The Weather warmed up...and the Clothes came off!

Today is a beautiful day.  It is warm and sunny.  Just right for a bike ride through the park.  Unfortunatly, a lot of other people thought it was a good sun bathing day.  In Berlin, it is not against the law to sunbath nude.  There were several men laying on the grass in the park taking in the sun and letting it all out!(sorry, no pictures).

After leaving the park, we rode to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Euorpe.  The memorial consists of a"Field of Stelae" covering an area of 19000 square meters and containing 2711 concrete blocks of all different sizes, plus an information center.  It is an exhibition about the persecution and extermination of the Euorpean Jews.  As you walk amoung the concrete blocks, you get a sense of being trapped with no where to go.  The walk ways between them are narrow and many of the blocks are much taller then you are.  The information center is full of individual stories about people that were murdered or just "disappeared", never to be heard from again.  It included letters they wrote, diary intries that spoke of the terror they felt and of the hopelessness they experienced.  One room showed pictures of families and then told what happened to esch of the members.  Most were murdered.  Only a few escaped and they didn't have anything to go back to.  The life they knew before the Holocoust did not exist anymore. 

We then left the memorial and made our way to the Brandonburg Gate and then up past the Russian Memorial.  It honors the many Russians that were murdered in the war.  One thing I hadn't realized was that Hitler's influence reached out all over Euorpe all the way to Grease, Macedonia, and beyond. It wasn't just German Jews he wanted to eradicate, but the enire Jewish race on earth.