Cassie sits to my right across the aisle, the seats staggered so she’s slightly behind me. She is listening to her iPod, probably something uplifting to get her mind off the weather and the purpose of our visit. I prefer to ride in silence, thinking about the visit to Auschwitz and contemplating our surroundings.
Our bus isn’t particularly comfortable. A row of heaters runs along the lower edge of the window, eking out a few degrees of warmth if you nestle right up to it. Eighteen inches away in the aisle seat, I sit beyond the range of the heater, where it is at least fifteen degrees colder. Balancing my laptop on my somewhat spread out legs, made necessary by the inability of the seats to accommodate someone taller than five-foot-eight, I can feel the difference in temperature between my left leg—closer to the heater—and my right leg in the passenger bus–equivalent of the Arctic Circle. We are a thousand miles away from any Spanish-speaking country, yet all of our windows say PROHIBIDO FUMAR. Those signs must have been added after the ashtrays in the back of every seat, when some managers finally acknowledged that, yes, smoking may in fact be bad for you.
Yet I know I am infinitely more comfortable than my first relatives to make this journey—the family of my maternal grandmother. They came from a different direction—from Zdunska Wola in central Poland via the Lodz ghetto—but their destination was the same: Auschwitz. They came by train, crammed together in an endless row of cattle cars, seen as no more worthy of life than the previous bovine passengers. When one train ended, another soon took its place. I often wondered why my family didn’t try to escape. Now I wonder if I’ll have a better sense of that after our visit to Poland.
Although the rain keeps falling, the temperature stays above freezing, holding at about forty-two degrees. We had expected it to be colder—much colder—our knowledge of Eastern European climatology clouded by pictures we had seen of Poland from World War II. It was always snowing in those photos, and somehow, we expected it to always be snowing in Poland, regardless of month or season.
Twenty minutes from our scheduled arrival time, we begin to see blocks of concrete closer together and a bit more frequently. Ah, these must be the suburbs of Krakow. Even the car dealerships look like they are made of concrete, although presumably they were constructed recently enough to be made of something else. I guess the Poles didn’t want to break the monotony of their countryside. A bright, colorful billboard advertising four different kinds of chocolate bars—milk chocolate, cherry, caramel, and neon blue—looks completely out of place.
Which is why I am so surprised that the Old City of Krakow is so beautiful. Stunningly so. The barbican, the castle, the central square—they are all incredible, transporting us to a different time and place with endless medieval wonder. It’s the antithesis of everything we’ve seen up to this point. The Poles of Krakow took all of the potential aesthetic value of the city and the suburbs and poured it into the tourist center of the city to a greater extent than anywhere we’ve ever been.
Cassie and I take an evening stroll through the Old City, around the castle, and into the Jewish Quarter, staring up at the church towers and buildings around us that soar into the overcast gray. We spot a Mexican restaurant and decide, for reasons that don’t quite make sense now and probably didn’t then, that this is what we’ll eat tonight.
We’ve spent the last week in Budapest, Hungary, eating thick, hearty Hungarian foods like langosz—fried dough with sour cream and cheese—or chicken paprikash, a thick, paprika-based sauce served with boiled chicken. With our Hungarian ancestry, it was natural for us to visit, but we had no idea how much we’d love the city. We meant to spend two days there but ended up spending a week without running out of things to do. We visited the second largest Parliament building in the world, soaked in the thermal Turkish baths for an afternoon, explored the largest Jewish temple in Europe, and wandered around the wildly eclectic and bizarre ruin pubs, sipping hot mulled wine. We even met Cassie’s cousins for dinner one night, which turned into a bit of a start-and-stop experience since only one of them spoke English and we don’t speak a word of Hungarian, short of the few phrases we learned from our free Budapest map. These include yes (egen), no (nem), and cheers (egeszsegere), for which the map gives the helpful tip of saying the English phrase “I guess she can drive” as quickly as possible—despite the completely disparate spellings, you’ll come close enough to pronouncing egeszegere. Whenever there was a lull in the conversation, which was often, someone would yell “Palinka!” and we would all take another sip of their native liquor that tastes like a cross between fresh plums and rancid turpentine—or maybe rancid plums and fresh turpentine.
We had expected that Hungary would be the first departure from what we knew as normal. Our first foray into Eastern Europe would be our first true excursion from Western life, as we left our comfort zones and truly started exploring other countries and cultures. We were somewhat surprised to find out that everything in Budapest was still so … Western. Everything felt disturbingly familiar, and we had no problem navigating the city or ordering meals. Even the food was nothing unusual, since we both grew up with Hungarian cooking, which is why, after a week of the thick cuisine of Budapest, we were ready for something other than the borscht and pierogies of Poland.
Hence, Mexican food in the Old City of Krakow. We expected Poland, like Hungary before it, to be very cheap and incredibly affordable. Combine that with the inexpensive Mexican fare we were used to eating in the States, and we assumed we would be eating for dirt cheap. Yet somehow, we end up dining at what might be the most expensive Mexican restaurant in the world, and one where I’m sure no Mexican has ever dined. The food comes as close to authentic Mexican cuisine as General Tso’s chicken comes to authentic Chinese cuisine.
A few hours later, we’re back at our hostel, ready to call it a night. Even without the other guests staying awake until three in the morning drinking and screaming despite the 11 p.m. quiet time mandate, I’m not sure we would’ve slept well anyway. The idea of visiting Auschwitz has a way of turning sleep into a disquieting struggle between you and the back of your eyelids.
In the morning, a quick look out the window reveals the weather has cleared. It isn’t exactly sunny, but it’s no longer the drab airborne bog of the day before. I sleep a little more on the ninety-minute drive to Auschwitz-Birkenau, dreaming that the warmth of the minibus would somehow follow me around the grounds of the largest Nazi concentration camp. I knew that wasn’t going to happen before I even woke up. The temperature is in the low forties, and I have the distinct feeling it never gets warm here. Warmth, compassion, friendship—these are all things that left this godforsaken place far behind. Auschwitz is a wasteland of lives and emotions—a complete desolation of the soul—and you can feel it when you approach the gates. We sign up for a guided tour to explore the historic epicenter of evil—the worst genocide in Western history.
As I walk among the buildings and down the pathways, I wonder if my family ever stood where I stand, walked where I walk, and mourned where I mourn. Before the Final Solution, the systematic extermination of Europe’s Jews, the Nazis took pictures of many victims. Many of these pictures hang on the walls of certain buildings, and I scan them looking for a familiar face. But I doubt I would recognize my family even if their photographs hung right in front of me; such is the despair on each face. In my mom’s photographs, everyone wears an expression of pride. Here, there is none of that.
Our tour guide leads us quickly through Auschwitz—too quickly—before shepherding us to Birkenau. The tour moves too fast for me, and I am left without time to properly reflect or mourn. The guide adds little to the experience, parroting the signs already placed throughout the concentration camp. The visit feels impersonal, even if the subject matter is very intimate. But even a short stay at such a moving place is very powerful. My grandmother’s family was here. Somewhere. I’ve never believed in anything as silly as an Ouija board, but here the dead find a way to speak to you.
We walk
quietly through the buildings that once housed the mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters who were about to die. We stare at the remnants of their lives—the clumps of hair, glasses, and cookware that were seized moments after they passed under the Arbeit Macht Frei sign—Work Will Set You Free. These families thought they were building a new life, unaware the Nazis were about to rob them of their future. I stare at Elsa Meier’s faded black chest behind an enclosed display of abandoned luggage. She wrote her address on the exterior that might once have been a rich, dark green, hoping she could identify her belongings after the chaos of arrival. But there was no after. We see Klara Sara Focthmann’s crushed brown luggage, labeled Wien for Vienna. A name is partially revealed from behind a bag, bermann, from Hamburg—a distant relative of mine, perhaps.
We see a pile of thousands of confiscated shoes, the vibrant whites and reds long since gone from the dilapidated leather. Prosthetics, braces, and crutches of those deemed unworthy to live even a few more minutes. Outside, rows of empty barracks stand as tombstones in a barren field. A lone flower on a wooden bed built for eight people underscores the hopelessness of this place. There are no birds or squirrels or rats that I can see. No fauna of any kind. Life abandoned this place long ago.
The solitary cattle car used to transport Jews.
The railroad tracks that were the end of the line.
The demolished cremation ovens.
We see it all, walking along the same double-layered barbed wire fences that my family must have walked along decades earlier. I’d like to think they put up a fight or found some way to resist, holding out longer than other prisoners, but I know that’s a completely romanticized fiction. They were brought here to die, and they probably died afraid, their will to survive left in the Lodz ghetto from which they came.
In Rome and Barcelona and Paris, we saw what man could accomplish. We saw what people could do. Here, we see the same thing. We see what people can do. We learn what humanity is capable of. In Western Europe, such a lesson was exhilarating. Here, it is horrifying. It will not be the last time on this trip that we reflect on such emotions—we will feel this way again. It would be nice to dream that no such place like Auschwitz exists anywhere else on earth and that people will never let this happen again. That couldn’t be further from the truth.
We catch a bus back to Krakow in the late afternoon and decide we need some kind of meal to cheer us up. Visiting Auschwitz is like watching Black Hawk Down or American History X multiplied by a million. Normally I favor beer, but this feels like an opportune time for a bright pastel girly drink with a straw and a tiki umbrella.
Having learned never to trust Mexican restaurants when not in or at least near Mexico, we search for another restaurant. Perhaps more so than any other ethnic cuisine, Mexican food is bastardized and corrupted all over the world. How someone can screw up Mexican food—or Tex-Mex as it often turns out to be—is beyond me. Last time I checked, the dining out equivalent of Mexican food boils down to some combination of five ingredients—tortillas, rice, cheese, veggies, chicken—cooked in one of three ways—baking, frying, or boiling—leaving a very finite number of permutations from which to pick. And yet Mexican food almost always ends up at the top of travel bloggers’ lists of ethnic food gone horribly wrong overseas. Tortillas are replaced with fried dough and salsa is replaced with tartar sauce and chicken is replaced with not-chicken. The result is something entirely inedible and not remotely what was intended.
Instead, we find another restaurant. A Mexican restaurant. But at least it more closely resembles what we want. The dishes all have names familiar to any American—burrito, taco, quesadilla—and they even have giant margaritas served in pitchers. We each order one and discover that the only thing the drink has in common with margaritas is the name. Apparently, in Polish, margarita means colorful drink. Our pitchers come out in all different shades of neon pinks and blues. The rim, which at first glance seems to be caked in a good, thick layer of salt, is in fact coated in a bulletproof casing of sugar. When we expect the familiar bite of tequila that is at the heart of any good margarita, we detect instead some flavored vodka, masked with more sugar and some sort of fruit juice. I wonder if this drink alone is enough to give me diabetes. The alcohol isn’t enough to make us forget the horrors of the morning—there is hardly enough to give us a slight buzz—but the drink personifies bright and peppy, and the food isn’t terrible. We spend the rest of the night exploring Krakow and wondering if the drinks will turn our pee glow-in-the-dark blue.
Our time in Europe is winding down. It seems impossible that it’s already been two months since we left the States. Soon we’ll be leaving for Africa, a place I suspect will feel far less Western than Eastern Europe, but not before we are forced to live through two of the worst transportation experiences of our entire trip.
Two days after Auschwitz, we catch a morning bus to Prague. The schedule says the journey takes ten hours, but that strikes me as odd since Google Maps says it should take only five hours. When we begin moving, I soon find out why this will be the bus ride from hell, far worse than the overnight buses we will take in Vietnam or Southeast Asia. The bus driver stops every twenty minutes. Half the time he picks up passengers, and half the time he stops for a smoke break. We move agonizingly slowly across this stretch of Eastern Europe, inching from one smoke break to the next. Unlike our ride to Krakow, there is no haze to obscure the scenery, and I see each individual tree and shrub pass like molasses across my window. I might have far more sympathy for the bus driver’s addiction if I smoked, but given my instinct to avoid inhaling carcinogens, I feel only a deep and unyielding enmity.
We spend a week in Prague—making a quick overnight trip to Vienna—before catching a flight to Naples and a ferry to Sicily for our final week in Europe. The ferry crossing from Naples to Catania sounded like a great idea when Cassie and I planned this part of the trip. We pictured a beautiful overnight sailing excursion down the Tyrrhenian Sea, culminating in a wondrous passage through the Strait of Messina that separates the tip of Italy’s boot from the misshapen rugby ball it is about to defenestrate through the narrow aquatic window of the Strait of Gibraltar. It turns into an unending nightmare. We sail straight into a thunderstorm off the Italian coast. The ship, not designed for comfort, is tossed about like a blow-up raft in a typhoon. The bow climbs into the night sky with each new wave, and then crashes down into the dark sea as one wall of water recedes and another approaches. As if the impact of metal upon seawater doesn’t make a loud enough thud, the Italians cheer “Oohooopa!” at the top of their lungs at the apex of each liquid sine wave. I wonder if some of them have reverted to their ancestral polytheism and decided now is a good time to taunt Neptune, the Roman god of the sea. But the chants begin to fade. More and more passengers are retiring to their rooms, where they can throw up in private. Cassie is soon among them, leaving our terribly overpriced and horrifically seasoned meal untouched. I don’t last much longer. I don’t vomit, but I spend the next few hours quietly lying in bed with my eyes closed. This wasn’t the romantic ferry journey we had imagined, but it does give me some time to reflect on our time in Europe.
We showed up on the continent with a handful of contacts in disparate cities, but we treated every day as a chance to meet someone new. If sites make a place special, people make it memorable, and we made friends from all over the world during our time here—the Erins and Joshes and Ellens and Marcs and Redas. We had nothing in common with these people except a geographical coincidence and a favorite hobby—we were in the same place at the same time, and we love to travel. In the hours or days we spent together, we built relationships with our new friends that I know will last a lifetime.
Eventually, we both find some comfort in sleep, and the sea is calm when we wake up. I step outside for some fresh air and catch a glimpse of Mt. Etna as we pass through the Strait of Messina.
Chapter 6
December 14, 2013
1°12’58.1”S 36°48’34.
3”E
Nairobi, Kenya
There is a natural expectation that people of a certain generation and a particular nationality—a general time and place, if you will—have a high probability of having seen a basic set of movies. For example, if you grew up in 1940s America, you have almost certainly seen Gone with the Wind and Casablanca. Is that true for everyone? No, absolutely not. But is it true for a large enough subset of the population that I would put money on a randomly picked person from that generation as having seen that movie? Yes, definitely. Similarly, if you consider the 1990s to be the decade when you went from a prepubescent soprano to an adolescent tenor, you have seen, and I say this with a high degree of certainty, The Lion King. It was a defining movie for my generation, a beautifully animated adventure combined with a compelling coming-of-age tale in the middle of the African heartland, and it was one of the first movies where it was completely acceptable for boys to admit they cried.
I was in middle school when it came out in 1994, and everyone I know saw it. Everyone but me. I don’t know what I was busy doing during those years—other than playing clarinet and computer games—but unfortunately, it did not involve seeing one of the greatest animated movies of all time.
I still bring this up occasionally when my friends and I talk about movies.
“I’ve never seen The Lion King.”
“What? Are you serious?”
A sudden gasp noticeably changes the ambient air pressure as everyone spastically inhales, unable to comprehend the words I just strung together into a sentence. In the brief moment before all is forgiven, I am considered less than human, my emotional growth as a child stunted because I did not see a cartoon lion become friends with a cartoon warthog before defeating his cartoon uncle. To people of my generation growing up in the States, not seeing The Lion King is akin to not having a complete soul, and maybe it helps explain why I didn’t kiss a girl until my junior year of high school.
The Insulin Express Page 6
