Seeing Inna and Alex!

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Bergen-Belsen

January 1 - 4
I spent much of New Year's Day on an ICE train and we topped out at 251 km per hour. I spent the last few days of my break with Inna, who worked at camp with me this summer, and her husband Alex in the small town of Hermansburg. It was a really relaxing time which was really nice. On the 2nd we went into Celle which was a cute little town with a lot of really old buildings. What is really cool about the buildings is that they were all decorated and many had a Bible verse as well as the date that they were built painted on them.
On the third we took a very cold, long walk to Muden for tea. It was like 10 km round trip and although it was a really pretty walk it got a bit cold. And it was dark by the time we got back to Hermansburg. But for dinner that night we went to Inna and Alex's friend's, Toby's. He made wonderful pasta and sauce with peppers in it. Then we had ice cream for dessert. It was a really fun evening.
On the morning of the 4th we went to Bergen-Belsen which was different from the other two concentration camps that I had been to. There was nothing left of the original camp. It was all fields and trees. The only thing that is visible is a chapel, a monument, the mass graves, and symbolic tombstones. There was also a museum which was very interesting because Bergen-Belsen was a POW camp for most of the war and it wasn't until 1943 that it was used as a concentration camp. There was also an exhibit on Anne Frank because that was where she had died. It was a very moving exhibit. I think that it was a bit of shock that there was really nothing left of the camp. It was not what I was expecting at all. That afternoon we discovered that my train did not leave from Hamburg but Lubeck so I needed to head out that evening instead of the next morning.

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Photos

Celle
Church in Celle

Celle
Shop fronts

Celle
The Celle Castle

Celle
Um . . . yeah

Walk
Germany or Minnesota?

Walk
Snowing!

Mission
Alex and Inna's school

Bergen-Belsen
All that is left of the camp

Comments

[Curtis Makela]

Germany or Minnesota?
That's a tough one.