Written by Annie Matthews, USA, on visiting the Berlin Wall in Berlin, Germany
While in Berlin, Germany Cast B had the awesome opportunity to participate in Regional Learning tours throughout the city. Berlin was by far the most historical city that Cast B has traveled to. We were all so happy to have some time to tour the city and see historical sites that many of us had only ever seen on TV.
We were broken up into groups and tour guides showed us important places in the city. We saw the Brandenburg Gate, Checkpoint Charlie, and the hotel at which Michael Jackson held his baby, Blanket, out of the window! The tour was filled with all of us asking questions and taking tons of pictures.
Throughout the day I saw many things that were thought-provoking, yet two sites stand out much more than others. The first was a memorial for all of the Europeans killed during the Holocaust. It was made up of cement blocks of various sizes lined up on a city block. The blocks are only about waist high at the beginning then grew to be higher than 7 feet and at the end faded all the way into the ground. The tour guide told us to walk through the memorial and we discussed our ideas of what the memorial represented at the end. At the end of the memorial, our tour guide told us that the artist wanted to leave the idea behind the memorial up to interpretation of the viewer. Walking through the site was very moving for me. 
Although I was walking through with my entire tour group, I still felt like it was uniquely my individual experience. A calm feeling swept over me and all I could think about was the people that lived through the Holocaust and how they had to be as strong and tough as these blocks. I also thought about the people that did not survive the Holocaust. Their lives were like the trees that lined the street entering the memorial site. The trees faced the blocks as if they were walking in unison, living, moving trees…turning into stone at the beginning of the site then rising up being pushed forward through horrific events that are unimaginable…then the blocks slowly shrinking, smaller, and smaller, and even smaller until the blocks were simply squares inside of the sidewalk. Even though the blocks became smaller, they never disappear completely. To me this symbolized how the Holocaust is a permanent fixture in the world’s history. This tragedy can not be covered up or erased. We can not forget. We can only learn from it.
An interesting tidbit that the tour guide explained to us is that within 24 hours of the memorial being built, a graffiti swastika was painted on a block. After this a company that built gas chambers for concentration camps during World War II donated a chemical coating that would make the memorial graffiti proof. Now even if graffiti is painted on the blocks, a person can simply wipe it off.
The second part of the tour was visiting the Berlin Wall. Our tour guide was very passionate about Berlin’s history and he gave us a lot of information about East and West Berlin and the Death Zone that was between it. It was amazing to be standing and touching something so historical; a wall that was literally built overnight to separate a group of people who were previously neighbors.
