Miss Morrison has been in touch with the latest news from our school trip to Germany & Poland:

Day 2

Students started the day by visiting Sachsenhausen concentration camp on the outskirts of Berlin. Students saw where inmates were kept in the barracks, including Martin Niemoller, a Lutheran pastor who opposed the regime and who famously wrote the poem “First they came…” about the Nazis’ destruction of their opponents. While Niemoller survived the camp, many did not – either through malnutrition and exhaustion, abuse, or on the death march when the camp was evacuated as the Allied troops approached Berlin. Students found this camp very interesting, and commented that it was still hard to understand why people would participate in this horrific event.

We then visited the Stasi museum. This is held in the original Stasi offices in Berlin, and students were able to see the original offices as they would have looked when they were last occupied in 1990. We also saw exhibitions of the technology they used to spy on the citizens of East Germany, including button cameras and wire taps hidden in doors. One of our tour guides revealed that he had been observed by the Stasi as a teenager due to a “friend” reporting on his actions.

Following this, we visited the German Market and did some shopping before walking through more of Berlin to get to dinner – we even saw the square in which the Nazis would hold their book burnings. After dinner, we got to go bowling and then we all loaded onto the coach to drive overnight to Kraków.