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Berlin and Eastern Europe 2005
Marx Engels Platz (Marx and Engels, the founding fathers of communism)
Sunday 28th August 2005
To Berlin with Easyjet from Liverpool. Picked up the hire car and drove straight to 'Mitte', the centre of Berlin. Went up the famous TV tower that used to be in the old East (DDR) part of the city. It cost a lot more now than when Jette and I went up it15 years ago. Then it cost 1 OstMark (10p), but now it was in the capitalist west it was 7 Euros each (£5).!!!
Went for a nice meal at the 'Operncafe' on Unter den Linden, again re-visiting old haunts from our visit 15 years previous when the wall came down. Now almost unrecognisable, totally changed. Went back to the car in Judenstrasse, by now it was well after midnight. Put down the seats and rolled out the sleeping bags so the kids could sleep in the back. Had a few hours sleep.
Monday 29th August 2005
Up very early after not much sleep in the car. Beautiful blue sky and glorious sunshine, had a coffee and croissant at Alexanderplatz station. Walked over to Marx-Engels Platz and spent some time trying to replicatethe same photos as 15 years ago! The former Volks Kammer (East German parliament) was in a bad state, derelict and run down.
We then walked down Unter den Linden towards the Brandenburg Gate, some reconstruction work was going on but the gates themselves looked magnificent, especially against the beautiful blue sky. From there we walked the short distance to the Reichstag, again wonderfully re-furbished and looking resplendant. What a difference to how it looked when it was in the Stalinist east when we were last in Berlin.
From there we walked towards Potsdamer Platz and Voss Strasse, trying to find the location of the Fuerher bunker. Hitlers bunker was in the grounds of the Reich Chancellery on the corner of Voss Strasse and Herman Goering Strasse (now renamed Erbertstrasse). Eventually found the site of the bunker, surrounded by apartment blocks with a childrens play area and sand pit marking some of the site...strange. ... (continues below)
 
Identical photos taken 15 years apart......
Top photo taken in August 2005 and the bottom photo was taken during the winter of 1990, just a couple of months after the fall of the wall. You can see the Volks Kammer (Peoples Chamber), the East German Parliament building in the background. This building is now derelict and boarded up. Its full of asbestos and nobody knows what to do with it, knock it down or re-furbish it ? (notice the full head of hair on the old photo..!!..)
Brandenburg Gate
 
Site of Hitlers Bunker. Not many tourists about...great.
Alexander Platz
 
The same views but 15 years apart , I used the kids as props.....
The Reichstag
 
Now and then...first photo is of the newly re-furbished Reichstag, the second photo is what it looked like in May 1945 and the third photo I took in 1990...what a difference through the years.
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The Bendler Blok
 
The Bendler Blok, site of the failed take-over by the resistance movement in the hours after the attempt on Hitlers life on 20th July 1944.
The courtyard had a memorial to Colonel Stauffenberg, General Beck and the others who were shot out of hand in this very yard after it was apparant that the coupe had failed. Inside the building, which was still part of the Bundeswehr (The German Military), was an exhibition detailing the German resistance to National Socialism. The street was re-named after Stauffenberg in the early 1950's in recognition of his bravery. In the quiet late summer sun, it was difficult to imagine the chaos and bloodshed that took place in this yard. If the coup had succeeded and Hitler had been killed, how different the world might have been. Europe may not have been divided and the curse of Stalinism may not have enveloped half of the continent.
'Hier Starben fur Deutschland Am 20 Juli 1944' .... Here they died for Germany. Gen. Beck, Col. Stauffenberg, Gen. Olbricht, Von Haeften and Von Quirnheim
 
Nina with a Berlin Bear with Steffan looking on
By now it was the middle of the afternoon and we still had the long , long drive over the border to Poland and southwards towards Auschwitz.
The border crossing was an unpleasant affair with stern border guards from both Germany and Poland checking and double checking all our documents...I got out of the car to stretch my legs and was immediately ordered back in, in no uncertain terms...Jawol, Herr Polizei.!! The mood and atmosphere seemed to change significantly upon entering Poland, not least because of the dreadful roads (EU member state ?..ha...thats a laugh..). On the roads sides there were lots of Gypsy types sitting in the gutters selling mushrooms and other strange things (freshly skinned rabbits etc). The kids, particularly Helena sensed that we had entered something of the 'unknown' and felt quite uncomfortable and almost frightened by this strange place. It was a completely different world. She wanted return forthwith to the 'safety' of Germany.
The sun was still hot and the sky blue as we pushed on through the Polish countryside towards Wroclaw (Breslau). Suddenly, the motorway was closed off and I had to follow a diversion which bizarrely took us almost back to where we had started, wasting about 3 hours in the meantime....Polish roads..!!!
By now it was after 7pm and slowly going dark...hmmm..I didn't really fancy driving too much whilst it was dark, so there was an urgent need to 'push on', only stopping for some water and chocolate at a huge Tesco hyperstore...yes, Tesco in Poland!! Drove onwards through Katowice, a grey,grim industrial town with a Stalinist look to it. By now we had been driving for about 6 hours, it was 11pm and I just couldn't find the road we needed to get on. Went up and down the same roads for several hours and tried to ask people proved fruitless....'Wo ist Auschwitz?'....'Wo ist Osweicim?'... Nobody wanted to know.
By now the kids were getting a little anxious, I was too. It was late, it was dark, we were tired and nobody spoke our language (or German) and man, it was beginning to get spooky!! Eventually stopped and asked an old man, who spoke some German and he put us on the right track and after some hairy moments of driving towards trucks on the wrong side of a country lane, we eventually got on the road to Auschwitz. It was after midnight and we were on the road to hell...literally. Man, I have been on some wild goose chases in my time but this one really did take the biscuit.
Onwards we drove, down small, dark, winding lanes with no lights...suddenly a freight train would dart across the road (no barriers or warning) and huge trucks would appear out of the darkness. I couldn't beleive what I was doing in such a place. Just as suddenly it went all foggy and misty...by christ it was spooky. More so knowing, in the back of one's mind, what took place here 60 years ago.
Approached the little town town of Osweicim, better known by the German name, Auschwitz. Bleak and deserted...not nice. It was 12:30 am...where was the hotel?? Amazingly, we found a petrol station that was open and the guy directed us towards the hotel. Hurrah... we found the Hotel Olympijski, a grim, Soviet style place, grotty with mid 1970's decor...ha,ha..I have always wanted to stay in a place like this, (yeah..really). It looked straight out of a 1970's cold war spy movie. We were just glad to rest our weary heads and to comtemplate what was coming in the morning.............
Continues on the next page...........
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