Vienna Means Bling

Schonbrunn Palace from the Neptune Fountain

We spent a very nice three days in Vienna, which really wasn't long enough. It was a helpful stopping over point between Auschwitz in Poland and our next big stop, Slovenia. Our originally scheduled Vienna AirBnB fell through at the last minute so we chatted with AirBnB and they were able to help us get a different one, which ended up being the nicest one we've stayed in yet.

Bill in our fancy AirBnB

St. Stephen's cathedral had a really cool colored tile roof, which really sets it apart from all the other cathedrals we've seen. Also, it looks pretty new because it is. Although the original structure was started in 1137, the church (especially the roof) was largely destroyed in WWII. The south side roof pattern shows the two-headed eagle which is the symbol of the Habsburg dynasty, which ruled Vienna and much of Europe for about 800 years. You hear a lot about the Habsburgs when in Vienna. They were a big deal for a very long time. In fact, the Holy Roman Emperor throne was held by a Habsburg for over 300 years. 

St. Stephen's cathedral with the unique colorful tiled roof. 

Tile roof of St. Stephen's showing the 2-headed eagle symbol of the Hapsburgs

There were several Habsburg-related palaces/museums to choose from in Vienna but because of our limited time there, we picked just the Royal Treasury and also took a day trip out to the Habsburg summer palace called Schonbrunn Palace. 

The Royal Treasury was pretty ridiculous in terms of opulence, just as you might imagine for an insanely wealthy, very powerful family. There were crowns covered in jewels, richly embroidered clothing for coronations, religious relics that were said to be directly from Christ's time, a narwhal tusk (which was fabled to be a unicorn's horn),  and lots and lots of GOLD. These people really liked over-the-top bling.

Crown, Scepter, and Orb of Kaiser Rudolfs II

One of the many royal gowns 

 Golden pitcher and basin for Imperial baptisms

Gold, gold, and more gold

A turquoise jewel, bigger than an egg

A crown covered in jewel

Schonbrunn Palace was very much like Versailles in France.  However, the palace seemed to be even better preserved and the gardens were almost as huge and lovely. We love a good maze garden and this palace had several of them. Empress Maria Theresa, the only female ruler of the Habsburg dynasty, had the palace remodeled in the mid-1700s, and each room seemed to have a distinct theme and decor. Notably, president Kennedy and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev met at the palace in 1961.

A side view of the Schonbrunn palace from one of the gardens

We love garden mazes!

Schonbrunn Palace and gardens from the top of the Gloriette

The Gloriette at the top of the hill above Schonbrunn Palace

The Vienna Stadtpark (City Park) was quite nice. We walked through it on the way from our neighborhood to the major city sites. It was usually filled with people lounging among the many musical icon statues. One afternoon we spent several hours hanging out here and relaxing like the locals, who by the way are called Weiners (Vienna is spelled Wein locally).

One of the many statues in Vienna Stadtpark dedicated to musicians

Lounging in Vienna Stadtpark

Auschwitz (His and Her Perspectives)

We visited Auschwitz/Birkenau in Poland on August 5th, and it has invaded our thoughts, conversations, and dreams since. This is a LONG post, and downright serious, so get some coffee. My post is concrete, including details of the day and facts that I've learned. Bill's is a more philosophical look at how the Holocaust happened and what we need to do to prevent it from happening again.

Kenzi's Thoughts: 

Auschwitz was all kinds of awful. Worse in some ways than I imagined, because I learned much more than I knew before. Turns out it was really the nearby Birkenau concentration camp (called Auschwitz II) that killed more people than Auschwitz I. The day we visited was beautiful, hot, sunny. 

We arrived in a group of seven people, with a local Polish driver, whose Grandpa is a survivor of Auschwitz but won't ever speak about it. Our arrival was a bit chaotic as our driver flirted with the lady parking attendants, then ushered us quickly past the ticket line, through security, got us decked out with headphones, and dropped us with our larger tour group. Unfortunately, you cannot enter Auschwitz during the peak hours of the day without a tour guide (thus the headphones so the tour guides don't have to shout). 

We immediately passed into Auschwitz underneath the notorious "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign, which means "work sets you free" in German. Sheesh. What a loaded phrase. 1.1 million people died at Auschwitz/Birkenau, approximately 90% were Jewish (the rest were Roma gypsies, Russian prisoners, homosexuals, handicapped, and people from other ethnicities). The vast majority were killed in the gas chambers. Most of the death camps were in the land that used to be Poland (before Germany took it over): Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Majdanek. I'm guessing that putting these death camps in Germany would have been too close to home for the Nazis. 

The victims that didn't die in the gas chambers died from being worked to death, from starvation, from diseases due to lack of sanitation (imagine dying from diarrhea), from exhaustion, from cruel medical experiments performed on them, from freezing during the winter. The suffering they experienced is unimaginable. The loss of dignity, privacy, basic human rights, and hope would have been unbearable. Perhaps some died from overwhelming grief. I think I would have. 

Building 11 at Auschwitz I is notorious for being the building of no return. This is where prisoners went when they got in trouble. The basement was full of dark prison cells. Sometimes the Nazis crammed them so full of people and because the ventilation was lacking, everyone suffocated. I think the worst cells in Building 11 were the "standing cells". They measured approximately 3 feet x 3 feet. You had to crawl through a tiny, short doorway to get into them. The prisoners weren't usually alone in there. They had to share this standing cell with sometimes up to four people. There was no room to sit, thus the name standing cell. Occasionally, they had to spend all night in the standing cell, likely not sleeping at all, and then go to work the next day like normal. 

Our guide did a nice job of pointing out day to day issues that I hadn't thought of before. There was no soap, there was no toilet paper (Lord knows what the ladies did during their periods), there were no clean clothes. Often when people were killed in the gas chambers, their clothes were given to new prisoners. There was also no grass, like there is today. The camps were mostly mud and Auschwitz leaders had not yet solved the sewage problem. So prisoners walked through mud and sewage every day.  Worse yet, the crematoria were often backlogged, so there would be piles of dead bodies waiting to be burned. I can only imagine the smells: sweat, sewage, rotting bodies, burning bodies.

Two things especially struck me: 

1. The Nazi guards would lie to the prisoners entering the gas chambers, even up to the VERY last minute. They would tell them to strip down to naked, because they were going to take showers. Some of these changing rooms had shelves and hooks for their personal belongings. The Nazis would even tell them to remember which hook/shelf they left their clothes on so they could retrieve it after their shower. I can only imagine lying to the victims made the job of killing them a bit easier. 

2. Because all the Holocaust pictures I've seen were in black and white, I was startled by the colors of the victims' personal belongings. We saw a giant room full of kitchenware that the people had brought with them, because of course, they had been told they were getting "resettled", so why wouldn't you bring your favorite tea kettle with you? Their kitchenware was blue, green, red, yellow. The colors brought them to life. Likewise, there was a room of thousands of the victims' shoes. Most were brown leather, but occasionally, you'd see a pair of colored women's heels. Dressy shoes. Again, why wouldn't you bring your favorite fancy red shoes? 

Walking through one of the gas chambers was chilling. It took up to 20 minutes for the poison gas, Zyklon B to kill everyone. The suffering of those last minutes is unfathomable. 

Much of the dirty work of killing hundreds of people a day was delegated by the Nazis to a group of male prisoners called Sonderkommandos. These poor souls would go into the gas chamber after everyone had died and it had been ventilated. They would collect glasses, gold teeth, and anything else of value from the dead. Then they would collect the bodies for burning in the crematoriums. I cannot imagine a more difficult job. Every three months, all the Sonderkommandos were killed and replaced with a new generation of Sonderkommandos. 

The beauty of the grounds today was so deceptive. Both camps had clean rows of brick buildings, green grass, blue sky, white clouds. One might be convinced that it was a college campus. Except it wasn't. The thing is, there's nothing wrong with the place, the ground, the trees. What's wrong is the history that played out on that land out in the middle of the Polish countryside. What people did to each other there. 

The scariest part is that the perpetrators could have been me. Countless people were involved in the Holocaust in peripheral roles. They might not have personally murdered anybody, but they were a part of the larger Nazi machine. Accountants, cooks, resellers, drivers, family members of guards, etc. Everyone was brainwashed into believing that certain people were bad, that Utopia would be achieved if the bad people were gone. It really makes me wonder what false beliefs I've adopted. And more than that, it makes the comments of a certain presidential candidate regarding Mexicans and Muslims all the more terrifying. 

I cannot imagine what the Holocaust would have done to the victims' faith. Bill told me the story of a prisoner who said that God would have to ask for his forgiveness for putting him through the torture of the concentration camp. 

As you can see, we have a lot to say about our visit to Auschwitz. It is a haunting place to visit, and we've done quite a bit of reading and talking since our visit. It's a place that sticks with you, one that probably everyone should visit. 

God help us not to repeat the past.

Bill's Thoughts:

Much has been written about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, the following is my perspective after visiting Auschwitz, pretty much a kids book report compared to what others have done, maybe I'm just stating the obvious, for sure I'm making huge over-simplifications, but this is the best I've got. I sincerely hope I'm not offensive in anyway to the Jewish population.

Auschwitz is the infamous Concentration/Death camp that the Nazi's ran in Poland. It was an industrialized means of murdering Jewish people at a scale never seen before. More than 1 million perished at Auschwitz and the few survivors were subjected to astounding atrocities. I'm not Jewish and I only have a very few friends and acquaintances who are direct descendants of holocaust survivors so I feel my background on what was done is thin. I think it is worthwhile for everyone to understand not only what happened in the Holocaust but the circumstances that led to the genocide of Jewish Europeans as this will go a long way to prevent it from happening again. This was perpetrated by humans just like you and me and it could happen again.

Perspective

Again, I just can't understand how sane and rational people could do what was done. Putting things in perspective, I watched a figurative army of doctors, nurses and hospital staff literally work around the clock for a week to fix my wife's trachea issue, dramatically improving the quality of a single life on this earth. On the opposite end of the scale we have the Nazis, a literal army, trying to kill as many innocent lives as they can. The same basic skills are at the disposal of each army here: intelligent, educated and motivated people. How? To prevent we must understand how.

We glossed over the start of hostilities toward the Jewish population in the post about Berlin but to recap: a bullying, fanatical leader was able to literally kill his opposition and unite the remaining people with a campaign of fear and hate against what he painted as a common enemy in Jewish people and other minorities. After sowing his seeds of hate, he reaped a bloody harvest in the genocide of European Jews.

Genocide

Genocide means killing, or attempting to kill off, an entire race or religion, the aim is to indiscriminately kill every last man, woman and child of the group so that they no longer exist, this is beyond war, beyond occupation, it is extermination and it is about as reprehensible a human act as one can imagine.

For background Wikipedia has the steps that precede a genocide. They start with a division of "us and them" in the population driven by religious or ethnic lines, progress to forcing symbols on the group, then dehumanization where the group is treated as something other than human. After that things start to escalate to organization for killing, polarization against the group via propaganda in an attempt to bring the entire population to support the genocide, physical separation of the group, extermination (murdering), then finally denial.

Evidence

Auschwitz holds key evidence that proves the Nazi atrocities really happened, despite their best efforts to cover all traces. This serves to prevent denial and force accountability. At it's most fundamental level, I think this is the function of Auschwitz now, there is a record: papers, pictures, mountains of shoes, kitchen  cookware, and disturbingly large mountains of  human hair from the murdered, meant to be used for mattresses. There are holocaust deniers and much of the key evidence to refute them is held at Auschwitz.

Ideology 

The road to genocide started with the division of the German people into the Jewish and non-Jewish and then treating the Jewish people as if they were not human.

In the case of the Nazis, this division was driven by an ideology that tried to sell the idea that the only thing preventing the Utopian society was the Jewish population. I'll steal words from my favorite author, Steven Pinker, where he talks about ideology being one of the prime drivers of violence "usually involving a vision of  utopia, that justifies unlimited violence in pursuit of unlimited good."

The murdering, however cold and calculating, was not the least bit humane, it was often accompanied by horrible sadism and made no attempt to be humane. The murdered were, many times before death, subjected to atrocities that defy description. Stanislaw Smajzner describes Nazi SS soldiers swinging infants by their feet into concrete walls and them falling down dead in front of their parents, moments later the parents are ushered into gas chambers where they die excruciatingly painful deaths. They were all condemned to death so the SS could do as they pleased. The only act that seemed marginally out of bounds was rape, because this undermined the casting of the Jewish people as subhuman.

All the victims' possessions were turned around and used to support the Nazi war machine: clothing, jewelry, gold fillings and anything else of value. Meanwhile, a small fraction of the condemned would receive a life extension in misery by doing manual labor for the murdering of their fellow Jews, day in and day out, not only watching but helping clean up the murders before they too would be shot or forced into the gas chambers because they knew too much (you can learn more about these Sondenkommandos here). The few survivors of the camps were subjected to beatings, humiliating human conditions, humiliation and being forcibly complicit in the murder of their fellow Jews. There is ample evidence that 6 million Jews died at the hands of Nazis, some of which may have been the most intelligent people of the time, not that it makes any difference, they are people and deserved the right to live.

Prevention

Stealing Pinker's ideas again, a driver in preventing, or reducing violence is empathy which "prompts us to feel the pain of others and to align their interests with our own." Pinker's other three "angels" are applicable as well but let's take a closer look at empathy.

The book Uncles Tom's Cabin is an excellent example of empathy reducing violence. People read Uncle Tom's Cabin and the abolitionist movement started to gain momentum. Understanding that slaves were people too, understanding their suffering and their quality of life recruited abolitionists.

In the same way, we can reduce or prevent future violence by developing empathy for the past victims of violence, by learning about their ordeal, seeing them as human beings and then recognizing circumstances where this is presently happening or could happen and doing whatever can be done to prevent it.

Honoring human rights by continuing to see everyone, including our foes, as humans, especially under the most trying circumstances, is what this essentially means.

After visiting Auschwitz, I spent hours reading stories of Holocaust survivors and I at least feel as though I'm now in a better place of understanding. If you're unable to visit a site like Auschwitz I urge you to read some of the stories of what it was like for these people, these fellow humans.

Not a very good picture, but here's the "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign

Pellets of Zyklon B, which emits poison gas for the gas chambers

Empty canisters of Zyklon B

Lots of colorful kitchenware that the victims had brought with them

A suitcase, labeled with a victim's name, in the room full of shoes

The Nazis were decent record keepers. They tracked prisoners with photos and numbers.

A priest who died in place of a fellow prisoner. 

The basement of Building 11, the place of no return. This is where the prison cells, including the "Standing cells" were. 

At Birkenau, a photo of the train emptying and people being sorted. 

The train tracks at Birkenau. Most people (especially women, children and elderly) exited the train and were immediately marched to the gas chambers. 

A train car. Often people died in the train cars on the way to the concentration camps. 

The Nazis set fire to the gas chambers after liberation in order to hide the evidence. These are the remains of the gas chamber that killed the vast majority of the victims at Auschwitz/Birkenau. 

Same as above

One of the MANY barracks at Birkenau that held prisoners. The Nazis would cram as many as 700 people into these buildings.  

Inside the barracks

Lots of barbed wire fencing and watch towers

Prague: Shopping, Spires, and Stalin

We arrived in Prague admittedly a bit tired of playing the tourist role, so we took it a little easier, and also spent a bit of time booking some future travels (which takes a surprising amount of research and time). We had a few days with some rain, so that helped us slow down a bit. 

Old Town Square in Prague at night

The city view from the Prague Castle grounds

Prague was largely spared damage from WWII and therefore has a lot to show off. It is now a huge tourist destination. It has really beautiful buildings, that cover the spectrum of building styles: Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Cubist/Art Nouveau, and of course, Communist. Don't be deceived by the exteriors of the buildings though, most of them were filled with malls, shops and other retail establishments. Prague has a surprising amount of shopping! (Stalin would not approve...)

Just one of Prague's many gorgeous buildings

In spite of "taking it easy", we still managed to hit quite a few Prague highlights. We visited the infamous Prague castle on a rainy day. It is a sprawling castle grounds (according to the Guinness Book of World Records, it's the largest ancient castle in the world). With history dating back to the 9th century, it has been the seat of power for centuries and has multiple churches inside the castle walls. The current President of the Czech Republic lives there. Sadly, the Crown Jewels were not on display the day we visited.

Outside of St. Vitus cathedral, within the Prague Castle grounds

Inside of St. Vitus cathedral

One of the dramatic entrances to the Prague Castle

Prague straddles the river Vltava. Currently, it has many bridges crossing the river, but the oldest and by far the most famous is the Charles Bridge. It has a number of statues along the sides, mostly of famous saints.

Us with the Charles Bridge on the left, Prague Castle in the back right

Wenceslas Square is where the roots of the Czech Republic lie. At the top of the square, there's a nice statue of King Wenceslas (born 907 AD) on a horse. King Wenceslas is like King Arthur, more fiction than fact, but still an inspirational historical figure for the Czech people. You may recognize the holiday song "Good King Wenceslas...".

Wenceslas Square

Wenceslas Statue at the top of Wenceslas Square

We went to a symphony concert at the famous art nouveau Municipal building in Prague. My (Kenzi) observation is that many people in Prague play instruments. Music seems like a big deal here. We saw lots of regular Prague folks toting stringed instruments around town. 

Our symphony concert at the Municipal Building

We toured the Jewish History Museum. The most interesting part by far was the Old Jewish cemetery. From about 1400-1800, Jewish people were buried in this cemetery. It was such a small area, though, that they had to keep building up, so the Cemetery is quite a bit taller than the surrounding streets. Some parts of the Cemetery are 12 layers deep! And that's why there are so many gravestones in such a small area.

The Old Jewish Cemetery. In the back you can see another higher layer of graves beyond the wall. 

So many headstones at the Old Jewish Cemetery!

We visited the Communist Museum, an eclectic little place, sandwiched between a McDonald's and a casino (take that Communism!). It was a friendly reminder to be grateful that I've never experienced my own government coming at me with military tanks. Marxism sounds interesting on paper, but according to some estimates, the attempts to implement Marxist theories "cost around 100 million human victims." Ouch! Prague has been a democracy ever since the Berlin Wall fell in the fall of 1989. 

Prague's central square has an Old Town Hall building and on the side of this building is a famous astronomical clock, the oldest one that's still operating. It was first installed in 1410. It tracks the position of the sun and moon, and has an hourly show where the apostles march around, as well as a calendar representing the months. 

Prague's famous astronomical clock

Alfons Mucha, a Czech artist, spent 20 years working on a set of 20 huge(!) paintings that represent the history of the Czech people. These were fascinating, beautiful creations, and we learned a lot about the history of the Czech nation from viewing them.

One of Alfons Mucha's 20 Slav Epic paintings. They were huge! 

A closer look at one of Alfons Mucha's Slav Epic paintings

Finally, we visited a large moving statue of a metronome. It currently stands where a gigantic statue of Stalin used to stand. The uber-expensive ridiculous Stalin statue was only up for seven years before it was destroyed due to Khrushchev's anti-Stalin campaigns. Even within Communism, there were disagreements.

The Metronome

All in all, we had a very nice time in Prague, and appreciated a little down time. 

**NOTE: As of this year, the Czech Republic is now known as Czechia. It's never too late to change your name. 

Ich bin ein Berliner!

Germany's history is fraught with many dark episodes but it has emerged as a peaceful, compassionate country that takes every opportunity to learn from its past.

The Riechstag, Germany's legislature building

In Berlin, everywhere you go there are well thought out educational installations that detail what happened with the Nazis, World War II, and the East/West division. I (Bill) was 13 when the wall fell and while I knew even then it was a significant event, it's really hard to understand at that age what it really meant for the people of Germany. I even visited Berlin briefly in 1999 but it really took this past visit to internalize what life was like from WWII until now. Here is what the wall looked like from the memorial on Bernauer Strasse:

The wall and bleak "Death Strip" that encircled West Berlin for 39 years. This re-creation is at the Berlin Wall Memorial. 

Dark Days

I'll give a quick summary here because I feel like my history classes on this either faded beyond recognition or weren't there to begin with. The winners of WWII (France, USA, Russia, Britain) divided Germany; both the capital of Berlin and the entire country were divvied up into four parts. It didn't take long for disagreements between the Soviets and the three Western countries to create an impasse in deciding how Germany would be governed. Fully 1/6 of the East population left the communist areas for the West, so under the guise of protecting the people from the western "aggressors", the Soviets built a wall and imposed strict travel restrictions to stem the tide of emigration. The line between East and West Germany ran through many rural areas and as such wasn't nearly as divisive as the division of the city of Berlin itself. France, Britain and the US consolidated their sectors into what became known as West Berlin, which was essentially an island, located deep within East Germany.

Being an island surrounded by what amounted to hostile territory isn't an enviable position. It also was a problem for the East German (Soviet) authorities. Initially in Berlin, people could just walk across the street and be under the Western umbrella and people did just that. So a wall was built around West Berlin that literally went through the middle of a bustling city and the Soviets subsequently tried to choke out the Westerners to force the West to abandon the city with a blockade among other things.

The West broke the blockade with the heroic (and now textbook example of how to do airlifts) Berlin Airlift. Later the Mayor of West Berlin made pleas to not abandon the city, and US President Kennedy made a speech in Berlin that redoubled the resolve of support for West Berlin ("Ich bin ein Berliner.")

Meanwhile in the East the incentives to work were breaking down, productivity faltered, and eventually the Soviet system of governance proved untenable and in 1989 the Berlin wall fell, and Germany quickly reunited.

Its worth mentioning that all over Berlin when reading about the Cold War you see hat tips the things the US did to support the City. It's quite nice.

*I'm skipping major bits here and this is my own spin. You can read up on your own but this is my take.

Reunification

With 39 years of crappy productivity, the East was far behind the west in many benchmarks; cars were obsolete, power plants polluted heavily and were inefficient, on and on and on. The cost to bring East Germany up to the Western standard has been estimated at somewhere around $500B. A very small few of the Easterners are salty about the reunification, and the overwhelming majority are much happier for it. There are little reminders here and there that come from the East such as these funny guys that are on the crosswalk signs and are now very popular:

The Ampelmann, the icons from the East German crosswalk signs

And substantial scarring on buildings:

Damage from WWII that never got fixed

Above ground pipes that channel water around giant construction projects that are underway probably still bringing the East up to the West's standards:

Kenzi liked the pink pipes running around the City

Darker Still

While the divided Germany chapters were dark, darker still are the Nazi chapters of German history where a bullying, fanatical leader was able to literally kill his opposition and unite the remaining people with a campaign of fear and hate against what he painted as a common enemy in Jewish people and other minorities. Horrible atrocities were committed against that common enemy. I just don't understand how this could happen but, to paraphrase Holocaust Survivor Primo Levi, it did happen and it could happen again. In essence, we can bring meaning to the deaths of 6 million Jewish people and the other 44 million who died in WWII by learning from it and preventing it from happening again.

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

What it looks like inside the memorial, it feels as though there is no way out but up

After being demolished in WWII literally, morally, and figuratively, Berlin now is a vibrant, diverse city with fun loving people, many beautiful parks, river walks, and spectacular architecture.

Dancing along the riverfront

The Reichstag was in awful shape after the war. Now it's rebuilt and topped with a wonderful glass dome that has two spiral walkways that take you gradually up and then back down to the roof terrace while listening to an audio guide. There is also an elaborate system of mirrors and a moving sunshade the directs sunlight in to the legislative chamber below. The tour is all free!

Dome on top of the Reichstag

Mirrors directing sunlight into the legislature below

The enormous Victory Column celebrating victories in the Danish/Austro/Franco-Prussian wars of the 1860s and 1870s), rebuilt and relocated to the Tiergarten park:

Lady Victory, more properly the goddess of victory (the golden statue is nice too)

Crazy huge cathedral:

Huge cathedral... but this one is Protestant, not Catholic

Brandenburg Gate:

Back of the Brandenburg Gate, again, pretty well demolished in WWII but now looking pretty good.

In 2015 Germany accepted about 1 million Syrian refugees from the humanitarian disaster that Syria has become.

A car mechanic and computer scientist right out of Syria

We ran into several Syrians in Berlin, and these were the happiest people I've ever seen and by and large they are comprised of intelligent, grateful people that will be assets to Germany for decades to come. Bravo Germany.