Steel Vintage Bikes: Awesome Cafe in Berlin

Steel Vintage Bikes in Berlin is a café decorated with steel racing bikes from the second half of the 20^th Century. They also roast their own beans. When I walked in on a rainy evening, they had just finished roasting Rwandan beans.  I had a double espresso and walked around the café snapping pictures.  I brought home a bag of their coffee.  

Visit to Buchenwald Concentration Camp: Russian Prisoners of War

For the past ten centuries, the worst fate a person in Europe could suffer was to be born a Jew or a Russian.  For those thousand years Jews were targets of persecution wherever they were. Ordinary Russians, for nearly a thousand years, were effectively slaves. Within two decades of their emancipation in 1863, Tsarist repression began again. Russians were killed. And a million Jews were killed in pogroms at the end of the 19th Century by the same Tsarist government.

Then Russian peasants revolted in 1917.  What could be worse than being slaughtered by Germans in World War I and the rule of the Tsar?  Communism.
Millions of Russians were killed by Stalin during his 30 years of rule.

In World War II, Russian soldiers fought bravely and eventually beat the Nazi Army.  But the Russian soldiers captured by the Nazis were treated as untermensch sub human.  At the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, the museum records the fate of Russian POWs. Many were executed and disposed of in mass graves or a crematorium.

In one of the saddest moments of a very sad visit, I saw the container below.  Nazi executioners dumped the bodies of Russian soldiers in a box lined with zinc for disposal.  The sad moment came from reading a book called Zinky Boys by Svetlana Alexievich. Fifty years after World War II, the Soviet Union shipped those killed in the War in Afghanistan home in sealed zinc coffins.

Alexievich, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature for her writing on the Chernobyl disaster, compiled an oral history of the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the suffering of soldiers and families.

When I saw slaughtered POWs were dumped into zinc bins, I thought of zinc the coffins the Soviets used, and zinc trash cans--zinc keeps trash cans from rusting.

Everyone brings their own experiences into a museum.  My knowledge of Russian history added a new dimension of horror to my experience of visiting the camp.

Of course, none of the horrors perpetrated by the Soviets in any way diminish the atrocities of the Nazis.  The Nazis slaughtered Russian POWs based on race, just as they slaughtered Jews and others for the same reason.

Mount Bental and a Battle That Saved Israel in 1973

The trenches on the Mount Bental Outpost

The Yom Kippur War in 1973 was arguably the last real full-scale armored war.  The American wars in Iraq in 1991 and 2003 were so lopsided in armor and ground attack aircraft that they could hardly be called armored warfare.
 The overwhelming triumph of the Israeli Army in the Six-Day war in 1967 led to terrible complacency in 1973.  The Israeli Army very nearly lost the war in fierce fighting both in the Sinai in the south against Egypt and in the Golan Heights against in the north against the Syrian Army.

The view from Mount Bental

The battle for the Golan Heights was one of the greatest tank battles of the 1973 Yom Kippur War or any war.  If the Syrian invasion force of 1,500 tanks and 1,000 cannon had broken through the thin Israeli line, the country could have been split in half and conquered in a day.

Between the Mount Bental observation post and Mount Hermon is the Valley of Tears where the battle was fought. An Israeli force of just 160 tanks slowed and finally stopped the Syrian columns. Though vastly outnumbering the Israeli defenders, the Syrians had to move through a narrow valley. In the end 600 Syrian tanks were destroyed.  Just seven of the Israeli tanks were still in service when the Syrians withdrew after their significant losses. The crews of the 153 damaged and destroyed tanks were nearly all casualties by the time the three-day battle ended.

Today Mount Bental is a tourist destination.  At least a half-dozen buses labored up the winding climb, discharging hundreds of tourists to explore the trenches and bunkers and, of course, the gift shop.

The view is amazing and beautiful looking over both the Israeli Golan and into Syria. It must have looked entirely different with 1,500 tanks streaming out of Syria.