On our second day in Berlin we woke up to a blue sky and sunshine! Still cold and windy but so much nicer without snow blowing in your face. We started the day by heading to the Stasi prison, Hohenschönhausen. Thousands of people were imprisoned here from 1951 until 1989 - most of them unjustly. Most people were in the prison simply because they tried to flee the GDR. And when you were arrested and taken to the prison, you were taken off the street and shoved into a van and next thing you knew you were at the prison so you just disappeared and nobody knew what had happened to you. Nobody even knew the prison existed!
The prison memorial includes a museum that you could spend at least an hour perusing. It's filled with the stories of many prisoners of their time in the prison. We also took a tour of the prison that was led by a former inmate. Most tours there are led by former inmates and it makes you relive their stories while you walk through the prison buildings. Most former inmates are getting on in years now though so the tours won't be led by them for much longer, unfortunately.
The tour started off in the "U-boat", or underground part of the prison. The cells were small and dark. While some of them have windows now they didn't back when it was a prison. Some cells were used as "water cells" which were cold, dark, and always filled with at least an inch of water. People spent months in these cells. There were also hot and cold cells. Inmates were checked on every 5-10 minutes, day and night, leading to a lack of sleep. Below are some pictures from the U-boat.
There were above-ground buildings in the prison as well, which just contained more (windowless) cells. There were red lights hanging from the ceilings and when they were lit that meant there was a prisoner in the hallway and nobody else was allowed to be in the hallway. This ensured that each prisoner never saw another prisoner and would always feel isolated.
Tiger cages - here prisoners were given 30 minutes of fresh air a day (or however often the guards felt like it). The cages were really small and the prisoners weren't allowed to touch the walls or move around at all while in them or they'd be shot.
We also saw interrogation rooms and the room where they were registered and photographed when they first came to the prison. Several hundred people reported hearing a strange noise while sitting in the registration room and feeling sick afterwards and most of them died of cancer later - it turned out they were dosed with high levels of radiation as an experiment. Freaky.
Our guide was originally arrested for tearing down political posters. This in itself wasn't a big deal but once they started interrogating him it turned out he had also made some western-leaning political statements in a politics class he had attended and he was sentenced to 30 months in the prison for that. His dad hired a lawyer and they went to court and turned the blame on his teacher for allowing him to make such political statements in class and his sentence was reduced to 20 months.
For a more in-depth description of the prison, read:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin-Hohenschönhausen_Memorial
After the prison, we grabbed some quick döner kebabs for lunch and then headed over to check out Checkpoint Charlie. Pictures below are from Checkpoint Charlie and some bits of wall that are still standing nearby. There is a museum there and an outdoor exhibition detailing many successful (and unsuccessful) escape attempts from east to west Berlin. A lot of sad stories there.
This double-cobblestone strip traces the path of the original wall throughout the city:
In the evening, we went to the Berlin Philharmonic for a little classical music and relaxation after a long, cold, and depressing day.
The Philharmonic building was kind of neat:
In Potsdamerplatz, which is near the Philharmonic, there's an enormous Christmas tree, a Christmas market of course, and a street with snowflakes and dripping icicle lights hanging from all the trees. It's beautiful.
While I'm not going to blog about it because I didn't take any pictures, on our third day in Berlin it rained. A lot. We went to the Altes and Neues Museum and looked at a lot of old Egyptian and Roman things. It's part of a UNESCO World Heritage site. It was well worth the visit, if you're ever in Berlin.
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