With a very early start to the days program, the day began.
We dragged ourselves to breakfast where we also had to prepare our personal lunches, to take them with us for our field trip. The group got a chance to become famous by being joined by members of the media (RBB) who were making a story about the Rainbow Project for TV.
In the limited time the working group managed to paint remaining beams. The kitchen group finished the preparations for dinner and cleaned the whole house. Deep Conversations about conflicts took place in the culture group and the public group prepared a devotion for Friday morning.
After a sleepy drive we arrived at Sachsenhausen and got a short introduction about the history of that place. Sachsenhausen was a former concentration camp for the Nazi Regime. 200 000 people were kept there, suffered there and often died.
We got a guided tour through the facilities, which are used as a memorial today. Coming there with different perspectives made walking around in the area into a very intense experience in our mixed group. It left all of us with the question how human kind could have done something horrible like this.
Afterwards Professor Morsch helped us with questions, which led to an honest conversation between the Arabic and Jewish Israelis, who shared their emotions and pain with us and with each other.
The group participated in a ceremony of memorial and hope, organized by the public group of the day before. Each of us got a wooden chip from our rainbow building site. We left them there on the tombstones. They shall be a sign that violence does not remain forever. But maybe the softness of the song we sang, “peace be upon you and me and everybody else” does still flow over the space of destruction and dead. Our hope for a future that changes the circle of history.
Our journey back was punctured by burst tyre of the leading mini bus. So we deserted the car, Abe and Rolf at high way (eventually meeting again one day…) and returned home.
We had fabulous Lasagne again. Afterwards the Isralien Group decided to meet again to continue their discussions on their emotions. They eventually came to the conclusion that if we want to work for peace, it is important to put yourself in the other persons shoes and share their feelings of pain.
In the morning there was also a movieteam from rbb who visited us and produced an interesting clip for their news:
http://mediathek.rbb-online.de/tv/suche?searchText=nahost#/tv/rbb-AKTUELL/Nahost-Projekt-auf-der-BUGA/rbb-Fernsehen/Video?documentId=29941494&topRessort=tv&bcastId=3907840