The clouds that gathered as we left Romania for Hungary have stayed with us the whole week, and it has rained at least some part of every day. This has not impinged on our sightseeing very much, which is remarkable, although Deane has had some rainy driving conditions. We are out of the sunny lands and into the rainy ones, I guess.
We left Budapest on Monday and drove to Terezin (Theresienstadt), a village whose fortresses were used by the Germans as concentration camps between 1942 and 1945. The larger of the two fortresses, holding the village whose occupants were forced to leave their homes, became a Jewish ghetto and transport center. Because some people lived there for months or years, and because there was a house full of children, there was a vibrant culture in this camp, with literature, art and education. Some people survived the crowded and filthy conditions with starvation rations, but most were transported to Auschwitz sooner or later and murdered, including most of the children. What was left behind was a remarkable collection of drawings, poems and other evidence of the nature of life in the camp. The children's drawings were particularly heartrending. The camp was used as propaganda in 1944, to show the Red Cross that the “relocated” Jews were being treated well, so perhaps conditions were a bit better then. However, up to one fourth of the people who came through the camp died there of disease, overwork, or broken hearts (who can say?), necessitating a crematorium; ashes were thrown in the river.
The smaller fortress was a political prison for enemies of the occupying Germans, and there were thousands of executions there, adding to the death toll. In the small fortress, there was also an exhibit about a nearby work camp, Letrice, where men and women were sent to work until they died, so the whole area has a tragic and brutal past. The village has some occupants now, but the village still has a haunted and terribly sad feeling about it, and I wonder how it is possible to stay there. We were in the small fortress as the site was closing, and as we turned the corner to go out of the massive wooden doors, we saw that the doors were closed. My blood ran cold at the thought of spending a night there, but of course, we could walk right out. This was an unsettling place to visit, and raised more questions for me than I know how to give voice to.
From Terezin, we backtracked to Prague for our hotel. We had a full day to spend in Prague, and we took the metro to Wenceslas Square, walking to the Old City from there. Our first quest was to find the Unitarian Church, which was near the Charles Bridge according to their website map. We didn’t find the church at first, because the church is on the second floor of a building that also houses a blacklight theater, which seems to be a locally popular device. The Unitarians have regular services each Sunday in Czech, and twice a month in English. From the display they had in the lobby, seem to be more like American and British UUs than the Transylvanian Unitarians.
Next, we crossed the river to see the church housing the Infant of Prague, a wax statue of the Christ child purported to be given to the church by St. Theresa. The church is unassuming, unlike many of the churches with internationally famous icons we‘ve seen. We were not allowed to photograph inside, but you have all probably seen pictures of the Infant, dressed in richly decorated robes. Deane whispered, “It’s smaller than I expected,” and I felt the same way, given its huge life in imagery around the world. Less beautiful, too, I have to say, as the head was pallid and lifeless looking. Still, people, mostly women, came to the church in a steady small stream, kneeling and praying at the statue.
Now that we had seen the things we came to see, we had time to be tourists, and Prague is a wonderful town for that. Streets are clean and there are few cars permitted in the old section, the Old City is remarkably intact even if the statues are black with sooty pollution, and there are wonderful crafts and performances everywhere. So we enjoyed, visiting the Horological Tower, listening to jazz bands, and finding a few special gifts. Prague has an old Jewish Quarter as well, but almost all the Jews were taken to one of the death or work camps, so what remains is mostly a memory. My favorite site was the John Lennon Wall, a wall of graffiti painted and erased over and over when the Czech Republic was beginning to try to break free of Communism, still dynamic today.
From Prague, we went to Czestochowa. In the Cathedral there is a black Madonna, painted by St. Luke according to legend, on a board from a table made by Jesus. Dating and the Byzantine style actually place the painting in the 5th century. The walls of the cathedral were hung with amber beads, silver amulets, crutches, and other tokens of gratitude for miraculous cures and prayers answered. On the day we visited, the sanctuary was crowded, so we could only see the painting from a distance.
The reason the cathedral was so crowded is that there was some sort of confirmation or children’s day, and hundreds of children, girls in white dresses, boys in suits, came into the sanctuary in groups and took turns reciting prayers or sang songs. It was quite touching, those high voices, and the parents and grandparents were enthralled.
Leaving Czestochowa the next morning, we drove to Auschwitz. This was a difficult visit, and I still feel the sadness of it. Auschwitz began as a political prison when the Germans first occupied Poland -- half the lawyers and many of the intelligentsia of Krakow were imprisoned there. But the site was soon selected to be the major death camp in the Nazi’s attempt to kill all the Jews in Europe, along with gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and others. They came much closer to succeeding than it is possible for me to conceive. Auschwitz was not large enough to hold all the prisoners selected for slave labor along with the thousands and tens of thousands of Jews and others facing immediate death, so a second adjoining camp, Birkenau, was built. The exhibits at Auschwitz were horrifying and agonizing -- thousands of children’s shoes, hair from 40,000 women which was to be sold to the textile industry, prayer shawls obviously precious to their owners, crutches and prosthetic limbs whose owners were not fit for work -- everything was sorted and reused in one way or another, with terribly cold-blooded efficiency. Political prisoners were also kept in their own section of Auschwitz along with prisoners singled out for punishments of unimaginable brutality and neglect. This picture is of the execution wall.
Birkenau is so vast it covers the land as far as the eye can see. Once the gas chambers and crematoria were finished, it was here that the transport trains arrived and prisoners were sorted. These were people who had been told they were being relocated, so they brought their most precious and important belongings with them. Most people, especially Jews, especially young children, especially pregnant women, especially the elderly and infirm, were simply gassed without being counted or registered in any way, which is one of the reasons that it is so hard to say definitively how many people died at Auschwitz. Our guide said 1.5 million was a fair estimate; it is also an unimaginable number. There were eventually too many ashes to bury, so they were trucked to area farms and worked into the soil. When it was clear the war was lost, the Nazis began trying to destroy the evidence of the camps, so what remains of Birkenau are the tracks, some chimneys, and the twisted wreckage of the gas chambers and crematoria. There is a monument, but I did not find it as moving as the mute site itself.
There were many, many visitors, including Polish and Israeli schoolchildren, and Israeli army personnel. Because of the crowds, we had to go through Auschwitz with a guide, herded from building to building, with so many horribly difficult sights to take in and no time to be still. It impressed the shocking scale of these camps and this murderous operation on us all, and when the guide asked at the end of the tour if there were any questions, everyone was speechless.
We left Auschwitz for Krakow, where we spent the night and then had a day to see the Old City. We started towards the Warwal Castle, where a 12th century cathedral has the tombs of Kings and Queens of Poland, and Saint Stanislaus, a (good) bishop murdered by a (bad) king; he is the patron saint of Poland. On our way, we passed a memorial to Katyn, where more than ten thousand Polish dissenters were murdered by the Russian secret police in 1940 -- it was this even that the Polish president was going to Russia to commemorate when the plane crashed, killing him, his wife, and many others. Poland did not had an easy time of it in the 20th century. The cathedral was crowded to bursting with school groups and tours -- at one point we were trapped in the back of an airless crypt while a guide lectured dozens of teenagers crammed into the tiny space for what felt like far too long. We went to see the Sigismund bell, not realizing that this involved climbing rickety wooden steps up to the top of the belltower, propelled by the groups behind us -- no turning back for acrophobic me!
In the Krezmierz, the old Jewish quarter, we saw a synagogue that had survived the war fairly intact because it was used by the Germans to stable horses. It had been fully restored and was lovely. Other synagogues were turned into museums or stood small and threadbare. The whole quarter seemed to be almost abandoned other than tourists like us, staring at maps on street corners. I thought of the area as it once must have been, vibrant and alive, and my heart broke all over again.
Krakow has a beautiful market square from the 14th century, which is still a center of culture and conviviality today. There was a college fair going on, and a jazz band played on a stage. Outdoor cafes ringed the square. We visited St. Mary’s Basilica, but decided that paying to visit was enough -- we did not pay an additional fee to take pictures. I had a small pang of regret, though, as the painted interior was amazingly beautiful, with teal skies and gold stars, frescos of Bible stories, angels, and all manner of decorative adornment. Outside, a trumpeter played from the belltower on the hour, cheered on by crowds and stopping mid-song in memory of a trumpeter struck by an arrow centuries ago.
We left Krakow and turned north and east, driving all day and stopping near Wittstock, Germany for the night. It rained all day, and I was grateful for the chance to sit quietly with my thoughts and feelings. We stayed in a small pension and spa in a beautiful forested area. We had a fireside raclette dinner, softening the cheese by holding it over the fire on long skewers, then eating it with dipping sauces and garlic bread. We were the only ones eating, and I can’t imagine a more peaceful or romantic setting for a meal.
Today, Sunday, we left Germany for Denmark. We stopped in Jelling, where there are two huge burial mounds, side by side, tombs for King Gorm and his wife Queen Thyra in the tenth century. King Gorm’s son, King Harald Bluetooth,converted to Christianity and dragged pagan Denmark along with him. He was responsible for two carved stones, one huge and one much smaller. The larger one with the first image of Jesus in Denmark, and is considered the “birth certificate“ of the nation. These smaller runestone contain the first written mention of Denmark, so is considered the “name certificate of Denmark.” After climbing the dolmens and visiting the church which is between the two, we drove on to Aalborg, where we are staying tonight on our way to Norway.
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