writebrained, rightbrained

Prague

We took our first night train to arrive in Prague in the morning.  The European overnight trains are quite an experience.  When we got onto the train, the seats had already been converted into three beds.  Manuel promised us that our first train would be our most luxurious, and our traveling companion concurred, with a sink, running water, nightlights and a small closet inside our compartment.  The beauty of the night train is that you don’t need to book a hotel and that you arrive in your next destination the next morning, ostensibly ready to go.  The downside is that the compartments can be very small, especially for the top bunk, which doesn’t comfortably fit anyone over 5’4”.  You may end up crammed in there with someone you don’t know and the tight quarters are not very comfortable for someone who is claustrophobic.

Prague is a picturesque city with gorgeous architecture and we enjoyed the young, modern feel.  We spent a lot of time near the river, one afternoon exploring the touristy castle area, and two evenings in the crowded main square watching the World Cup games on a big screen.  We had an additional day in Prague, but I spent much of it sorting out an annoying Bank of America issue and trying to get my debit card replaced.

Prague was lovely, but not notable.  My favorite evenings were the ones we spent watching the World Cup.  We had been warned against tourist traps like the black light theaters and the 20% surcharge on restaurants near the city center.  It was fun to meet two lovely Indian girls from San Diego, who we took to a nightclub with us that night.  The club had five floors with different types of music, including “Oldies”, “Radio Hits”, and “Black Music,” which we thought was hilarious and un-PC, all at once.   Another evening, Ghabby and I tried to find more authentic Praguian experience, but ended up in Tretters New York Bar and a Hawaiian tiki bar, with “Ain’t Nothing But a Hound Dog” playing at the former and Vanilla Ice playing at the latter.  Incidentally, everywhere we’ve been on this trip, we’ve primarily heard American music playing, including a live rendition of “Achey Breaky Heart” in the town square of a tiny village in the Tatras and “Filthy Gorgeous” by the Scissor Sisters in a restaurant nearby. 

A final experience which I loved in Prague was a concert we attended in the Church of St Nicolas, close to the Charles Bridge.  I’m normally not a huge classical music fan, but the church was stunning and the music (Vivaldi’s Four Seasons) was absolutely heavenly.

Auschwitz

When I was ten years old, I read about World War II somewhere and was inspired to do a project for our fifth grade Social Studies Fair on the Holocaust.  I remember building a cardboard model of a concentration camp, complete with string and tin foil barbed wire, and carefully lettering a poster listing how many people had died in each European country.  Yes, I can offer this as evidence of being a morbid little child!  But I found that despite knowing many of the facts nearly my whole life, it was still moving and disturbing to visit this place on Monday.

Nearly everything I could say has been written elsewhere.  So I’ll just describe my photos below, and mention the two or three things which really stayed with me during the day. 

Barbed wire

The execution wall, where several thousand prisoners were shot

The fence between the women’s area and men’s area in the main camp

The crematorium chimney.  “Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.” - Elie Wiesel

The entrance gate, inscribed with “Arbeit macht frei,” or “work shall set you free.”  The deportees were told that Auschwitz was a work camp until they were inside, so they did not panic or try to escape.

The sign at the gate to Birkenau.

Birkenau, where 100k prisoners were housed at a time.  Sleeping quarters in a space originally designed to hold horses.

A railway car, the platform where prisoner “selection” occurred, in front of the main gate of Birkenau (the “gate to hell.”)

It was extremely difficult to describe the scale of the camp.  Auschwitz was capable of gassing and cremating 20,000 human beings in one day, and it is believed that it operated at capacity during the deportation of Hungary’s Jewish population in 1942 and again, very close to the end of the war.  More than one million people died at Auschwitz, and as has been described by many, the number itself is difficult for the human mind to grasp.  The barracks literally stretched as far as the eye could see.   We learned from our tour that the barracks housed one hundred thousand inmates at a time, and that the entire occupants were replaced every few months, so this gave the first tangible representation of the number of human beings that passed through here.  Of course, most of the victims were actually unnumbered and died going straight from the railway cars to the gas chambers after the sorting process; only those who were considered fit for heavy labor were spared for the barracks and confinement.

Our tour guide was an older, dignified local Polish woman whose uncles had been killed at Auschwitz because they were caught helping a Jewish prisoner who had escaped from the camp.  She was very emotional throughout the tour and provided much needed grounding point.  How do the descendants of the Holocaust legacy (or survivors, or witnesses, or visitors) come to terms with a place like this?  Much has been written…. I won’t pretend to write anything profound here.

I cried when I saw the ovens and when we saw the photos which had been taken of prisoners before they were killed, especially the children.  Each person had a shaved head and identical striped uniforms, but you could see so much in their eyes: humiliation, terror, loss, sadness, weariness, and near-panic, like that in the eyes of a young girl old enough to comprehend what was happening, but unable to stop any of it.  In the older prisoners, there is a terrible cynicism and resignation: death of the soul before the death of the physical body.  The rooms of shoes, personal items, and hair, are, I believe, replicated in the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, but still affecting, especially a room full of suitcases, including suitcases marked with very young children’s names.

In Norway, every school child is required to make the journey to this camp to see the museum there.  This is good, but even in our time, things happen and the international community has not determined successful ways to mediate or protect individuals from atrocities occurring.  It was strange, almost disconcerting to leave the camp and see that the sun was still shining peacefully on the grass outside the entrance.  Many more distinguished people than myself have thought and written about this, and we obviously today still have wars, displaced peoples, refugee camps, and genocide…

The day was a reminder about the best and worst in people, and how the fault lines between us can so easily be exploited and end in destruction.  I could espouse my view that not just children, but every adult should be aware of these places, including the refugee camps in Darfur, Gaza, and outside Iraq.  Instead I’ll try to remember that these fault lines also exist also between individual humans, and perhaps that is a better starting point before questioning the myriad imperfect ways these fault lines are handled politically.

Krakow, Poland

I have been diligently taking photos for the past week, but not so diligently posting none of them.  Our tour with Tucan Tours has been fantastic so far - we love Manuel, our tour leader!  It’s fantastic to not have to worry about transportation or hotel details, and to get a few hours introduction to each new city.  Then we usually split off from our group of ten (mostly Australian) fellow travelers and do our own thing.  I’m going to divide my Krakow post: my first impressions and what I learned about the Jewish history of Krakow on the second day of our visit.

Krakow, on first impression, is a city of contrasts: old and new.  Wonderfully preserved Polish architecture next to young, modern art.  The oldest indoor shopping mall in the world, next to an outdoor jazz festival.  Horse drawn carriages decorated for the tourists, and the driver, busily chatting away on his cell phone.  Graffiti and a very rich, ancient Jewish history.  It’s a university town and full of artists, who work as street performers for tourists during the day, and enliven the nighttime cafe culture rich with live bands and art everywhere.  This is hopefully reflected in my photos below….

As some of you may already know, Krakow has an old and distinguished Jewish history as a center of learning and scholarship.  Our hotel was on the edge of the Kazimierz district of Krakow, which had historically been the old Jewish quarter.  After learning about the history, this neighborhood felt a little divided.  On one side were cute galleries and cafes, but it was also a little like a ghost town, because what had once been a crowded, thriving village was now the home mainly to a few cafes and museums commemorating the area’s history and mostly catering to tourists.  This was striking especially in the Kazimierz main square.

On the second day of our visit, we hoped to visit the Schindler Factory museum (from the Spielberg film), but it was unfortunately closed on the first Monday of every month.  Instead, we went to a moving photo exhibition called “Traces of Memory” at the Museum Galicia, focusing on the history of Jewish culture and people in the area surrounding Krakow, including a remarkable segment on the legacy after World War II.  It was a perfect precursor to our trip planned to Auschwitz that afternoon.  The film “Schindler’s List” shows the tragedy of the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto.  I learned that of the 70,000 Jews in Krakow before the war, fewer than 1 in 10 survived.  It was really sad to learn about the vibrant Jewish culture and community in Krakow, which had been virtually erased and dispersed, like ashes scattered to the wind.

I visited the old synagogue Remu, which was the home of a well-known Jewish rabbi and intellectual and is still in use.  I took some photos of the wall next to the synagogue’s large, restored cemetery.  Remarkably, this wall has been made of the fragments of gravestones from the many desecrated Jewish cemeteries scattered all over Poland.  I thought it was a stunning and visual reminder of what had been destroyed here.  Below that is the entrance to the Remu Synagogue (considered to bring good luck.)

The photo exhibit, Traces of Memory, will be visiting Boston sometime this fall.   That afternoon, we went with a tour guide to Auschwitz, which I’ll write about in my next post.

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