About History in Berlin

On November 20-22, the DP2 historical group together with history teacher Marta Wierzbicka-Kotte visited Berlin for scientific purposes.

On the first day, they toured around Berlin dating back to the Cold War. They walked in the footsteps of the divided city, visited the Stasi museum, the former headquarters of the Ministry of Public Security, and the Palace of Tears, a check-in hall for people leaving the GDR for West Berlin, operating in the years 1962-1990.

On the second day, they explored Berlin in the footsteps of the Third Reich. They saw Hermann Goering’s monumental Ministry of Aviation built in 1933 (now the Federal Ministry of Finance), the Topography of Terror center, where the Gestapo, its prison, the SS command, the SS security service and the Reich Main Security Office were located in 1933-1945.

In the second part of the day, they visited places commemorating the victims of the Third Reich (Jewish communities, homosexual communities, Roma, Sinti) and Neue Wache that is the Central Memorial Site of the Federal Republic of Germany, inside which an enlarged copy of a sculpture titled Mother with her dead son by  Käthe Kollwitz has been standing since 1993. The original sculpture was created to commemorate the artist’s eighteen-year-old son, who died in Flanders during World War I.

All participants of the expedition to the dark past happily returned to modern Warsaw.

(text: Beata Ciacek, cooperation: Marta Wierzbicka – Kotte; photos: Marta Wierzbicka – Kotte and author unknown)