We were all able to visit the temple while we were in Freiberg, Germany. It was a great experience. I was able to play the piano in the chapel next door for a bit. They had a grand piano so I was excited to play.
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The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Temple in Freiberg, Germany |
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| The group |
We drove to Berlin and on the way had to take a mandatory half hour stop for our bus driver. During our half hour we were able to get out of the bus and play Ultimate Frisbee! It was so fun! The team I was on dominated the other team. It felt so good to be up and running around. Once we arrived in Berlin we went to the Checkpoint Charlie Museum. We learned about different ways people escaped across the Berlin Wall. Some people are so creative! We also got to see a place where a Gestapo office was located. It was mostly destroyed, but the foundations and part of the basement are still there and were made in to a museum. It talks all about the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich. It was super interesting. We then climbed on the bus again and were brought to our hotel. I was overjoyed when I realized that our hotel was within eyeshot of where I stayed in Berlin in July! I was back in my part of town!
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| At Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin! |
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| In front of the Berlin Wall near an old Gestapo office. |
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| Cool looking clouds! |
We visited several important places in church history in Berlin. We visited a spot in the Tiergarten where the mission office was located. It was destroyed during an air raid in World War II. The whole street was destroyed so it is now covered in trees. We also went to Plötzensee Prison where Helmuth Hübener was murdered by the Nazis in 1942. It was quite the sobering experience. He was only 17 when he was killed.
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The room Helmuth Hübener was executed in.
From the time he entered the room until the time he was killed was 18 seconds. |
Later I walked from the Brandenburger Tor (Brandenburg Gate) to our hotel on Karl-Liebknecht Straße. It was relaxing to walk alone passed buildings I knew well. I made a detour on the way and visited the Alte Nationalgalerie so I could see my favorite paintings by Caspar David Friedrich and other artists. I bought a decorative plate of Berlin. I’m excited to have it because this city has become important to me. I also ended up buying a hat and a bag while in Berlin.
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| Brandenburger Tor! |
As a group we visited the Reichstag and got to climb to the top of the Siegessäule. It was cool to see in all directions from the top of the tower. It was very windy and cold, but worth the long climb to the top. We then walked to where Hitler’s bunker once was. It no longer exists, but it is where Hitler died. We walked around the monument to the murdered Jews of Europe. I don’t understand the symbolism of the blocks. One girl in my group commented that it was hard for her not to want to play hide and go seek in the memorial because it was so abstract.
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| Reichstag |
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| Siegessäule |
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| The view from the Siegessäule...(Reichstag, Fernsehturm, Berliner Dom, Branderburger Tor, Rotes Rathaus etc.) |
After dinner I led everyone to Hackescher Markt. We met up with Bishop Bartsch and his wife. They showed us around the Hackesche Höfe. It is interesting that the Höfe exist and you wouldn’t even know it unless you were super curious or were ‘in the know’.
We went to the Gesundbrunen U-Bahn station and climbed a nearby flak tower. We then took a tour of a bunker under the U-Bahn station. We got to see a bunch of rooms and some artifacts they had found. It was interesting to see a type of paint that glowed after it was exposed to light. It was only used in some rooms so it the lights went out the others would be completely in the dark. We also got to see an old enigma which was used during the war to encode messages.
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| WWII era Enigma |
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| Other artifacts... |
I showed a few people around the University and St. Hedwigs. We also went to Marienkirche so they could see the “totentanz”. We then bought Döners from the store near Hackescher Markt I went to a lot when I lived in Berlin. The Döner tasted amazing! Döners in Berlin are way better than the ones they sell in Vienna.
We stayed the night in a town called Forst near the Polish border. Ten of us stayed at a place called Gasthaus zum Grünen Baum. We had Schnitzel and French fries for dinner.
The next day we focused on church history. We visited an old pedestrian bridge in Forst which was destroyed during WWII so it wouldn’t be used by the invading Russians. We got to go to Poland for a few minutes. We then drove to Brno, Czech Republic. On the way we watched “Five Pennies” and “Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince”. “Five Pennies” is a movie from 1959 starring Danny Kaye.
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| The whole group and our bus driver! |
We went to church in Brno so we had the missionaries translate for us again. We were a little better at singing the hymns in Czech the second time around because we practiced last week. After church we drove to Burgenland where our bus driver lives. As we were driving we could see Bratislava from a distance. We stopped so we could walk across the border between Austria and Slovakia. He must have liked us a lot because he bought us all a Schnitzel dinner. He said that in his thirty years as a bus driver he had never done that before. After dinner he drove us home to Vienna. He was so nice. We were all glad he was our driver for both of our trips.
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