So far our adventure to Berlin has been filled with laughs, jokes and good times. But today was going to be very different - we were about to embark on a cold and chilling adventure to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, in northern Berlin. None of us really knew what to expect or how we’d react to such a memorial.

It started out with a nice train ride where we were all laughing and enjoying the ride, but as soon as we got to the camp the atmosphere immediately changed. It went completely cold and grey. At first glance you could tell it was a rough and cold place, surrounded by tall grey walls with barbed wire across the top. There were beautiful trees on the outside, demonstrating the saying “the grass is always greener on the other side”.

Throughout the whole tour we learnt about how the prisoners were made to live in such a deprived and humiliating environment. The most emotional part of it all was seeing the crematorium and gas chambers where nearly 16,000 people were killed each week!

All in all this trip was a real eye opener to how cruel the world can be and how much we really need to keep these sites open to the public so that we can see what mistakes were made in the past and make sure that nothing like this will never be repeated again.

After this experience we went into the central part of the former East Berlin, AlexanderPlatz, which made us really appreciate how lucky we were to do something on our own accord as the formers prisoners didn’t have any choice. So while in AlexandraPlatz we did some shopping and sat in a Starbucks under the TV tower. It was quite ironic because the TV tower was built to stand for socialism yet right underneath was an American company standing for capitalism, which socialism was completely against.