BERLIN. 14th September

Saturday night the only bed available is in a 10-bed dorm (18euros). I feel that only a supreme optimist would expect to get an undisturbed night's sleep in a 10-bed dorm, on a Saturday night, in a city that prides itself on being party-central, and I'm not disappointed. Not that there was any ya-hooing, but there just seemed to be people coming and going and whispering in the room throughout the night. That wouldn't have been so bad, but the guy in the bunk above me has a really loud snore, and as soon as the transients quieten down, he starts up. He doesn't only bother me, every time he starts up I can hear bodies turning in other bunks. When I drag myself upright at about 8.30, this guy, who looks all of 16 or 17, gets up too. I gaze myopically at him as I reach for my glasses and I notice that as other guys get up, they make a point of directing dirty looks in the direction of this kid. At breakfast he is sitting on his own, with a mystified look on his face, obviously wondering why he is receiving all these negative vibrations.

I do my washing, and ask at the desk about a private room. There is one available for Sunday night only, and I lash out 35 euros for this, as I'm booked into a dorm in Krakow for 3 nights from Monday night, and very much crave a good night's sleep. I can't move in till one o'
clock, so store my gear in the baggage room, and go for a walk through a nearby suburb where I haven't been before, until 1pm. I had some vague plan for the afternoon of going out to the Olympia Stadium (originally built for the 1936 Games), but instead I sleep in solitary splendour until 5pm. Apparently Adolph and company assumed that Aryan supermen would walk off with all the medals, and were a tad choked when the African-American Jesse Owens walked off with 4 golds. A poetic touch is that the road south of the stadium complex is now called Jesse Owens Allee (Avenue).

In the evening I have a whim to visit the site of the Hitler Bunker. Anything to do with the 3rd Reich is usually kept very low key, in complete contrast to anything to do with 'the Wall', but I ask my friend at the desk (the one who usually undercharges me), and he has an idea that it is now UNDER the Holocaust Memorial. I couldn't quite accept the irony of this, and went to investigate, as he said there was a Jewish Museum under the Memorial as well. The Museum is free, but beforehand you get a little pep talk about 'appropriate behaviour' in the museum, and have to switch off mobile phones before being allowed in in groups. I manage to embarrass the young lady giving us this spiel, as she addresses a few people in front of me in English, and then turns to your humble narrator, who is probably wearing his habitually-puzzled expression, and gives it all to me in German, while I unashamedly nod my head in all the right places, with a couple of 'Ýa's' thrown in. But then I get sprung as she starts handing out brochures about the museum, and I need one in English. But she takes it in good part, saying that she will 'have to be more careful in future'. The museum is rather an unusual one. It has about 100 metres of wall with a photographic account of the history of Berlin's Jews from 1933 to 1945, with written commentary. Then a large room with the family history of individual victims, and another room containing original last letters (and translations) from persons writing to their families while on the way to the camps. Many seemed to have been put in bottles and thrown from railway wagons. I learn from the brochure that the north-east corner of the memorial is built over Goebbel's bunker, and that a plaque marking the Hitler bunker is some 300 metres south of the memorial. Apparently it was filled in and deliberately left unmarked for fear of it becoming a neo-Nazi shrine, but in the 1990's a plaque was laid. An ex-soldier who was one of Hitler's bodyguards in the Bunker was invited to speak at the laying ceremony, and said that although the man was a bestial monster, that it was wrong to ignore history. Anyway I couldn't find it, and I suspect it is about to disappear under a big building development. Back to the hostel and in bed by 8pm. Sleep like the dead until 5.30 when outside my window the laundryman starts trundling away the many big trolleys of sheets and pillowcases that amass over the week in a 350 bed hostel.