The Kimberley School Newsletter October 2015 | Page 7

2015

there was time to take in the quite new memorial
he murdered Sinti and Roma and check out the
morial stones to Communist and democrat
icians persecuted by the National Socialists. We
our appointment to enter the restored German
ament, taking the lift up to the roof terrace, with
option of winding your way up the glass dome for
r more spectacular views of this city. As dusk fell,
e was time to stroll over to the Brandenburg Gate
some Dunkin’ Donuts before taking our seats on
river bank for the open-air film show about the
man parliament, projected with some sound and
ing effects onto the façade of a new parliament
ding across the river, all making for a great
osphere with hundreds of people watching and
es of people carousing on the passing boats.
de the hour, we would tiptoe back inside our youth
el. Sunday we were at the Grunewald Station for
m, scene of Berlin’s deportations to ghettoes and
centration camps and now home to some honest
sobering memorials. Then into the city and the
in Wall memorial on Bernauer Straße, so many
gs to see there, the window of remembrance
er Fechter et al again), escape tunnels, Conrad
umann, the excavated basements of houses
cked down when the Wall was built, a section of
Wall itself, the new chapel (replacing the Gothic
rch which the East Germans blew up in 1985)
the short film and animation about the Wall in the
ors’ centre. I nipped into Nordbahnhof S-Bahn
ion to get the tickets for Monday, glancing at the
to exhibition of the ghost stations of the Cold War
od, Nordbahnhof had been one such station.
drove via East Side Gallery and Karl-Marx-Allee
all its Stalinist architecture to the truly Stalinist
ptower Park Soviet Soldiers’ War Memorial in
pest former East Berlin for our picnic lunch, then
north to Oranienburg for a tour of Sachsenhausen
centration camp, one of the first three major camps

in Germany along with Buchenwald and Dachau.
Stalin’s son was held captive here. In two of the blocks
the Nazis forged British bank notes in an operation
called Bernhard (see film The Counterfeiters). More
generally this was the scene of torture, mass murder,
human rights abuses on a grand scale…what we saw
and heard in Sachsenhausen was stirring stuff. The
tone lightened after our last evening meal, as we met
up for the pub-style quiz on all aspects of the trip,
Lawrence and his group being the worthy winners
and all groups being fooled by the name Zachary in
the wipe-out round, and then for the world premiere of
Mr Wharmby’s masterpiece, a movie he had
painstakingly compiled since the first evening; this
was received very warmly by the group, allowing
us to remember the many special personalities and
moments of the trip. Outside again, it was ultimately
the music of DJ Elliott which brought the curtain down
on the trip, rocking us into the night with his wellchosen tracks, as the waters of the lake lapped at our
feet for the final time. There was more on Monday,
we went to see the workshop of Otto Weidt, a blind
manufacturer of brushes and brooms who employed
and protected blind, deaf and Jewish people, a kind
of microcosmic Oskar Schindler. We also had a brief
tour of the surrounding Jewish district before having
some final lunch and shopping time around Zoo
Station and the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in
the always commercialised West part of the city.
It was a pleasure to take this group of students to
Berlin, many thanks to all of them for their effortless
joie de vivre (and Reuben for being my adjutant)
and to the many colleagues who assisted us, and
most especially to Mr Wharmby, Ms Gungaram and
Ms Walter for their constant care of the group, technical
wizardry and wonderful banter (whatever that
word means).
Mr Vinter