Traveling history

The Polish countryside, on the way from Krakow to Prague. Post-Auschwitz, and the clouds mirrored my mood

There’s a point at which you have so much to write about that the words logjam at your fingers. Instead of a veritable flood of prose you get…nothing.

I’m at that point right now, a paralysis of choice.

So…let’s start small. I’m cruising on the modern equivalent of a Viking longboat, in reality a shallow-draft cruise ship that gives tourists a leisurely exploration of European rivers.  The ship holds about 190 passengers, small potatoes as cruise ships go, and the average age on this trip seems to be around 75.

Cruising down the river on the way to Miltenberg

Right now we’re heading down the Main river in Germany, about an hour north of Miltenberg, exploring the Christmas markets of middle Europe and getting an up-close-and-personal look at what happens when a population turns into a cult of hate and destruction.

There are ornaments of all kinds, glass, wood, plastic, paper, throughout the Christmas markets. The challenge is figuring out how to get them all home.

We’re about 2/3 through a 3-week excursion with Viking River Cruises. It’s been marvelous, we’ve stocked up on warm clothes and enough Christmas presents to fill TWO new suitcases to haul our treasures home. The food’s great, our fellow travelers are wonderful, and our eyes and hearts are full of the sights we’ve seen.

Ornaments in a Nurnberg Christmas market booth. Absolutely beautiful.

Our trip started in Warsaw, a town of magnificent baroque and Art Deco construction that, soberingly, is reconstructed from the ruins of World War II (nearly 90% of the city was bombed flat by Germans and allies). We’ve visited former Jewish ghettos that lost most of their inhabitants to deportation or death camps, now converted to shopping malls and artistic flats for bustling hipsters.

It’s an odd mix, visiting memorials and learning about Nazi activities during WWII in the mornings, then shopping for ornaments, sampling local delicacies, and drinking gluhwein in the afternoons and evenings. Every craft-filled booth with smiling vendors seems built on the sacrifice and destructive power of Hitler’s final solution.

Bullet-pocked walls mark the spot where the Nazis executed Jews and those who tried to help them escape, in Poland.

It strikes me that this may be the greatest danger for US citizens. To most of us, genocide and mass destruction are abstract concepts that happen far away. We don’t wait for a train in the same place that hauled non-Aryans to Auschwitz. Our kids don’t lean against bullet-pocked walls by the playground.

Abstraction is a dangerous thing. I’ve certainly learned World War II history, read books and watched movies detailing the horrors of the death camps. I’ve interviewed Auschwitz survivors with fading numbers tattooed on their arms, studied the propaganda techniques of Albert Speer and Leni Riefenstall.

Memorial in the Jewish ghetto in Krakow, where Jews were herded and selected for death camps. Each chair symbolizes the death of 1,000.

Visit Auschwitz, see the dusty mountains of women’s hair, frilly sandals, suitcases carefully marked with their owners’ names and addresses…no amount of studying prepares you for the knowledge that the Nazi dilemma wasn’t the morality of their final solution but, rather, the search for ever more efficient ways to dispose of corpses.

It makes me scared for my own country, for the vast numbers of people nodding approvingly at the deportation of “furriners,” the casual assumption that people without white skin must be drug dealers, rapists, and murderers, that there must always be two classes of people in the world: Us, the good guys, the deserving…and them.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m here with my fiancé (more on that later) on a dream trip, and we’re enjoying the hell out of this. We’re already planning the next trip.

But still: We’ll go home a lot less complacent for our own political scene.

More to follow.