We started our day today with heavy stuff. The first thing
we did was go to a deportation site of Jews called Bahnhof Berlin-Grunewald. It
was pretty interesting. The way they constructed it was they put metal plates
over the ground and on the edges nearest to the train tracks they put the date,
how many Jews were deported and where they went. When they started deporting
Jews we could see that they sent around 30 Jews at a time and for the last few
deportations they sent around 18-21 but in the middle there were groups that
ranged from 100 to about 1700 Jews sent to Theresienstadt and then to Auschwitz
or sent directly to Auschwitz. There were also some Jews sent to be shot in the
woods in Riga.
After we went to the deportation site we went to Haus der
Wannseekonferenz. The Haus der Wannseekonferenz is where people met over
breakfast to plan for the Holocaust. The house has been turned into an exhibit
for the Holocaust. There were a lot of really interesting charts and maps in
the house. They showed what percentage of Jews were taken from European
countries, and a lot of other statistics for the countries.
Next we had lunch in a Turkish restaurant in the train
station on our way to a couple of palaces in Potsdam.
The first palace we went to was at Schloss Cecilienhof. The
house was built for Crown Prince Wilhelm of Germany and his wife to be,
Cicilie. This house was where the Potsdam Conference took place, Josef Stalin,
Winston Churchill, and Harry S. Truman. They wrote up the Potsdam Declaration,
which defined the terms of the Japanese surrender. The house felt very comfy
and homey, the opposite of what the next palace felt like.
The next palace we went to was Sans Souci, which was the
home of Frederick the Great. The entire house felt like a museum but it also
felt really gaudy. Everything was plated in gold and over decorated. The
outside was painted gold. The grounds were really pretty though. They were very
green and there were a lot of trees and there was a really big pond out of the
front doors that had a lot of birds in it. 
After Sans Souci we went to a Swiss Buffet for dinner and
then walked back to the hotel to enjoy the rest of the night.
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