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day twelve I think that I could have stayed a few more days in Prague, but I knew that Berlin and Amsterdam were still coming up next and that made leaving easier. At the moment the country may not be completely up to speed with the rest of Western Europe, but I'm sure that they'll get there soon. If I can I would like to go back to Prague in the next five years and see how much progress they have made there. From Prague we headed north to Terezin, a place where the Gestapo first held political prisoners and later Jews during World War II. If I remember correctly something like thirty-two thousand people passed through until the war ended. It was as close as we came to visiting a concentration camp and it was disturbing enough. I didn't need to see gas chambers to know that they people had died there. Of course there weren't any gas chambers or ovens there, the people died due to malnutrition and disease. Our guide led us into a room that was used to hold sixty people and with just our group of twenty-five people it already felt crowded. The idea of sixty people trying to sleep in there was beyond me. Our onboard guide, Heather, was even more animated than usual when we were approaching Berlin. She stood up and told everyone on the bus to close his or her eyes. Then after a short break we were told that we could open them. What we saw was a foam hat in the shape of the Berlin skyline on her head. For the rest of her mini lecture she would point to the attraction on her hat as she talked about it.
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