IWM

Today was the Imperial War Museum.
It was fantastic, or as fantastic as a building dedicated to war can be.
I was a little disappointed that Australia wasn’t mentioned terribly much

Part of the Berlin Wall

There was an electronic registrar of deaths so I searched Barge, not really expecting anything to show up (great, great uncle fred fought in the war but didn’t die fighting)

to my surprise there was a Barge, William who died in 1918 and he’s buried in France so we might have to pay him a visit.
As strange as it sounds reading about William Barge made me feel really homesick and also disappointed that I had no one to share it with.
-I’ll call Grandpa later tonight and share my excitement with him (they conveniently arrived home from their european cruise yesterday)

Better Pot -Luck with Churchill today than humble pie under Hitler tomorrow.

The holocaust display in the museum is huge, unfortunately you can't take photos inside.

I spent hours inside it.

as you walked through the very dark exhibit you also followed stories of Jewish survivors.
The facts and figures were horrifying but nothing compared to the stories these elderly people told, remembering when they were taken from their mothers, never to see them again, when they arrived at the concentration camps and then finding out the truth about the camps and the bellowing smoke from the giant chimneys.

here are a few:

a woman told the story of when it she first realised how serious it all was:

It was a rule that if a jew was passing a policeman they had to leave the footpath and walk on the road, the woman telling the story did, but her friend did not and was shot in the head then and there. (she was a young girl at the time)

one survivor we telling that after the war the town he was from searched for all of the survivors and invited them back, many others obliged to the invitation and were treated like royalty but he said that he couldn’t bear to be there and see other older Germans and think, which camp did you work on, or see them wearing gold jewelry and think, that they could have gotten that from the gold in his parents teeth.

it doesn’t matter how many times I study into the holocaust, every time is just as confronting as the first.

I did learn something interesting though, irrelevant to the holocaust, but Elvis was conscripted in 1958 and served in Germany ha

I walked home to drop off my ridiculously heavy bag and then headed for the strip of supermarkets in search of Vegemite for Luani.

NOWHERE HAD ANY! but tomorrow I’ll head into the city centre and track some down for you Lu!

ps apparently there’s an Australian store ha I’m so excited to find it!