Monkey Wrenches

Sometimes things go surprisingly or unusually well, and sometimes life throws a monkey wrench into your plans.

The day started with the good news: I finally heard back from the JCC in Krakow; they arranged for some members and volunteers to meet with us this evening at 6 pm.  Our bus picked us up and took us to Krakow with no problems whatsoever.  It only took us four and a half hours (with a half hour break), rather than the six to seven hours if we had gone by train.

The first monkey wrench happened when we checked in.  The staffer at the front desk said the university had only put down 20% deposit, when I was certain that not only had they paid the full amount, but had, in fact, overpaid.  Since the university only paid after I had left, I didn’t have any documentation.  The university sent me the materials today and I forwarded them on to the hotel this evening.

Ok, so that’s pretty minor.  The next thing was getting metro passes for Krakow.  Normally, I buy them at the train station, but we came by charter bus.  I found a machine and tried to buy the cards, but it wouldn’t take my credit card, and my 200 zloty bill was too big.  I went to the bakery and broke it to four 50s, but then it wouldn’t taken my last coin to complete the amount.  I told the students we were walking until I could find a better machine.

I eventually found a machine, but it ate one of my metro passes, giving me only 8 instead of 9 discount passes.  Frustrating, but hey, it happens.  Off to the rynek glowny, the sukennice, and St. Mary’s church.  We hear the trumpeter, and head up to the vodka tasting place, only now, they charge for tasting the vodka (unlike two and four and six years ago, when it was complimentary as a way of boosting sales).

After exploring the Florianska Gate, we head to a dessert and coffee café for some refreshment.  The girls school, whose wifi we could in the past pirate is now an gym specializing in pole dancing.  After a long, long delay our desserts come, and, thank God, they’re actually good.   

I’m starting to relax, I pay the bill, and am planning to walk to the main train station when one of the students asks if we aren’t going to the JCC.

OH MY GOD!  Well, it’s not too bad, we have 25 minutes to get there. I’ll skip buying my newspaper and we’ll just get the tram to Kazimierz.  As I leave, one of the students asks about my backpack, which I had left under my chair.  I rush back and start to leave, only now they point out I’ve left the pouch open. Not running on all cylinders today.

We head to the street and it’s fenced off.  We walk under the tunnel to the train station side and it’s fenced off too.  The entire street around the central train station is torn up and under construction.  No trams stop here anymore.

Now I’m in trouble.  I have no idea where I can catch a tram to Kazimierz.  It’s 5:45 pm and our meeting is in 15 minutes.  I take off walking, trying to find a tram, leaving the slower students racing to keep up.  Eventually, I find a tram, but were across the street and the crosswalk is way down the block.  I was two steps into the street when I realized I was about to crushed between a tram and a car, and ran back to the sidewalk.  Eventually, we got the right tram and made it to the JCC only five minutes late.

I thought the discussion went well.  Yakub began by talking about the history of the JCC and the work it does within the community.  Lila talked about what led her to volunteer at the Center, despite her not being Jewish, while Olga talked about discovering her Jewish roots. 

I think I’ll continue this in tomorrow’s post; I’m getting tired.

The Hardest Day of the Trip

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In many ways, this was the hardest day of the trip for me, not logistically, but emotionally.  Logistically, everything went far smoother than last time.  We reached Belzec from Lublin in a little less than 2 and a half hours.

I knew there was no food for purchase anywhere near the camp, nor is eating permitted in the memorial site, so I warned the students that they would need to pack a meal.  There are no chairs, benches or tables, so we sat on a small, raised curb in the parking lot where they put flags during ceremonies.  Behind us, we could see the entry to the camp, written in iron letters that are intentionally rusting, leaving stains down the concrete that resemble blood.

We began by touring the information center.  The area of the center is quite small, but I did warn the students that they may find the room of reflection somewhat disturbing.  The museum is really quite small, but packs an incredible punch for such a small space.  Where there are pages to turn, they are bound to a heavy, dark metal plate that makes a scraping noise as you turn it.  I pointed out some of the officers from the camp that the text highlights, like Oberhauser and Höfle. 

The director Claude Lanzmann tracked Oberhauser down in the late ‘70s, after he had been released after he had only served 4.5 years for participating in the murder of half a million Jews.  Sure enough, they had that clip playing around the corner.  Höfle was the officer who met with Czerniakow in July 1942 to organize the murder of the Jews of Warsaw. After Czerniakow failed to receive any assurances from him about the fate of the orphans, he committed suicide rather than participate in the deportations to Treblinka.

Around the corner was a diagram of the camp and excerpts from Lanzmann’s documentary Shoah.  It’s always surprising to me how many people were murdered in such a small space.  I explained to the students how this was scheduled murder:  the Nazis had to make sure that not too many victims were sent to the camp at the same time, so as to not overwhelm the ability of the Sonderkommando to burn their bodies. 

After a model of the gas chambers, labeled in German, “Bath and Inhallation” and with a Jewish star over the door there is a single sentence, repeated in Polish, Hebrew, and English, on a metal slab stretching from floor to ceiling.  It’s a quote said by a child inside the gas chamber to her mother and was heard by Rudolf Reder, a member of the Sonderkommando and the only survivor of Belzec who lived to give testimony.

The first time I saw this in 2006, I turned pale and fled.  The next time I did my best to avoid looking at it.  Even two years ago, I tried to avoid reading it.  As we were talking afterwards, one of the students mentioned it and I started crying.  It profoundly affects me every time.

The museum includes artifacts they found when they prepared the site to construct the memorial.  These include stone tokens given to the victims to recover their clothing after their “showers” and some of the Star of David armbands that had been on their clothing in the ghetto. 

At the end is a map, showing the systematic murder of the Jews of southern Poland.  Month by month, Jewish communities light up in blue as they are murdered.  Like stars in a dying galaxy, they flare up and then go out. 

Beyond that is the “roof of reflection.”  To get to it, one must pull open a tall, heavy, metal door at the end of a concrete corridor.  Beyond that is a large, dimly lit, cool concrete room.  Beyond a small Polish plaque in stone, the room is completely empty. The sound of the metal door slamming shut on the empty concrete room often unnerves students.  The space is meant to be disturbing, and the empty echoes on the plain concrete floor meant to convey, emptiness, fear, and hopelessness.

After talking for a while outside, we began to tour the memorial itself.  The surface of the memorial is covered in a mix of slag, ash, and impoverished soil, with burnt metal sticking out here and there.  Every now and then, a tiny green shoot peeks through, but they are not allowed to grow and are periodically removed.  Cutting through this field of dark and blasted stones is a path tracing the way the victims walked to the gas chamber.  The floor of this path is paved with cobble stones taken from numerous Jewish ghettos.  The walls of undulating rough grey concrete rise up on either side, higher and higher as one approaches the heart of the memorial, until one is entirely cut off.

At the end is a large stone wall, carved in Hebrew, English, and Polish with a text from the Book of Job. Opposite is a list of common names of people sent to this place to be murdered.  I found my great grandmother’s name and read the Yizkor prayer for those murdered in the Holocaust, first in Hebrew and then in English.

To continue the tour, we climbed the stairs and found the alphabetical list of cities and towns from whence Jews were deported here to be murdered.  Their grave is the vast field of stones and their tombstones are these city names.  I found the marker for the ghetto my great grandmother was imprisoned in and deported from. 

We found a sliver of shade and talked about the memorial and its design.  After that I bought a new book on the camp and we got on the bus and headed away.

Since our drive takes us through Zamosc, I thought it would be nice to stop there for a breath of air.  The town was commission in the 16^th century by Count Jan Zamoyski, who wanted to build a town to develop trade in the region. He brought over an architect from Padua, who designed the town around a classic Renaissance square (though the large town hall was added over half a century later).

From there we went to the Sephardi synagogue.  When I first came to Zamosc in 2006, this was still the community library.  Now, it’s small exhibition space.   

Eli Zolkos, who sold us our tickets, turns out to be a leader of the Jewish Defense League in Poland.  His website is full of praise for Rabbi Meir Kahane, ימח שמו. Kahane was a racist son of a bitch.  I saw him once in Jerusalem in 1984 or ’85; he was the only person I ever met who could make Hebrew sound like German. Not happy to see this organization being revived and very unhappy to see it here in Poland.

I gave the students an hour to explore the city or have some food or buy souvenirs.  I sat in the main square and ordered a sundae.  This was a lovely, refreshing dish of two scoops of forest fruit ice cream along with a scoop of vanilla, strawberry sauce, whipped cream, and fresh fruit.  It definitely hit the spot.

After some difficulty, I managed to round up all the students and get them on the bus back to Lublin. 

For dinner, I went to a “Jewish style” restaurant in Lublin’s historic rynek.  I had walked by it many times before but never eaten there.  I was tempted by the duck, but it was half of one and that was just too much, so I got a steak instead, but started with the cabbage soup garnished with raisins and almonds.

I had a very nice conversation with a lovely couple who come to Lublin almost every year.  The wife got a Fulbright in 1984 to teach here in Lublin and recounted stories of the really bad old days.  Her husband has been installing an art installation in a neighborhood.  I asked him about some art I had seen hanging in a tree in Zamosc and the husband said he knew the artist, but couldn’t remember his name.  He’s going to get back to me when he does.

As I was finishing dinner, I could see flashes of lightening, so I called for the bill and paid. Just then it started to rain, so I took cover in the restaurant.  Within a minute, there was a torrential downpour.  Everyone sitting outside rushed in.  I found a chair in the lobby, about three meters from the door, and two meters beyond that to the rain, but the wind was so strong, I could feel the water that far away. 

I found wifi and logged on to the internet.  After telling me the chance of rain today was 0%, it said that the rain would stop by 9:15 (in 35 minutes).  Pretty soon, though, the rain was dying down, and by 8:55, it was safe to leave.

The sky was dramatically red, and I could hear music when I reached the pedestrian mall in the city center.  I walked over and saw that they had lit up the fountains and small children were splashing through them and dance music played loudly.

The sky still looked suspicious so I headed back to my hotel where I ordered a diet coke and the “Beza,” basically a meringue, but this one was flavored by halvah.  I’ve seen a lot of that here, which really surprised me.  

 So now it’s time for bed.  I’ll pack in the morning.

The Swedish Invasion

Slept well in the room.  At first I thought the hotel was somewhat out of the way, but it turns out to be a little bit better location than our last hotel.  Nice breakfast buffet as well and A/C, so yes, I think I’ll book here again.

Last time we took public buses from Lublin, but that didn’t work out very well; the buses were small, people didn’t queue up, and we had to struggle to get on.  This time, I chartered a bus.  Our trip today to Kazimierz Dolny went far easier than last time.  He met us in the lobby, drove us to the town and dropped us off right next to the main rynek (square).

Kazimierz Dolny is a market town.  In its heyday, it controlled a fair amount of Poland’s grain trade with the Baltic, and the many of the older buildings in the city center date from the Renaissance.  In the years before the war, about half the town was Jewish. 

I gave the students a brief orientation tour:  the main rynek, the small rynek (which was the Jewish square), the church, the ruined castle (captured in the Swedish invasion of the 17^th century).  We took a short walk out of town to find the Jewish cemetery.  During the Holocaust, the Nazis created a ghetto in Kazimierz Dolny and destroyed the cemetery by taking the tombstones and using them for paving and construction materials.  In 1984, some of the broken tombstones were recovered and a memorial wall was formed out of them.

Despite the many flying bugs that pestered us, I led a short discussion about what we experienced yesterday at Majdanek.  I need to give the students a chance to talk together about it.

After that we walked back to town.  By now it was 11:30 and I gave the students the next 4 hours to shop for souvenirs, go to the church, walk through the hills or along the river, or climb up to the ruined castle.

I went to eat lunch at a “Jewish-style” restaurant I had visited once before in 2006.  I call it “Jewish style” because it’s not really Jewish.  For example, the appetizers consist of rye bread, sour dill pickles, and lard with fried onions. Some of the students came in and one ordered the roast pork knuckle.  The decorations were all wood paneling and early 20^th century chairs; the music was from the 1980s.

I got the stuffed cabbage and mizeria (cucumbers with dill in sour cream); it wasn’t bad.

Afterwards, I headed for a walk out of town and down the river to the ferry.  Initially, I had hoped to make it across to the castle, but there wasn’t time.  I saw some lovely houses and listened to the birds in the trees.

I take students to Kazimierz Dolny for three reasons:  1) it’s a mini mental health day between the very heavy days of visiting Majdanek (yesterday) and Belzec (tomorrow); 2) it’s important that they don’t only see the dark side of Poland; and 3) they need to understand why Jews loved Poland for nearly 1000 years. 

Because Jews did love Poland.  Kazimierz Dolny is exactly the sort of market town where most Jews lived.  Most of the Jews who lived here were very poor, but they loved the town, the river, and the countryside.  It’s important for the students to understand that the Holocaust was imposed on Poland by the German; it did not spring up from the soil.  Polish-Jewish history is more than six very bad years.

After I got back from my walk through the country side, I stopped by a famous bakery in town for a snack.  They had a strawberry menu, so I ordered the strawberry cheesecake and strawberry lemonade.  What I got tasted a lot more like strawberry mousse and strawberry smoothie.  The cake was good, but I would have appreciated something colder and more tart to drink.

Tonight when we got back, I took a nap for an hour.  When I woke up and went downstairs, I saw what seemed like thousands of Swedish fans heading to the stadium for tonight’s game.  At least two dozen were partying in the hotel’s restaurant. 

I joined some of the students in the Stare Miasto (old city) to watch the game.  We were all rooting for Poland, and at first, the game went Poland’s way.  Later, though, the Swedes recovered.  It looked pretty grim for Poland, but they managed to score a second goal late in the game to tie it up. 

I think this is the best possible scenario for us tonight here in the hotel.  Hopefully, the Swedes won’t be too riled up from either winning or losing to go on a noisy rampage. 

Tomorrow we leave at 9 am for our two hour drive to Belzec.  I’ve warned the students that there is no food for purchase in or near the memorial (nor may food be eaten inside the memorial) and I’ve urged them to pack a lunch.

Logistical Problems

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This has always been a hard day of the trip no matter how many changes I make how it’s done. It’s complicated logistically, and it hits hard emotionally.

This year’s logistical problems started when we arrived in Lublin; up until then, everything had gone smoothly.  I had a lot of problems finding a hotel with available rooms, and I eventually found one about a 15-minute walk from the pedestrian mall.  Last night, I mapped it out and figured out which trams we could take from the central train station, including which bus stop it leaves from, the times of departure, and the number of stops to our hotel.  I figured I had everything covered.  I was wrong.

The bus comes to the right station at the right time and we all get on.  Looking at the chart on the bus, it appears that the bus is going in the opposite direction, so I order everyone in the group off the bus and we trudge across the street to find the bus going in the opposite direction.  Unfortunately, I can’t tell which time table is for Sunday and which is for holidays. Even worse, our stop isn’t listed on the schedule, but it is on a type written addendum posted to the sign.  Eventually I give up and say “we’re walking” (it’s only a 23-minute walk to the hotel).

Meanwhile, one student wants to know where the nearest bathroom is (we were in the middle of nowhere, with no business or shops or even houses around).  I told her that it was behind that tree.  I don’t think she appreciated that.  I suppose bad karma might explain why one of my wheels on my roll aboard suitcase split in half shortly thereafter.

After 10 minutes, we reach a bus stop whose name I recognized.  I looked on the chart and I realized that every bus that stopped there should stop close to our hotel, so we waited for a bus.  It dropped us off a block from our hotel. 

I noticed that there was a group of guys all dressed in Swedish soccer colors ahead of us to check in.  We soon discovered that Sweden played Portugal today in Lublin for the Under 21 UEFA tournament.  A lightbulb went off:  perhaps this is why I couldn’t find vacant hotel rooms?  Sure enough, Sweden is sticking around to play Poland here in Lublin tomorrow night. 

Everywhere we went in Lublin, we saw groups of Swedish fans dressed in yellow with blue accents.  People walked by singing Abba songs or leading chants.  I saw several very drunk fans staggering down the street tonight.

As it was late and hot, I figured I would buy the students lunch so we could get to our afternoon destination early.  That backfired spectacularly.  I picked a café with lots of shaded and enough empty tables to accommodate 11 people.  I told the students that I would cover the food but that they were responsible for their own drinks.  And then we waited.  And waited.  And waited.  Our food didn’t come until nearly an hour after we sat down.  It’s not that it was bad, it just took forever.

As a result, we didn’t reach Majdanek until nearly a quarter of 4 pm.  The main museum and barracks closes at 5 pm, so that meant we had to rush much faster than I would like.

I think the biggest shock of visiting Majdanek is how close it is to the city.  We took a bus, got off at a regular stop on a normal street, and you look across and see the concentration camp.  People live in apartment buildings that come up right to the fence (and they lived just a close, though not as densely, 70 years ago).  You can hear church bells, radios, and even a political rally being held nearby.  And prisoners in the camp could see and hear the town just as well.

Although Majdanek was a relatively small camp with a relatively small death toll (about 80,000 people murdered hear, 75% Jewish), because it was liberated by the Soviets in July 1944 (the first camp to be liberated), some of its structures survived intact (such as the gas chambers and the ovens), while others, such as the barracks, were partially or fully reconstructed. One can still see where the concrete in the gas chamber turned blue due to exposure to cyanide. 

Nearby is a one-story mound of human ash and bone exposed to the air.  I explained how, in my opinion, this is so disrespectful to the people murdered here.  They were brutally murdered, and their bodies desecrated through cremation.  Now there bones (and you can see individual bones in the pile) lie unburied on display and exposed to the air and the elements.

The camp closes at 6 pm, and the last thing I wanted was to be locked in to Majdanek (it’s very easy to get out over the symbolic fence, but I still preferred to leave through the open main gate), so we had to hurry to make it out in time. 

Back at the hotel, we formally checked into our rooms, and I headed up to the pedestrian mall for dinner.  

 I went back to Vanilla Café, where I knew I had a good meal last time.  I went very light with a mushroom soup followed by a crispy duck salad over lettuce, rocket (arugala), warm pear, and melon, topped with a raspberry vinaigrette.  It was very good.

I decided not to get dessert in the restaurant, but head over to Bosko, a Polish ice cream store with two 20+-minute lines out front.  

I was curious what made it so popular.  Among the unusual flavors they offered were:

Peanut halvah
Poppy seed
Kinder surprise
Nesquik
Kangus (sort of like Golden Grahams)
Stracciatella (chocolate chip)
Chocolate
Vege Oreo
Mascarpone with fruit

I got a single scoop of chocolate.  It was very good, but I’m not sure it really was worth that wait.

The Warsaw 'Rising

Our hotel here in Warsaw is conveniently located.  That’s about it when it comes to praises.  The students all commented on how small the shower and bathrooms are (one compared it to being on a submarine).  The good news is that we only have one more night here.

After the long, overnight train where so few students got restful sleep, I delayed the start of today’s class until 10 am.  Our goal this morning was the Museum of the Warsaw ‘Rising.  While very well known in Poland, few non-Poles have heard of it.  This is because for over 40 years, the Polish Community Party did everything it could to suppress the memory of it.  At 5 pm on 1 August 1944, the Home Army, the largest underground in Europe launched a rebellion against German rule in Warsaw.  In a matter of hours, the Germans were successfully driven out of much of the city.

The goal of the ‘Rising was to free the Polish capital before Soviet troops entered.  The Soviets had already created a communist-led provisional government in Lublin, and the Home Army and the Polish Government in exile in London wanted Warsaw to be independent and run by the Polish government.  As Soviet forces approached the east bank of the Visła River, the Home Army acted. 

The decision was controversial among the Home Army and Polish Government leaders because while the Home Army had enough weapons to drive the Germans away, they couldn’t hold the city against a sustained counter attack.  The Home Army’s plan depended on Stalin coming to their aid by continuing its advance across Poland.  This was a fatal mistake.

Stalin’s forces halted their advance and he, for a while, refused to allow American planes seeking to aid the Poles, to refuel in Soviet territory. Eventually, Stalin relented, but only after he realized that the air drops had limited effectiveness (most of the supplies fell in the river or the German zone).  As the Germans advanced through Warsaw, they destroyed the city.  When the Woła well, all 40,000 inhabitants were massacred.  First the historic renaissance-era city center burned, followed by the surrounding neighborhoods.  By October, Warsaw was forced to surrender to the Germans, for a second time.  Nearly 200,000 (out of 900,000) Varsovians were dead and the city was little more than a pile of rubble.  Almost all the remaining population was deported to internment camps, concentration camps, or to Germany for forced labor.  When Soviet forces finally cross the river in January, less than 1,000 people still lived in the ruins of the Polish capital.

Warsaw was so badly damaged that it wasn’t clear if it would be rebuilt.  If you search for images of the 1948 Monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, look for one that shows the area around the monument; you’ll see that there’s only rubble. 

The Museum of the Warsaw ‘Rising is not the world’s most coherent museum.  The numbered signs for museum sections, for example, no longer match the numbers in the official plan.  Still, one can get a pretty clear sense of the course of the ‘Rising and the massive losses endured by Warsaw despite their heroic struggle.  The end of the exhibit there’s a 3D computer recreation of the ruins of Warsaw a few months after Soviet forces retook it.  It’s devastating.

We headed over to the reconstructed Old Town, walking from the rebuilt Warsaw Castle 

to the rebuilt Old Town Square (they used Canaletto paintings to get the colors of the buildings right.  

I gave the students an hour and a half to get lunch and do some souvenir shopping, pointing out a few good places to buy amber.  I headed over to a milk bar I like just outside the Barbican.  A milk bar is a communist-era institution that’s really just an old-fashioned cafeteria.  You buy your food and the grandmothers pass it to you through a hole in the wall.

Afterwards, we walked down to the Umschlagplatz (deportation square), where we went over the fate of the 300,000 Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto who were sent here between July and September 1942, and from here sent to Treblinka Death Camp, where virtually all of them were gassed on arrival.  Nearby is the monument to ghetto fighters at Miła 18.  The bodies of the 100 fighters who died here, including their commander, the 23-year old Mordechai Anielewicz, and many civilians who had taken refuge in the largest of the bunkers in the ghetto, still lie under the one-story high pile of rubble.

Along the way, I noticed some anti-Semitic graffiti showing the Star of David on the gallows, had been drawn on a wall near the Old Town.

 

I took the students back to the hotel.  I think they are going out tonight to the free concert next door.  They went last night and had a very good time.  All evening, trams have been dropping off 100s of young Poles to go to tonight’s event. 

I went instead to Nowy Świat to Blikle Café, a very upscale café on a street closed to traffic on the weekends.  Instead of cars, it’s full of Poles strolling in the late afternoon sunshine.  I ordered a Kremowka (also known and a Napoleonka) and a cappuccino and read today’s paper, while watching the parade of Varsovians and tourists walking past. 

It was a little late in the afternoon for such a rich dessert, so I knew it would affect my appetite for dinner.  In the end, all I ate later was a roll and some orange juice.

Now it’s time to start packing up before I go to bed.

New Things

Last time I took students to Vienna, several of the students became convinced the hotel was haunted.  I chalked that up to one student who believed any building older than 50 years was haunted, and a sociology student who decided to stoke their fears by telling them he was hearing moans and other noises.  This year, however, several other students told me they thought the hotel was haunted (without knowing anything about the prior class).  One told me she had heard a child running in the hall at 3 and 4 am, but never heard a door open. The other told me that someone or something had suddenly knocked the fan over.  Haunted or not, I like this hotel, its buffet, and its location, so we’re coming back in two years, ghost or no ghost.

Normally, when we finish in Vienna we head on to Budapest, but I’ve had so many logistical problems in Budapest the last two times, I decided to go right to Warsaw.  The problem is that the overnight train to Warsaw doesn’t leave until 10:50 pm, but we check out of the hotel in the morning.  How should we spend the rest of the day?

I put together a plan:  tour the Jewish Museum in Vienna and the Stadttempel, have lunch in the Naschmarkt, tour Schloß Schönbrunn, dinner in the Altstadt (perhaps at Trześniewskis), and then dessert and drinks at Café Landtmann before picking up our luggage in storage from the hotel and heading off to Wien Hauptbahnhof.  It would have all worked like a charm except for one thing:  Thursday was the Catholic feast of Corpus Christi.

My first clue should have been when the Jewish Museum told me that the synagogue would be closed for a holiday.  Holiday?  I thought.  What holiday?  I checked the Jewish calendar to see if I overlooked something, but nothing was there.  Maybe it’s something local.

I only found out Thursday morning when I discovered all the shops were closed, including the tobacconist, where I had intended to buy our metro day passes.  As I walked to the nearest station for a machine, I could see all stores were closed.  I had already confirmed the museum was open, so we went and toured what for me was a new presentation.  Gone were the cheesy holograms on the 3^rd floor, replaced by a good chronological history.

Eichmann’s office’s chart on their success in expropriating and expelling Austrian Jews was chilling.

Their temporary exhibition was on merchant culture in Austria and I met two cousins, one from Australia, the other from the U.S.  The woman from New York turned out to be a 94-year old survivor.  As a Mischling (only a mother was Jewish), she was spared from wearing the Jewish star, and could go out to buy food, but she couldn’t marry, or go to university.  All she would tell me of her experiences during the war is that the Austrians were worse than the Germans.  I asked her if she would be willing to talk to my students, but she declined, saying that she gets very emotional when she goes over this.

I met my students and we headed over to the Naschmarkt.  The day was getting hot and I figured I’d find a nice shady and cool place to eat in the market, but no, the entire market was closed for the holiday.  We ended up going to Hauptbahnhof just to find something decent to eat.  In the meantime, I bought Mozart Kugeln to surprise the students with later.

From there we headed out to Schloß Schönbrunn, Empress Maria Theresa’s out of town, but now in town palace.  I bought timed tickets, but we couldn’t enter until 4:28 and it was only 3:10.  I figured we would stroll through the gardens, which were lovely, but it was so, so hot.  Every time we passed a water fountain, I urged the students to drink and then top off their bottles.

The fountains and gardens really were lovely, and were even enjoyable in the shade.

Finally, our turn came to tour the house and we got our audio guides and made our way through the crowds.  Signs insisted that all photos, even with flash, were prohibited, but I did manage to sneak one shot of the small ballroom, and helped another student get a shot of the main ballroom.

By the time we finished it was after 5:30, so we made our way back to Stephensplatz for dinner.  I hoped to go to Trześniewskis, which I knew was open until 7:30 pm, except on holidays, it turns out, when they close at 5 pm.  Nothing was going my way, it seemed.  After 20 minutes of walking, I finally founded a bakery where I could get a sandwich.  Afterwards, I headed over to Aida for a coffee and to read the paper.

At 7:30 we met to go to Café Landtmann.  It took faster than I thought, and I didn’t want to show up really early for my 8 pm reservation, so I tried to stroll leisurely to the Ring.  As it happens, Vienna Pride opened their fair and booths virtually opposite the café, so we took a quick walk over.

When we got to the café, our table was waiting in the climate controlled outdoor area.  I bought the students one dessert and one non-alcoholic drink.  Unfortunately, on such a hot day, the café had sold out of strawberry ice cream.  In the end, though, everyone was very happy with what they ordered.

I ended up with the nuß krokant becher, somewhat similar to what I got on the boat in Dresden.  It had vanilla and walnut ice cream, along with chocolate sauce, nuts, crocant (a kind of nut brittle), whipped cream, and waffle tubes.  It was very good.

Everything went well with picking up our luggage and getting to the train.  With only one other male passenger in the group, I had no choice but to share a sleeping compartment with a student; the only time I ever do.  The nine female students were split between three compartments. 

Several of the students are suffering from bad colds and congestion, and as the train began to move, a few of them started to develop motion sickness.  I went from cabin to cabin urging any who felt sick to lie flat on their backs and close their eyes.  That seems to have worked.  Only about a third of the students (plus me) slept well on the train.  The others had difficulty getting used to the train’s movements. 

I wasn’t able to get our usual hotel in Warsaw, but I booked one in the same building.  I was kind of wondering how that would work, but it turns out that this building is shared by three hotels, each with their own staff, accommodations, and breakfast.  The one we’re in seems definitely down market from the other. That explains why it was so cheap. 

After a so-so breakfast, we headed out to tour the fragments of the ghetto.  After some difficulty we found the last remaining pieces of the ghetto wall, and I talked about the effort to save them from the Polish communist government.  I also brought photos of the wall’s construction.

From there we toured the Nozyk Synagogue, which provided an opportunity to explain aspects of Jewish religious culture.

I treated the students to lunch at Zapiecek, a chain restaurant specializing in pierogis.  In the past, pierogis quickly become the students’ favorite food in Poland.

Last time, we toured the Polin Museum as individuals, but the museum is simply to jam packed to see that way, particularly for students with no background in Jewish history or culture, so this year I hired a guide.  This was the right decision; she really helped by highlighting the most important aspects of the museum’s collection.

The museum is really well designed and covers a rich and complex topic very well.  The guide spent a fair amount of time on the Holocaust section, but that worked well with the topic of our class.  I was really surprised how much she managed to cover in just two hours.

Before we left the area, I showed them the two monuments to the ghetto uprising (the first, from 1946, and the more famous, from 1948).  I also talked about Jan Karski and recounted, while fighting back tears, what he witnessed in the ghetto and his efforts to get the western powers to intervene on behalf of Polish Jewry.

We barely made it back to the hotel before pouring rain hit.  Luckily, it lifted before we left for Ec Chaim (in English spelling Etz Chaim), a reform synagogue in Warsaw, very close to our hotel. The students (only one of whom is Jewish) weren’t sure what to expect and since I had never been there, I didn’t know what to expect either.  As it happens, there was another smaller group of English speakers there, so the rabbi did his sermon in English.

I was surprised by how Orthodox the prayerbook (in Hebrew and Polish) was; it was not even conservative, let alone reform.  The melodies, on the other hand, were exactly the melodies they sing at American Jewish summer camps.  A rather strange mixture.

I forced the students to sit and talk with the Poles over dinner, but it was rather hard; in part, a few of the Poles told me, because they too were nervous about talking to the Americans (not sure why).  I had a long chat with the rabbi, who is from Tashkent (though of Polish heritage).  His family moved to Central Asia to escape the Nazis.

That’s about all for now.  Time to do laundry and go to bed.