Another day in Berlin! I am finding Berlin huge but it’s getting easier to navigate. This morning I had a slow morning, getting up a bit later and doing a whole lot of washing before I headed out to the Memorial of the Murdered Jews of Europe. This time as well as walking around the blocks, I also went down to the museum underneath the memorial. It was very sombre experience but I think a really important one. As well as telling the series of events of the development and work of the Nazi’s, it also had a lot of personal accounts of Holocaust Victims and survivors through diaries and letters. The part of the exhibition I found the most interesting as well as the saddest was the families section which had the stories of 10 or so families and their lives through the Holocaust. Many had a member who had lived and was able to tell the families story while others stories had been put together by friends or surviving family journals/relics. It was difficult to read about the normal lives these people had had before they were taken to concentration camps or treated with other unimaginable cruelty. The memorial has had a list of statistics about how many people were killed by the Nazi’s under German Occupation in different countries. Perhaps ignorantly I had always assumed the most amount of people who’d been killed were German but I had no idea that Poland had significantly more (over 1 million).

Although I had only stayed for 1.5 hours, it was a very draining experience so I left and walked to the topography of terror where I had lunch before meeting up with Clare. The topography of terror was also really interesting as it is where the Gustapo headquarters were in WWII although it was originally built as an Art School after WW1. The building was destroyed, but there are small brick remains of the basement. It felt a little bit eerie to stand where the major Nazi headquarters had been. The exhibition detailed the gain of power of the Third Reich as well as profiling powerful people during the reign. After a while there we both felt drained as we’d been dealing with quite emotional and intense topics all day. It was also really hot so we headed off to Potsdamer Platz shopping centre to visit an ice-cream shop I had been told about by a Frugii customer. On the way we ended up going into Forever 21 and spending quite a bit of time in there! Which was okay because I came out with two dresses and a pair of shorts which I really needed in the hot weather! We eventually got to the ice-cream shop and I bought a caramel ice-cream which was delicious! Best ice-cream in Europe so far.

We were then pretty exhausted so we caught the metro back to the Hostel and had some drinks with some others at the hostel, most of whom seemed to be Australian, followed by a late dinner and then bed.