Friday, October 2.

No sleep in this morning. On the bus into town. We were off to the Jewish Museum.  Saw this old bus outside the museum.

 The museum not only highlights their oppression during WWII, but also the preceding 2,000 years.  They were even blamed for the Black Death plague, accused of provisioning the water supplies. 

It conveys the cultures and history of Jews in Germany, the first Jewish communities on the Rhine, sweeping cultural changes during the European Enlightment, struggles for social equality, the profound rupture of the Holocaust, legal attempts to process the murder of European Jews, and the present day situations in Germany. 

Jewish counting table.   
The museum, an amazing structure in itself, with sloping floors and no square rooms continually reminds you that they never had it easy.  

   
The memorial garden outside is square, but with a sloping floor fourty nine, one metre square pillars, seven metres high with Russian Olive Willow trees planted on the top. 

   
The most haunting was the memory void where there is a permanent exhibition in place Shalekhet, Fallen Leaves, by Israeli artist, Menashe Kadishman. It is thousands of 25mm steel plate circles in varying diameters, in the forms of faces. The void is cement walls all around and twenty five metres tall. People are able to walk on the discs and the noise sounds like people crying out or screaming. Quite soul searching and mind numbing.  

 Visiting here was a necessity, as tomorrow we were heading for Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Leaving the museum, after six hours, we walked toward Check Point Charlie where we would catch the Metro. Found a lovely restaurant nearby so decided to have dinner before heading back to Myrtle.  

    
 This had been a very informative and thought provoking day, readying us for what lay ahead.