Today was our last day in Berlin. We started the day with a visit to the US Embassy. We met Catherine, a political officer for the embassy, who told us about the role of the US Embassy and connected the role of the Embassy to the holocaust (reparations). Following the meeting at the Embassy we visited a few memorials.
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| Over 500,000 Sinti and Roma were murdered |
Among which was a Book Burning memorial, which was inaugurated in 1995.
The subterranean bookshelves could accommodate about 20,000 books - and remind at the approximately 20,000 books, which the Nazis burnt on May 10th, 1933.
Destroyed writing included work from journalists, writers, scientists and philosophers; anyone seen as a threat to the Nazi ideology. The exact phrasing used was "literature, which undermines the moral and religious foundations of our nation" or "writings who glorify the Weimar Republic." Even works by communist thinkers were wiped out in this "action against the un-German spirit". Among the most targeted authors were e. g. Erich Kaestner, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Heinrich and Klaus Mann, Rosa Luxemburg, August Bebel, Bertha von Suttner and Stefan Zweig.
Besides the glass plate there are two bronze plaques, including a memorable quote from Heinrich Heine (1820):
That was only a prelude, there
where they burn books, they burn in the end people. |
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| http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/righteous/stories/lichtenberg.asp |
The remainder of the day was spent on a train. We spent five hours traveling to Prague. We arrived at 8 p.m. to this magical city. Once again, the locations we are visiting are so picturesque it is hard to imagine that they are sights of such devastation. It is now 9 p.m. local time, we are going to dinner and then to bed. Tomorrow we have a Jewish tour of Prague and the following day we visit Theresienstadt Concentration Camp.
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