Berlin from here

After flying through the early morning hours from Tel Aviv, we landed in Berlin Sunday, July 11. Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday were full of people to meet and places to go.

Sunday evening, Program Coordinator Stephen Feinberg gave us a quick tour and history lesson of some of the important locales of Nazi operations in central Berlin.

Oddly, on the day we arrived, a huge outdoor tent housing a Berlin fashion show covered the site of the famous book burning of May 1933. We managed to make our way to the memorial to that event, however, a well-lit, starkly white underground bookcase that holds no books.

That event, by the way, was generated not by the Nazi government, but by the German Student Association as a way of attacking what they called, "un-German spirit." They saw it as patriotic, an expression of love and devotion for their nation.

My favorite part of the Pledge of Allegiance we observe at school is the ending, "with liberty and justice for all." For all. The Nazi definition of "nation" did not include "all." Also, the German pledge was to Adolph Hitler as the embodiment of "German-ness" and did not locate the nation "under God." I know the inclusion of "God" in our pledge is controversial, but for me, as a suggestion that the "nation" is subservient to an ideal, and not the other way around, it works.

I've already included video and comments here on the Gruenewald train depot and Wannsee, but I want to add what I can on our visit to Bergen-Belsen, the former Gestapo Headquarters known as the "Topography of Terror," and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.