was beautiful and some of the rooms in this one were more homey than some of the other palaces that we have seen. I did think that it was interesting to learn from Dr. Moser that the relationship between Sissi  and her husband was not the happy idealized marriage that the museum made it out to be.

After  that we took a bus to the top of one of the mountains surrounding Vienna to see a view of the city. It was beautiful, you could see the city pretty well and the snow covered vineyards that were all over the small mountain were also very beautiful.

The last thing that we did was go inside St. Stephens Cathedral, on the outside of the building a symbol of rebellion had been carved into the stone during WWII but sadly defiance against the Nazis and rebellion was not widespread throughout Austria. 

January 25th

Today we went to Bratislava, Slovakia which is about a hour away from Vienna by train .  We went to Slovakia because it was a puppet nation controlled by the Nazi's during WWII and their Jewish community was almost completely decimated and during this time Jews made up about 25% of their population.  The first thing that we did was go to a castle that was rebuilt during the communist period, from the castle you can see across the Danube and even some of Austria.
Following that we had lunch at a cafe a short walk from the museum that we were going to afterwards. I had goulash which is similar to a stew with dumplings pork and sauerkraut, I was surprised at how much I liked it because I had never had goulash (or anything like it) before. After lunch we walked to a site where the main synagogue of Bratislava had been, however it is not there anymore because it had been demolished in the 1960's so that a highway could be built. I was surprised at how little consideration there had been when demolishing the synagogue  There is not even a noticeable monument to it, instead there is a relief of the synagogue on the wall that supports the highway and a plaque.
Then we went to the Jewish museum which was very informative and had a lot of information about Jewish culture but it was unsettling because the museum was created not entirely as a memorial to the holocaust but also to educate the people of Bratislava about a group of people and a culture that is very rarely found in their city today.  I was happy to see that steps are being taken to memorialize the loss of Jewish people and their culture but at the same time it done in a very different way than we saw in Berlin.

Because of the extreme cold we decided to go back to Vienna after seeing some of the new part of Bratislava instead of walking across a bridge over the Danube to have dinner in Bratislava.

January 24th

Today we went to Schonbrunn palace which was one of the summer palaces for the royal family, it was destroyed during the Turkish invasion and then rebuilt by Emperor Leopold. However Empress Maria Theresia expanded the palace and decorated much of what we saw today. Schonbrunn includes the palace, the park surrounding and also the oldest recorded zoo in the world, it is also the largest palace in Austria. I thought that the palace was beautiful, I really enjoyed how the rooms were decorated and the style that they had been built in. I also enjoyed learning about the royal families who lived in Schonbrunn. Tonight we are going to have Turkish food for dinner which I am looking forward to because I don't have much experience with it.

January 23rd

Today we spent the morning at the central cemetery which is one the largest cemeteries in the world at about 590 acres. It was established in 1863 and has burial grounds for many different religious such as Catholicism, Judaism, Protestantism and many other denominations. There are also multiple churches and a military section in the cemetery.  We first saw the Catholic section that also has the resting places of many of Vienna's important citizens as well as some famous composers. There are two Jewish sections in the central cemetery the newer one was opened in 1917 and is still used. You can tell that there was a some damage to these sections in particular during the Holocaust and especially the night of broken glass. You can also see the visible effect of graves not being maintained because there are not a lot of surviving family members around to keep up the graves and keep plants like ivy from overtaking them. When we were in the Jewish sections you could tell that very few people had been there recently and we were the only people in the old section. I was overwhelmed by how huge the cemetery was, we took the trolley a few stops from where we started out to the Jewish sections, I was also surprised at the fact that you could still see some visible damage to graves from the war.

After the central cemetery we went to an all you can eat Asian buffet and then went on the famous ferris wheel, the riesenrad which is huge and dates back to before world war one. It was destroyed in the war however it was rebuilt and runs all year. 

January 22nd

This morning we took our short plane ride to Vienna from Berlin, and this time we didn't experience any delays. After leaving the airport we took a train to the heart of Vienna's first district where our hotel is located. We then had fast-food for lunch and took a tour of Vienna's first district. We saw the parliament building, the Vienna opera house, the University and several of the other important sights of the city. When we were done with that we had jause which is the Austrian word for pastry break/ second lunch, we went to the central cafe which is one of the fancier cafes in Vienna.  I'm already sort of in love with Vienna, the buildings are beautiful and the food and coffee has already been amazing. There is also a lot of important and interesting history here.

January 20th and 21st

January 20th
The first thing we did today was go to the German Film Museum. The permanent exhibit is set up to begin with early films and film-making equipment and then goes chronologically through important movies, actors/actresses and changes in film. In the 1920's and 30's the Berlin film scene was very influential; in some ways it was even  more so than Hollywood. However the rise of the Nazis impacted film heavily as Jewish actors and directors were no longer able to work in this industry, additionally the Nazis only allowed specific types of films to be made and shown in Germany. I thought that seeing the progression of the industry was really cool and I was amazed to learn about some of the movies that the Nazis had made. Just days after the Wannsee conference a Nazi propaganda film was made, the premise of this movie was that the English had concentration camps in South Africa and they were starving and killing the Dutch Boers. The fact that just days after the decision was made to systematically kill millions of people a movie using their same premise would be shown to the German people was truly amazing to me.

After the Film Museum we went to the Anhalter train station where many elderly Jews were deported. Since this was a major train station in the middle of Berlin those deported were out onto third class passenger cars rather than cattle cars and about 50-75 people would be deported at one time instead of many 500-1000. The Nazis did not want to alarm any of the non-Jewish citizens who were on their way to work or traveling, and that is why they changed the way they deported people. The station was bombed during the war and was then demolished in the years following, only the front of the building is still standing.

Following the train station we went to the Deutsches Technikmuseum (the German Technology Museum) to see an exhibit on trains and train cars used during the holocaust. One of the things that I learned was that the head of the railroad during Nazi Germany was not held accountable for being involved with the killing of Jews, he did not see any physical suffering but he did know the amount of Jews being deported and arranged so that it could be completed as a top priority. Its interesting to learn that only recently have people begun to do research on him.









January 21st

Today we went to the Oranienburger Strasse Synagogue, also called the New Synagogue. It was built in 1866 to be the main synagogue for Berlin's Jewish population and was influenced by middle eastern architecture. It was one of the few Jewish Synagogues to survive the Night of Broken Glass in 1938, its survival is mainly accredited to a police captain who made the SA men who were ransacking it leave and then ordered a fire brigade to put out the fires that they had started. The synagogue was badly damaged in the bombings of WWII, and some large parts had to be demolished however it was rebuilt and restored starting in 1989. Some fragments of the original building found in the rubble were used to rebuild and restore the synagogue. Inside it looks like a ruin from hundreds of years ago, and its hard to remember that most of the damage was done not even 80 years ago. Inside a museum of Jewish culture and the history of the church has been established, there is also a small congregation that uses a few of the restored rooms upstairs.

Tomorrow morning we leave for Vienna, Austria.

January 19th

The first thing we did today was go to the site of the book burning in East Berlin, unfortunately we were unable to see the small memorial set into the ground because of the weather. The site of the book burnings was actually in front of the University. After that we went to the German Historical Museum. The museum was huge and had information about Germany and its origins all the way back to the Celts and Romans. There was also a lot of information about the history of how Germany was formed from the Holy Roman Empire and there was also a lot of information about important and influential Germans such as Martin Luther. The museum also covers Germany's involvement in WWI, WWII and the cold war. It is set up so that you start before Germany is even considered a country and walk through all of the artifacts until you come to post reunification Germany. 

After the museum we had currywarst for lunch. It was really good and unexpected because it was not spicy. Then we went to the Berliner Dom, which is a beautiful cathedral that was rebuilt recently to replicate the church that was destroyed in the war. 

January 17 & 18

January 17
In the morning we took the train to the Grunewald train station which is where the majority of the Berlin Jews were deported from. The tracks are no longer in use and there is a very discrete memorial on the platform itself. The memorial consists of every date of deportation, the intended location of the train and the number of Jews deported. The train tracks were very quiet and isolated and being there was a very unsettling feeling; I also thought that the numbers were just staggering, thousands of people were deported at one time to death camps to be killed. Being at the train station made me wonder why no one would question the Nazi government about what was happening to these people, its scary to realize that over a thousand people can be taken from one city and never heard from again without having someone question what was going on.

We left the train station and traveled to the Wannsee house, where higher ups in the Nazi government met to decide how to carry out the "Jewish problem". The house itself is a beautiful villa on a lake (the picture on the left) that was given to the Nazi party by a wealthy business man. The villa is now a museum that covers the history of what happened from the early Nazi period until the Nuremberg trials. It was hard for me to connect this beautiful house with the decision to kill millions of people systematically. Additionally, I think that the very businesslike like way that this decision was made is also so hard to understand.
After the Wannsee house we went to Potsdam to see Cecilienhof and Sanssouci. Cecilienhof was the house that the Potsdam conference was held in. The Potsdam conference outlined the terms of surrender for Germany, the leaders of the United States, England and Russia decided on terms for the Potsdam Agreement and the Potsdam deceleration. Originally, Cecilienhof was the house of  Crown Prince Wilhelm Hohenzollern and his wife Cecilia. I thought that the house was beautiful and I really liked the design of it. I also thought that the rooms inside were preserved very well and that helped to connect the pictures and exhibits to the rooms themselves. Sanssouci was Fredrick the Great's favorite summer palace. It is considered to be a very small palace because it is only one story tall and had about a dozen rooms total, however it has always been favored by the German monarchs. 

January 18th
Today we went to the Jewish museum, it was focused on Jewish history and culture throughout time, there were also special Holocaust exhibits. I really liked this museum because it covered such a large time span and told a lot about Jewish life in Midevil times up until modern times. I enjoyed learning a lot of the cultural history that I had not heard of before and I found it interesting to learn how the Nazi's used very old prejudices to further their own adgendas. After the museum we went to the Fernsehturm TV tower in East Berlin. We went up 203 meters high into the tower and could see almost all of Berlin.

went up into the tower 203 meters high

January 16

Today was our first full day in Berlin, and it was snowing a little when we left which was so pretty. We started off by going to the Reichstag to go into the copula. The copula wasn't rebuilt until the early 2000's and inside was beautiful, if you climb to the top you can look down into parliament. I did not actually make the climb all of the way up because I have a really bad fear of heights but I still enjoyed going and learning about all of the history involved.
After visiting the Reichstag we walked over to the Brandenburg gate which was originally the entrance to Berlin and was also the  entrance to East Berlin after the wall went up. Following the Brandenburg gate we walked to the Berlin Holocaust memorial. The memorial was made up of 278 tomb like stone blocks that have no names or religious symbols on them, and are that way to represent the nameless victims of the holocaust. The memorial is also built in a wave-like pattern to represent the unpredictable nature of life and of what could happen at any time. I found it interesting that the memorial was not finished until May 5, 2005. There is an underground museum and information center beneath the memorial. It is not a huge museum but it is also very informative and effective.
When we had all completed walking through the museum we went to get lunch in a steak house. Lunch was very good, and it was interesting to see a German take on a steakhouse.
We walked around what was East Berlin for a while and on our way to the Berlin wall memorial we stopped in what was a ghost station during the cold war. It was interesting to learn that during the cold war many subway stations were literally cemented closed.
The Berlin wall memorial had a few pieces of intact wall along with a memorial to the people who were killed attempting to cross into West Germany. The Berlin wall memorial appeared to be minimal but I think that may be because of the snow covering some of the exhibits.                    
For dinner we ate Prussian food, I got two fried sausages potatoes and sauerkraut. I have never really had sauerkraut before and I decided to try it, it was good but I didn't eat too much of it because it seemed like a kind of strong flavor  to me, however the sausage and potatoes and gravy was amazing.

January 14th/15

We left RMC on January 14th and I experienced my first trans-Atlantic flight. After that we ran into some snow delays in Amsterdam and ended up staying there for around seven hours, however we were able to make it to our hotel in Berlin before 7 pm.
 After checking in we walking through some of the streets near us to become familiar with the area and then took the train to what was East Berlin for some dinner and saw some of the sites that we will be visiting later in the week.
I'm exhausted from traveling and the time difference but it was fun to bond with the rest of our group today and tomorrow we will be spending the whole day seeing some sites in Berlin such as the Reichstag, I'm really excited to see the city during the day and to learn about what was happening here during WWII.