Day 24, March 23.

As Katja [Symons] put it, “What a great day of inspiration, culture and insight!”

After a counseling session in the morning where I may have seen a tiny glimmer of hope within severe depression, I met Katja back at the shoe box and we went to tour Berlin.

Our first stop was in a queue line to see if we could get up into a huge modern dome above the old parliament building. Katja had already been told it would not be possible to get in this day, but we decided not to believe it, and the waters parted for us when a tour bus cancelled and we got right in.A very strange, compelling structure kind of set up like a three dimensional labyrinth (it just occurred to me now).

Then it was off to see the monument to the Jews murdered by the Nazis, which was even a stranger structure made up of large, different sized blocks and pathways that said nothing, until we discovered it went underground to a museum; then it all made sense.

The museum was very moving, especially when I found a woman in the Shoah archive named Berta Block from Vilna, to whom I may have been related, as all of the Blocks from Vilna on my grandmother’s mother’s side who didn’t escape were murdered there.

Then we were off to see the last remnants of the Berlin Wall—that other astonishing monument to oppression—which, we discovered, was also attached to the “Topography of Terror” museum (I may not remember the first word right, but something like that), the remnants of the old Gestapo headquarters, which traced the rise and fall of the Nazis.

What really got to us was how many hundreds of thousands of people it took to keep this entire brutal system alive, torturing and starving and murdering people in the worst possible way. So it wasn’t only Hitler and the rest of his close cronies, and its tentacles reached into most other European countries. The worst possible thoughts of humankind, believed.

Another moving moment was when I found the tentacle that reached into Minsk, Russia, near where, if the Pransky family had not escaped before the Nazis got there, it occurred to me that I would never have even been here, never been born, and neither would George [Pransky], and neither would Aaron Turner.  An entire system built up slowly, tightening the screws little by little until the horrors couldn’t even be imagined, all propelled by fear.