The week following our Italy/Croatia trip was pretty busy. The kids went back to school and Monday, Carissa to work and Rick, Sandy and I went to the laundromat. The kids had a science fair coming up so Monday and Tuesday night were spent getting ready. Elise's project was trying to determine which juice contained the most vitamin C between lemon, orange, cranberry, apple and Hi-C. Lydia's was to figure out which M&M color melted the fastest. They did a great job and both ended up winning first place for their grade.
Conducting Experiments
1st Place!
On Tuesday I took Rick and Sandy to the Flossenburg concentration camp. It's a "small" camp about 20 minutes from our house with a very nice museum. You can also walk the grounds. What struck me about this camp was it was literally surrounded by the town of Flossenburg. It was primarily a labor camp (as opposed to an extermination camp), and intially the prisoners were used to quarry granite for Hitler's many constuction projects and later in armaments production. The camp housed mainly political prisoners, itellectuals, criminals and social deviants as well as Jews. Basically anyone who questioned the Nazi's or weren't in the plans for their master race. Among the 30,000 that died there - mainly from exhaustion, as the Nazi's literally worked the prisoners to death, the most famous was probably Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Toward the end of the war, 22,000 Flossenburg prisoners were led on a "death march" in an attempt to move them to Dachau, and 7000 had either been shot for not keeping up or died from exhaustion by the end of the march When the Allies liberated the camp, 1600 prisoners were found who were left behind because they were too sick to walk. This was my first trip to a concentration camp and it was very disturbing obviously. I felt weird about taking pictures, but if you want to see what the camp looked like this link has some good pictures -
http://thirdreichruins.com/flossenburg.htm
The following day Rick and Sandy took a day trip to Reinheim, Germany where Sandy's father had served in the Army at the end of the war. He was a part of a cleanup effort and stayed in the Baron's mansion in the center of town. Sandy had brought along a postcard of the mansion that her dad had saved from the war and was planning on trying to find it. When they got to town they were dissapointed to find that the Tourist Information office was closed. Outside the building Sandy approached a German man and showed him the postcard and asked if the man knew where the building was. He took a long look at the postcard, thought for a minute and then started walking away. Rick and Sandy followed him around the corner of the TI building and then he stopped and pointed at what turned out to be the Baron's mansion. From the looks of it the mansion has been converted into apartments
Baron's Mansion
Thursday I took Rick, Sandy and Haaken down to Regensburg. It was a perfect day and I basically took them to all our favorite spots. Rick really liked the sausages and sauerkraut.
Hungry Men
Happy German
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