As we explored the city this weekend, the highlights included:
meeting a ton of wonderful people and learning all about their lives (that was probably, as always, my overall favorite thing)...
a neat, artsy, hipster outdoor market...
stopping at Starbucks every time the weather was bringing us down, which was nice because there are actually a good number of Starbucks in Berlin, as opposed to zero in Maastricht...
an adorable carnival thing with cute shops and all (where I got delicious chocolate-covered-Strawberries)...
having a wonderful girls night with Kristin, Jaime, and Sydney...
the artsy part of the Berlin Wall, called the East Gallery, where artists paint murals on the wall in remembrance of the terrible past that should lead us to never repeat our mistakes and as a reminder that everyone deserves freedom, justice, and love, so we need to stand up for what is right...
delicious bratwursts everywhere all the time and delicious Asian food when not eating bratwurst (I know, not what you would expect, but Asian fast food was everywhere and so good)...
and finally the greatest chocolate shop I have ever been in, full of delicious German chocolate, a chocolate making museum exhibit, and a chocolate restaurant (I spent more money there than anywhere else I went this weekend.)
I loved wandering around Berlin and finding happy pieces of the city to enjoy, but the respect and remembrance of the past that the people thankfully hold onto makes it impossible to avoid the sadness of the city as well. In ways I would have never imagined affecting me like it did, I got to witness the rich history of World War II.
I have never been into history in school or anything, so, coming into this weekend, I really only knew enough about World War II to survive AP US history in high school, which is a pretty American-biased class anyways. I didn't really have a grasp of what happened from the european perspective.
Needless to say, after checking out Checkpoint Charlie (the crossing point of the Berlin Wall), I spent a ton of time in the Topography of Terror, reading all about what exactly happened in Germany only 70 years ago, and, boy, did it break my heart.
The hardest part for me was thinking about the German people who somehow ended up being brainwashed into following Hitler, stuck in a war that was boosting their economy, with terrible things happening under the beautiful veil that Hitler so carefully laid over many average people's eyes who didn't dig deep enough to find the truth. It's sad to imagine an entire population of people, the majority of whom claim to be Christians, believing that certain people should be removed from society simply because they are different.
Saturday afternoon, Jaime joined Kristin and I as we took an hour long trip outside of the city to Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, which had the most powerful impact on me, probably of everything I've done so far in Europe. 
Note: feel free to skip this paragraph if you don't want unpleasant images in your mind. Just go right on to the next one.
I stood in a room looking down at basin for washing, that for years was crowded with desperate, cold, dying, innocent people, fighting for access to a few drips of freezing water, for only half an hour a day when they were allowed to wash. For the other 23.5 hours each day, the basin could be used as a place for prisoners to be drowned, if the police felt like it. Right where I stood, less than a hundred years ago, a dying man was kneeling with his head forcefully shoved underwater. Then, another prisoner was instructed to carry the dead body to the cellar, and throw it on top of the piles and piles of the other dead. If a prisoner misbehaved, he was tortured by a fellow prisoner. They believed in creating a hierarchy of the people in the camp and putting them in charge of one another to keep them from banding together. The torturer was possibly a prisoner of war who was in the concentration camp because he tried to help save jews, or possibly a jew who was in the camp because of the family he was born into. Whoever it was, both the torturer and the tortured were trapped to their death within those towering walls with absolutely no hope of coming out alive. If they were a part of the small group liberated in the end, the experience was too painful for them to even celebrate their freedom.
Every room felt like that. Every little piece of plastic explaining what happened in each location told a different story of terror, disgust, hurt, and hell. It completely broke me down. Just thinking about it makes me sick to my stomach again now. I won't torture you with anymore terrible details, but I will tell you that I will never see history, or humankind, or the world around me the same way after being the the place where that happened.
The world is full of evil. Of course, there is also goodness, but we cannot deny the evil. There are terrible injustices in the world today; in many parts of the world, people are still tortured and killed through things like human trafficking, as they were in the concentration camps 70 years ago. It is so good that Germany does not ignore its past mistakes, and the people don't forget this war so that they don't repeat this in the future. We also cannot ignore the current state of the world. I want to do everything I can to save people. That's all there is to it. Witnessing this suffering makes me want to scream to the world that there is freedom in Christ, that God came to earth to so that we can spend eternity in paradise because He loves us, that this fact is just as historically true as the painful truth of World War II.
Everyone deserves freedom, love, and justice. I believe this can only happen through Christ. I don't know exactly how I can get involved in saving people from injustice, but I am going to figure it out and do what I can.
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