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Sir Nicholas Winton

At Platform 1 at the main train station in Prague - This is a statue of Nicholas Winton who, at the age of 29 in 1939, saved 669 children by finding places for them in Britain. They would have otherwise perished in Nazi concentration camps. The children left Czechoslovakia from this train station, Praha - hlavní nádraží (it was called the Wilson Station back then). There was one last train which was to carry an additional 250 children that never left because the borders were closed on September 1, 1939.
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Kathe Kollwitz

On our way to Schloss Moritzburg, I noticed a sign for Kathe-Kollwitz- Gedenkstaette. The name rang a bell, so after touring the amazing hunting castle of Augustus the Strong we went looking for it. About 300 meters away was her house - not her long-term house in Berlin, obviously, but the house where she fled to avoid the Allied bombings for her last two years and where she died on 22 April 1945.

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Schloss Sonnenstein

Near the 15th century castle, a sanitarium was opened near Pirna, Germany, just south of Dresden. Like Grafeneck, it still serves the handicapped through a company located there which employs them. The psychiatric hospital had been closed in 1939. The Nazis took over the building and installed a gas chamber and crematorium. some 100 people were employed there and by 24 August 1941, when Hitler officially "ended" Action T4, 13,270 men, women, and chiuldren had been murdered there in the name of science.

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Schloss Grafeneck

Schloss Grafeneck was built in the 16th Century. It became a sanitarium until the Nazis decided to use it as the first T4 site outside of Berlin. Over 10,000 were murdered ther in less than a year, and the gassing expertise gained there was used in the death camps. It is disturbing, not only for the history, but because it is still used as a sanitarium, and the cemetray where they put the cremains in a mass grave is still active. I finished reading Defying Hitler in the shadow of the castle waiting for the bus.

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