And All the Rest from Prague

Mary and I returned to Prague from Romania on October 8th and spent another four days before returning to San Francisco. Highlights included our attendance at Prague's 'other' symphony, the Czech National Symphony, at one time headed by Rafael Kubelik. The standout of the evening was Matthias Goerne's singing of most of the songs from Mahler's Das Knabe Wunderhorn.

We hiked to the castle, visited St Vitus Cathedral, but missed the Jewish neighborhood because it was closed for Sukkot.

I had toyed with the notion of seeing Terezin but I wasn't sure that it would be a fitting end to such an otherwise enjoyable trip. But we went, and spend almost the entire day traveling to and from, as well as visiting several different parts of the Thieresenstadt concentration camp. Terezin is the Czech name for the town, Thieresenstadt the German name for the camp.

We arrived on an appropriately gloomy day. Standing in front of a park that fronts on the main exhibit building, I noticed leaves falling to the ground. This was a stark reminder of soot, falling to the ground like snow in Schindler's List. But it was the ash of women, men, and their children, destroyed in the ovens.

A prison barracks before the Nazis took it over, Terezin housed the notorious Gavrilo Princip, who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo in June, 1914. Princip died of tuberculosis in this camp in 1918. Death from disease and starvation pervaded Terezin through and past the 1945 liberation. More deaths of inmates occurred in May and June of 1945 (of Typhoid, incurred earlier in the year) than the entire year prior, and this was after the end of the War.

The Germans used the camp as a "showcase" for a visiting Red Cross delegation in 1942. They also produced a movie showing the Jewish inmates playing soccer and enjoying outings. The reality was uncovered by artist inmates, surreptitiously drawing scenes from daily life. These are devastating in their quantity. Apparently a few of these got out to the Red Cross team before their visit. They showed the drawings to their Nazi hosts. After the Red Cross departure, all of the identifiable artists were put to death. And the movie? Joseph Goebbels refused to let it screen, because it pictured Jews enjoying sports and conversations, like 'normal people'. Goebbels wanted Jews only to remind people of rats.

In a nutshell, Thieresenstadt was a way station to something much worse. The camp was a "sort and dispatch" facility. Women aged 18-40 and men 18-50 were considered able bodied and were employed as slave labor. Those falling outside of these boundaries were transported to be killed, except for healthy children. The children were brought up by other inmates, normally not their parents who were separated from families prior to their arrival. When children turned 18, if they had survived and were healthy enough to work, they joined the slave gangs.

Murdering of the inmates was carried out by shipments east to Auschwitz, Sobibor, or really anywhere in Poland. People were gathered into manifests of 1,000 and their names were tracked through to the recording of their execution.

But several thousand inmates died in Thieresenstadt, due to poor nutrition, non-existent sanitation facilities, leading in combination to epidemics of typhus, typhoid, and whooping cough.

Most amazingly, in 1990 someone opened a door while cleaning up an old building that had been part of the city during the War. Inside was a secret Synagogue. No one knows who built it, but it clearly was used by some of the inmates. On the wall is most of a prayer. It's content is "God, we will never forget you. Please don't forget us."

Prior to arriving at the camp, we passed a neighborhood on the outskirts of Prague where Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated in early 1943. Heydrich, the architect of the Wannsee Conference (where the Final Solution was shaped), was appointed overseer of Czechoslovakia by Hitler. The Allies parachuted in two Czech partisans who observed Heydrich's movements, and then ambushed him while his open limousine slowed for a sharp turn onto the main highway.

Hitler was so upset that he ordered an entire nearby Czech town to be liquidated. All men were taken and shot the same day. The women were separated from their children, and sent off to prison camps. The children, numbering some 120 were all murdered, except for about 15 who had sufficiently "Aryan" features to qualify for adoption by German families.

Two pictures are worth noting. In the prison yard ( a fortress structure behind the Star of David that is pictured in the cemetery) you see a snack bar with blue signs advertising that food and drink can be found there. This is not the classiest place for a snack bar because it was the Gestapo snack and refreshment bar during the War. Prisoners who had worked all day in town had to pass this entrance on the way back to their cells, and smell the aromas of cooking food. Most of them were starving.

The second picture contains a typical meaningless Nazi/Gestapo phrase "Work will Make you Free". The only thing that made you free during the War was your death.

September 24-Wachau Valley

The Aggstein castle, along the Danube upstream from Melk, and on the way to Durstein. Paddy Fermor writes of this redoubt in his book "A Time of Gifts", celebrating his 1933 and 1934 walk from Holland to Istanbul. Here is some of his language, written as he sat at the ruins of the castle:

"Enter the Rugii, all the way from southern Sweden (in the 400s). By the middle of the fifth century they were settled along the left bank of the Middle Danube. Odoacer was a Rugian. Odoacer, the first barbarian king after the eclipse of the last Roman Emperor. (Romulus Augustulus). Behind the little town of Aggsbach Markt on the other bank, the woods which had once teemed with Rugians rippled away in a fleece of tree-tops. Odoacer came from a point on the north bank only ten miles downstream. He dressed in skins, but he may have been a chieftain's, even a king's son."

The castle itself dates from the mid  1200s and frequently served as the HQ of bandit kings who plundered traffic on the Danube. Attacked often, but subdued only by siege since the walls were impenetrable, the castle finally fell into ruin and abandonment in the late 1800s.

Our bicycle journey began after breakfast. But breakfast deserves equal billing with everything else. Filip is justified in claiming its supremacy. In addition to the usual cereals and jams, and breads salty and sweet, the Romanian staff (some from Kluj Napoca, a city that Mary and I  circled around later but did not visit) hand made a cold casserole of jellied chicken liver pate, as well as cakes of unusually firm but moist substance. We also enjoyed a mechanical marvel, an industrial size egg boiler. It comprised boiling water in a stainless steel container, and a series of wire hangers into which you placed your egg. Each hanger had its own plastic tag, with a different color. Several timers lay about, both mechanical and hour glass. At times eight eggs were cooking simultaneously, each tied by its owner to her own preference for consistency.

We rode through sunny but cool weather, through towns linked by a beautiful bike path. This is wine country and fields of grapes take up much of the lower plains. The towns are all old, and built upon ruins going back to before history is recorded. We eventually crossed over into the walled city of Melk. Here is some more of Fermor's language about Melk, recorded during his 1934 visit:

"Through the last water-meadow, before the mountains resumed their grip, I was approaching one of those landmarks. High on a limestone bluff, beneath two baroque towers and a taller central dome, tiers of uncountable windows streamed away into the sky. It was Melk at last, a long conventual palace cruising above the roofs and the trees, a quinquereme among abbeys."

"Paradox reconciles all contradictions. Clouds drift, cherubim are on the wing, and swarms of putti, baptized in flight from the Greek Anthology, break loose over the tombs.

"Female saints display the instruments of their martyrdom as lightheartedly as dice-boxes and fans. They are sovereign's favorites, land ravines dressed as naiads."

And this brings me to our Melk castle guide, Gerda. Fermor aside, the Melk castle and church have been turned by expensive consultants into a Euro trash of color, space and sound, trivializing the ancient religious relics that lay before us. And Gerda, bless her, had memorized her English speech down to the last comma. There was no interrupting her, and I could sense her pleasure as she appended complex phrases on top of each other, to a point that my eyes rolled back into my head, and I almost slept standing up. It occurred to me that the spiked wheel that failed to achieve the death of St. Barbara might more profitably be employed on Gerda, just to silence her drone.

Comic relief came soon enough as I discovered a construction site in front of the church, and learned that portapotties are called Pippiboxes in German. The construction unearthed incredibly old Roman ruins beneath the Melk castle, but they are being covered up, much like subway construction crews in New York re-bury the old Dutch settlements after completing their projects.

It was market day in Melk, and impressive displays of all the food groups, salt, sugar, fat, and ethanol beckoned urgently to us. Betsy, George, Mary and I stopped for lunch in a 'fast food" establishment, and I greatly enjoyed roast pork and delicious red cabbage.

Back onto our bicycles, we sped back up the Danube towards Durstein, but Mary and I decided to cut back across the river early. We took the wrong ferry and ended up in Spitz. We felt bad that we had gotten ahead of Betsy and George, but as the ferry moved out into the river, they laughed and continued up the bike bath to the correct crossover.

We enjoyed enough afternoon light after we cleaned up to take advantage of a nice local custom. If a winery puts out a straw wreath and a light, it means they are offering their latest wine release for sale, including drinking it on the premises. Mary and I began drinking Gruner Vetliner and were soon joined by Betsy and George.

We enjoyed our final group dinner that evening. The best part was a terrific apricot schnapps. Tomorrow is the bus ride to Vienna, and then everyone goes his own way. The group has been highly entertaining. Several subgroups have known each other forever, but all have allowed entree for interesting conversation and jokes.

September 23

This day was a necessary "meh" experience.  It rewarded us with entree into the Wachau Valley.

We began innocently enough. Starting in Passau, we said goodbye to the nice buffet breakfast and walked to a Danube river cruise ship for our float to Schlogen. The engineers among us enjoyed the mechanics of a large lock that lowered our craft about sixty feet midway through the cruise. The day began gray, continued gray, and ended with parting clouds, harbinger of the big ride tomorrow.

Our crew misbehaved with beers or slept or just chatted each other up during the cruise. Departing at Schlogen, we climbed aboard our bikes. The ride was much like riding in a Mobious strip; river on the left, big hill with trees on the right, town every 25 minutes, battery-powered bicycles with heavy set people passing us every 15 minutes. Eventually we arrived in the town of Ashcach.

Lunch was at a sandwich shop filled with cigarette smoke. Soup was good, sandwiches so so, and I made a snap decision to have a full beer and a van ride on to our destination of an old church in Ottensheim. I walked down to the river and watched the ferry cross from the other side to O. From the church we took a bus into the Wachau Valley, ending at the Raffelburger Hof in the town of Weissenkirchen (White Church, which dominated the sky line).

The van ride was fabulous. Molly, one of the infamous Black sisters, is a complete theatre nut, espousing the virtues of American Players Theatre in Spring Green, Wisconsin. I was an easy sale, since we enjoyed many plays at this outdoor theatre gem with Mary's brother's family during our frequent visits to Madison. Molly attends the High Def broadcasts of the UK's National Theatre, much like Mary and I do with the Met Opera broadcasts. I filed away this tidbit, because I know we would like these shows.

Eventually all of us climbed on board the bus to the Wachau. My Mary took the opportunity to ask Molly if she was the little sister who told on her older siblings to their parents. A chorus of "Yes!" erupted from most of the Blacks before Molly could defend herself. The bus was warm. I nodded off repeatedly.

The Raffelburger Hof is in a very old building, perhaps 15th century. Our room was up stairs, up more stairs, and up still more stairs. It was really an attic, with the shower/bath located four steps down from the bedroom. The one window afforded a view of the Danube if you leaned out far enough to risk a fall thirty feet to the stones below. But it was comfy. I looked forward to breakfast in the morning, because Filip said it is the best layout of the entire trip!

September 22

Rain spritzed on us a little today. We took a short ride up the River Inn to Scharding in Austria. The start was dicey, because we had to wheel our bikes through a multitude of students on their way to school. I almost created an international incident as a little boy darted in front of my bike while I was trying to stay vertical at 0.5mph. I ticked his leg and he fell down. But his teacher ran to him, picked him up and started yelling at him, in German of course. I don't think he was going to have a good day.

We arrived in Scharding simultaneously with cement trucks, buses and too many cars. During a very slow climb up into the main square, Mary fell off her bike, giving her a very impressive strawberry on her thigh. When asked how she was, she responded "Oh, for me that's nothing compared to the rest of my falls!"She continued biking, but we got the hell out of this rather ugly town, and hightailed it back down the other side of the Inn. When we arrived back in Passau, some of us went to the confluence of the Inn and The Danube for picture taking. We then hurried back to our hotel to change for lunch.

Betsy, George, Mary and Nick took a taxi to the castle high on the bluff across the Danube and enjoyed a real drunk-up lunch at the German restaurant there. A terrific fish and chips and many beers later, we felt we could float across the river to our hotel. But before that, Mary and I knocked off a half-kilo of apfel strudel mit schlag. Then we walked down the escarpment on a very long series of stairs. As we were part way down, up came a large group of teens, mostly girls, cursing as they pulled enormous suitcases up the stairs and wet gravel to the hostel they would stay in that night. Some numb nuts bus driver had left them off at the bottom. I recalled similar bad planning from trips of my youth.

Mary and I then went to the St. Stephen's church, but it was the wrong church for finding out about Wenceslas, Charles IV and other Holy Roman Empire dignitaries. That would have to wait for our return to Prague in several weeks. We then wandered into the shopping area, and found a terrific hat store. I bought a hat on sale. Then, Mary looked around some, and we then bought and paid for a hat for her. Then, we both looked around and found a third hat, and paid for that. The shop owner most likely thought we were demented, but she took our money.

That evening, we joined George and Betsy again for more beers and dinner in a pub around the corner from our hotel. A liver dumpling in the chicken soup and a couple of sausages plus beer 'put paid' to the evening.

At least one couple in our group had a more classy experience. Mary Ann and Jane found a terrific bar. They described a nicely crafted cocktail with fresh fruit and a ton of Granite Gin. We missed that.

A lot of cruise ships are docked near the hotel. One Viking cruiser lines its guest bathrooms up with the lobby and first floor of our hotel. So you can see all the hanging laundry. You could also see any misbehaving occupants if you were unlucky (or lucky) enough.

September 21

Today we enjoyed a 28 mile ride from Nova Pec, in the CR, to Germany, ending a short distance from Passau, Germany. The gap to our destination was covered by bus.

The border has no controls, nothing except a little sign marking the change in countries. The Czech Republic and Germany were among the original signers of the Schengen agreement which predated the EEC by a couple of years. Eliminated in one document were all border restrictions among signatories. Still, George Smiley came to mind as I crossed into the former East Germany, land of Erich Honecker and the Stasi. It was only a momentary chill on an otherwise terrific day.

We rode on dedicated bike paths that Americans can only dream of. Had to pay attention, however, as we repeatedly crossed the tracks of a little mini commuter/tourist train. Also, a few automobiles somehow had rights to use the bike path, but they were few and far between. Butt sore today, but the legs held up fine. The bikes are clunky, especially since I have never ridden a mountain bike before.

Mushroom hunters abounded today. Zuz said that when she returned to the CR as a teenager, one of her cousins, a tiny kid of four, walked with her into the forest to show her the ropes. "This one is good." "Don't eat that one." Zuz's father is a terrific mushroom hunter, and he adds a major benefit to his companions. He hates mushrooms and gives his entire haul to the rest of the crew.

We had lunch at a German pub/road house, right along the trail. It paled compared to yesterday's feast at the Czech farm house, mostly because of attitude. Here, decent food was piled on the table. You ate what was there. If something ran out, tough. The bartender hung around hoping for beer sales and was sorely disappointed. We had too much additional riding to do. We departed with him looking grumpy and bored. I should be kinder. It was a fine rest and lunch break.

Passau is a beautiful German town (the border with Austria is just down the road), occupying a fantastic piece of geography where the Danube, the Ilz and the Inn rivers all come together. Ah, the Danube finally showed up! We will not only track this all the way to Vienna, but will visit a couple of other countries having a border with this famous river. In total there are ten! Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Serbia, Croatia, Romania, Ukraine, Hungary, Moldova and Bulgaria.

September 20

The jet lag is receding fast. The breakfast layout appealed to this Russian American, with herring and head cheese to go along with the oatmeal. The Hotel Ruze is filled with medieval references, including manikins, one dressed like the Pope, while another, a short distance away, looks like Rasputin in a hair shirt. Oh, how I wanted to exchange their costumes, but this is maybe not wise in a Catholic country.

The ride was excellent, short but through beautiful country. We had one major hill, and I envied Mary Ann who tore up it on her road bike. The rest of us got off and walked, although my Mary made it pretty far, standing on her pedals. Our ride took us through the town of Ceske Budejovice, home to the original Budweiser beer. In taste the American Bud is to Budweiser as pig slop is to Mom's chicken soup. Crossed the Vltava River here.

On a magical stretch of 17th Century farmland Mary saw a deer gallop down the highway, and a few of us saw Baba Yaga, or Jezibaba in Czech, a crone straight out of a dark fairy tale. She burst out of the forest carrying faggots on her back. All that was missing was the cackle of pleasure that now she had material to heat the soup kettle containing the children she intended to cook for dinner. Next I heard the merry sound of shot guns taking down game birds. Yes, Fall is here.

At a farmhouse we stopped for a fantastic lunch, prepared by a farming family. It included a savory spinach strudel, one of the best things I have eaten on the trip. I began consuming beers since I had the option of riding back to the hotel in the bicycle van. Given the alternative of climbing back up a long slow grade in threatening weather, it was an easy choice.

Dinner was at the Catacomby restaurant, a very noisy subterranean speakeasy. The names of all of our group come easily now. I captured a nice photo of each of the Black sisters.

I recall Zuzana's comment about how under Communism the country was gray. Even the people were gray. That is not the case now. Many buildings are splashed with color, such as the pink farmhouse where we ate lunch. She said that the economy is still behind much of Europe, and that one noticed this immediately upon crossing the border into Austria, which we will do tomorrow. Speaking of Zuz, she came to dinner dressed in a traditional Dirndl, used in the CR as well as Austria and Germany.