Monday, October 3, 2011

3 of 3: Berlin's Rosenstrausse

Dearest friends,

When Kristin and I got to Berlin, we had a huge checklist of things we wanted to see.

One thing that was REALLY important to Kristin was seeing Rosenstrausse.

After wandering around for about 30 minutes and thinking that some fancy restaurants were built on top of Rosenstrausse, we finally came across this beauty of a sign:


When Kristin was in high school and college, she did a report and a speech on a protest that was held on this street. During World War II, there were many Jewish husbands that were taken away from their non-Jewish wives for deportation. Some, in fact, had been deported already to Auschwitz.

Instead of staying silent about their husbands' deportation, the non-Jewish wives protested. They stood outside the building where their husbands were being held and during the week that they demanded their husbands be released, nearly 6,000 wives, relatives and friends showed up to protest.

Since the Nazis didn't want the news of the protest to spread (bad for propaganda, of course), they decided to release the men back to their wives. Even the men who were already deported were pulled from their concentration camps and reunited with their wives.

You go, girls.

Here's Kristin finally seeing the memorial she had seen so many times in pictures while doing her reports:



Since the memorial was in German, Kristin whipped out her iPhone so she could relay some of the stories about the protest to me.

She was my own personal tour guide!



Just one sight of many!

More stories to come soon!

xoxo

2 comments: