Germany

On my last day in Dresden, I hit the bricks early to experience the city waking up. Trams rolled down nearly-empty streets as the sun emerged from behind majestic buildings.

Another former Eastern Bloc city, another museum full of Socialist detritus. More elaborate than the Museum of Communism in Prague, Dresden’s DDR Museum occupies several floors in an appropriately stark building.

To say that I was “looking forward” to visiting Terezín wouldn’t be quite right; rather, I felt I needed to go there. On a high school trip in 1989, I had visited the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland- a moving experience.

To fans of Kurt Vonnegut (like me), Dresden is synonymous with his novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, Or the Children’s Crusade.

If it were February of 1945, this street would be on fire. At that point in World War II, the German army was retreating but had not yet surrendered, and the Allies were looking for ways to hasten the end of the war.

Prague is so darn close to other historic European cities, and I had a couple of unclaimed days in my itinerary. I couldn’t help but add a third country to my two-week trip.