knitting for the trenches

I was poking around on google today trying to figure out how to do this one knitting thing, when I came across this - a 1917 New York Times article explaining what soldiers and sailors need in the way of knitted garments. It includes such useful advice as "If one does not know how to 'purl,' experts at Red Cross organizations and in the department stores, or experienced knitters anywhere, will be glad to explain the simple stitches." It sounds so useful, being asked to knit wool garments for the war effort.

my people! what's the haps!

OAM friend Dahvay sent me this link to an internet comic that you should read RIGHT NOW. Put your knowledge of cultural and historic figures to use! For giggles! And let me know if you understand the ones about Canadian politics, so I can be impressed!

photography, but not new photography

Lookit, E.C. found a cool old-photo blog.

Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas

This is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe - it's commonly referred to as the Holocaust Memorial, but there are separate memorials (or plans to build them) for other groups of victims.

It's a full block of giant cement rectangles, on undulating ground and at various heights. At the edges they're a few inches high; as you walk to the middle, they're several feet over your head. It's on prime real estate a block from the Brandenburg Gate.

I frankly didn't get much out of the above-ground part of the memorial - both times I was there, European teenagers were chasing each other around the blocks. The underground museum, though, is powerful. The shapes of the blocks above extend through the ceiling and tell some of the personal stories. Then there's one room where a recording tells the stories of people who died; there isn't enough known about most people to talk about, but they say if they did tell each victim's story, at this rate it would take nearly seven years to finish.

Going to Auschwitz was awful, but this was the place that made the Holocaust most real. It's important to me to understand the geography of events, and through the room at the memorial that showed photos and maps and explanations of different concentration camps (and mass murders outside of concentration camps) - the ones you've heard of and many more you haven't - I put it all together in my head. It wasn't pleasant.

kazimierz

Krakow's Jewish community was almost entirely wiped out in the war. (This is where the events in Schindler's List happened - actually a bit outside of town, I think.) Here are some pictures of the old Jewish cemetery near Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter:

concentration camp

I haven't posted in a couple of days because I've been putting off blogging about Auschwitz. It was horrible. I didn't think at the time it affected me that much, but it got worse and worse over the next two weeks. Anyway, here are some pictures.


The "Arbeit Macht Frei" gate was at the entrance to Auschwitz I, the first camp set up in the Polish town of Oświęcim. It looked nothing like I imagined - it was all solid brick buildings and a very small area. And if I remember correctly, people there died primarily from starvation. (Although many were executed, and it's also the camp where Joseph Mengele did his medical experiments.) The prisoners were forced laborers at German-owned factories nearby. The exterminations were at a different camp, Auschwitz II or Auschwitz-Birkenau, which was built later a few kilometers away.

It was raining pretty hard the day I was there, and it was the very beginning of March, and there were still a lot of people. Most people were in tour groups. I was glad I saw it by myself. Leaving the fenced-in area of the camp:


This next picture is the entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Nazis destroyed most of the camp when they retreated. This camp is where the large-scale exterminations took place.


In the next picture: Those rail lines brought people in. On the bare patch where the rail lines split, that's the ramp where the "selections" took place - where the Nazis decided who would live and who would go straight to the gas chambers.


Beyond those fences (below, looking across the ramp) were once rows and rows of barracks. Birkenau is vast, over 400 acres.

Ruins of a gas chamber and crematorium at Auschwitz-Birkenau:

Over a million people died at the Auschwitz camps, the vast majority of them Jews. Here's the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's entry on Auschwitz.

not so old town

Check out the central square in Warsaw's old town. Looks like a nice little square from a few hundred years ago, doesn't it?

Well, it's not. Warsaw got destroyed during the second world war, the old town included. After the war, the government used photographs and detailed plans of the old town to reconstruct it; everything looks old, even from up close, but it dates from the 40s to the 60s. On the one hand, this means the old town is a big old fake - but it's also kind of cool that they put that much effort into reconstructing their history.

I was in Warsaw for less than 24 hours. The coolest sight, which for some reason I took no pictures of, was the museum of the Warsaw Uprising (for reasons that are unclear, they call it the Warsaw Rising Museum). It's a huge new museum with great exhibits, lots of photos and documents and videos and whatnot.

The Warsaw Uprising, not to be confused with the earlier Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, was toward the end of the war. The Nazis were about to leave and the Red Army was coming from the other direction. So Poland was like, ok, if we don't establish our own government right this second, we're going to be overrun by the Soviets. (It didn't work out.)

(The Ghetto Uprising didn't succeed, either. Read about the Warsaw ghetto here and the uprising here.)

church of reconciliation

The Church of Reconciliation was built on Bernauer Straße in the late 19th century. It happened to be on the south side of the street, so when the border closed, the church was in the east. Most of the congregation just happened to be in the west, and eventually no one was allowed to go there from either side. For decades it sat in the death strip and border guards went around it, but in 1985 the East German government did this:



Which, I mean, talk about your terrible PR. Everybody could see that happening, idiots.

This is the church that is there now:


It's really lovely, made mostly of wood and packed earth. They have a service every weekday in honor of one of the people who died trying to escape.

die berliner Mauer

S.Ev's apartment is about a block away from one of the most interesting stretches of the Berlin Wall. When the East German government closed the border between East and West Berlin in 1961, they did it overnight. Generally they put up barbed wire, but along this stretch of Bernauer Straße, the facades of the apartment buildings were the border.

In those first few days, a bunch of people jumped out their windows - people on the West Berlin side were catching them with blankets and mattresses. After a month or two, the East bricked up the windows, then finally tore down the buildings.

The main Wall memorial is along Bernauer Straße - there's a little museum with pictures and history and some news video of those escapes. (Craziest one: a grandma already most of the way out of her window, but with East German police pulling her back in while West Germans are pulling her out. She made it out.) They've also reconstructed part of the wall:



This is the view from the west - the wall was way more than just the big famous concrete blocks that face the west. There's another wall facing the east, and there's the death strip in the middle. Border guards shot to kill, although some people argue they weren't all that careful about their aim. But still, more than 200 people died trying to escape over the Berlin Wall. (Many more died along the main border between East and West Germany.)