Bergen Belsen was a displaced persons camp for five years after the war. Now it's a British military base, a launch point for units deploying to Afghanistan and Iraq. Before it became a concentration camp, the Nazi's used this massive state of the art training facility to roll out Wermacht units. 
With our flights grounded by the eruption, our hotel reservations expired and furthermore trumped by the attendees to Messe, a 13 tech trade show monster convention, our group was shuttled to the only decent hotel that wasn't fully booked, located on the outskirts of Hanover. Goodbye posh digs. Everyone anxiously waited for seats on jets, so I started making jokes about how Germany would have to reopen Bergen Belsen. That way all us Hebrews would have a place to stay if the clouds over the ocean stopped us from going home for a while like the media was forecasting. Ashes and Jews, it made for a macabre association. I got lots of laughs for that joke and I really milked it. I think I told it to almost everyone I could find who spoke English.
We walked past Bergen Belsen's memorials, encountering mass burial mounds numbered by their estimated body counts. Jenny and I visited her old barracks in in the DP camp, went into the old building and knocked at the door of her old room. A British soldier lived their now. Jenny looked uncharacteristically disoriented as she rejoined me and the Brit historians guiding us through the camp. She told me stories of my dad's post war smuggling days, when all the boys lived wild and crazy, as black marketeers, lost souls hunting for revenge and renewal.
Berlin was brilliant. I loved it. I want to move there. The art scene is fresh and the city feels alive There are so many young people and it's really energetic. I saw some great shows. They have incredible museums and on the weekend I went there, the city was quiet with hardly any traffic. A nice place to walk for miles. On the bullet train from Hanover, we stopped half-way because the driver had spotted a herd of miniature deer by the tracks. Everyone, even the drunk soccer fans, watched mesmerized. One tiny deer got lost behind a secondary fence adjacent to the tracks. We watched him run up and down frantically looking for a way out, the herd waiting restlessly. Finally after five minutes of this, he was free and they all took off away across a field and into a small forest. The young Japanese couple I woke to see this, thanked me profusely with lots of bows. They said it was the highlight of their trip to Europe. It was magical.
