Budapest: Renewal

Budapest is the "most foreign" city to which I've traveled. There were many things that didn't feel familiar, the language, the currency, the food, but most importantly -  the feeling that freedom is not something this country has experienced until recent years. We traveled on September 11th and freedom may have been ever present on my mind as we arrived in the city. It was a bit unsettling that week to travel because of the anniversary of 9/11 and the fighting between Russia and the Ukraine had intensified. Hungary is on the border with Ukraine, though the opposite border from Russia.

When we arrived, we walked around the center of Pest - the east side of the city near our hotel and I observed several things: the new Jewish memorial for the Holocaust victims, the beautiful St. Stephen's Basilica lit at night, and the dark vibrant street of ethnic restaurants close to our hotel.

Many policemen and women were near the Holocaust memorial and a woman came up and gave us some literature asking us to please read. The protesters thought the memorial ignored and glossed over the Hungarian government's participation of the Jewish extermination. Instead of looking at the government memorial, the protesters asked us to consider looking at the makeshift memorial that the Jewish families put at the base of the government statue which contained victims' personal belongings and photos. It was indeed a poignant testament to the lives that were lost in extermination camps during WWII.

Early the next morning - in the rain, Paul and I traveled to Szechenyi Baths, a Turkish style bathhouse with 3 outdoor pools and 18 indoor pools with medicinal natural hot spring waters, complete with steam and massage rooms. These baths were built in 1913 and the buildings surrounding the baths were very ornate. We had an appointment for massages and also wanted to relax in the baths. Our massages allowed us to unwind. Afterward we went outside to the hot spring baths to watch some older gentlemen playing chess on the built-in marble chessboards, probably something they have been doing for decades. We spent an hour or two under the fountains and in the healing warm pools of waters to people watch and enjoy.

On the way home, we went by St. Stephen's Basilica - an active Roman Catholic church completed in 1905 named for the first king of Hungary (year 975) who offered his crown for the good of God and the Catholic church. His right hand is a relic located in the church signifying the importance of performing God's works. We found there would be a concert that night in the church with the pipe organ, a trumpet and a mezzo-soprano vocalist. The concerts enable the many musicians in the city to perform and also allows the church to pay for the preservation of the Basilica.

After dinner at a hummus bar, we arrived at the church to a sparsely lighted sanctuary with magnificent artwork and Carrara marble statues. One painting caught my eye by Benczur - St. Stephen offering his crown to the Virgin Mary with baby Jesus. The lighting surrounding Jesus's head was brilliantly white, even in the darkened church. During the concert, the mezzo-soprano vocalist sang three versions of Ave Maria and many other classical pieces that were performed in my daughter Stephanie's wedding last year. The music was extraordinary. Between the darkened environment of the church, the lighted artwork and the brilliant music, I found myself crying during much of the concert as the music washed over me.


Paul and I went across the Danube river the next morning to Buda - the city that was united with Pest in 1873 to see the older part of the city. On our way over, we saw the memorial of the shoes on the river banks.  It honors the Jews who were killed by fascist militiamen in Budapest during WWII. The people were ordered to take off their shoes, and were shot at the edge of the water so that their bodies fell into the river and were carried away. This memorial represents their shoes left behind on the bank. I could only imagine the tears that fell into the river that day.

Across the river is the Grand Palace, which is now filled with museums and exhibits since there is no monarchy. The President's offices are also on this side of the river. We walked around the cobblestone streets and it started raining. We found shelter at the top of the hill at a cafe which overlooked the valley below. We drank some Hungarian Budweiser (very different than the US kind) while it rained. We booked a river cruise for the evening to see the city at night from the Danube. It stormed during much of the evening, but we stayed sheltered inside the glass roof of the boat to watch the lightening show over the magnificent city. 

On our last morning there, we returned to St. Stephen's Basilica to go to a Hungarian mass. The mass is the same all over the world - except for the homily - whatever language it is spoken in. It was a chance to be inside the Basilica again - a place that felt like home. We left for the airport after mass and it was still raining. It occurred to me that in coming to visit Budapest, I felt renewed. I don't know if it was the water from the spas, being on the banks of the Danube river, crying during the concert, or just getting wet from the rain, but I felt cleansed. Travel - and being renewed -  allows me to open up to new ways of thinking and feeling and it leaves me with a quiet soul. I am glad I have the freedom to travel.

Definition of a Hero

I've known many World War II heroes in my life. But most of them didn't emphasize this often little-known fact about themselves to others. The years they spent in the war never came up in conversation, except sometimes incidentally. My Dad, three of his brothers, and three of my mother's brothers served in WWII and came home with medals. In my Dad's case, he received a Purple Heart, two Oak Leaves (essentially 2 additional Purple Hearts), four  Presidential Unit Citations, the European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Ribbon, and a Combat Infantry Badge.  He also came home with a piece of shrapnel still behind his ear. He never talked about it.

I don't think my Dad ever knew the profound impact his years of service had on the world. There are two kinds of heroes. Heroes who shine in the face of adversity, who perform an amazing feat in a difficult situation. And heroes who live among us, who do their work unceremoniously, unnoticed, but who make a difference in the lives of others. My dad was a hero in both regards.

Last week, I was able to spend some time in the company of WWII veterans who are also heroes.  They came to the Netherlands to commemorate the 70th Anniversary of the Liberation of the Netherlands. One American veteran named Armando Marquez, 90 years young, was in the 101st Airborne and dropped into the Netherlands in 1944 during Operation Market Garden. He was flown by the Dutch government from El Paso, Texas to the Netherlands with his wife Christina of 66 years and his daughter Martha to attend the week-long ceremonies to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Liberation. I met with him at a lunch stop in a tank and military vehicle procession and got to know a little bit about him. We bonded as fellow Texans, he said he was glad to know someone from home. This was his first trip back to Europe since the war. In coming back, I think he was starting to know the impact his service made on this world. His regret was that from his company, he was the only still living.

Many attending the procession wanted Armando's autograph, some wanted to ask him questions about the war, and others just wanted to say thank you. During our conversation, we were interrupted many times by others who wanted some of his time. I commented to him that he was like a "rock star", considering the following he had among the attendees. I asked his wife if he told any stories of the war and she mentioned that he wouldn't keep quiet about it. Armando leaned over and said he only told the good stories.

Armando's first jump during combat was in Normandy and his second jump during Operation Market Garden, when he landed in Son. He lost his helmet during the jump and grabbed one from a soldier who unfortunately would not need his after his jump. In Armando's home in El Paso, he has a photo of a German tank in the streets of Eindhoven, newly decorated with American flags after the liberation.

Later, I asked Armando if he realized that these people thought he was a hero. I mentioned to him I talked to a gentleman during the procession who was a 8-year-old boy during the Liberation of Eindhoven 70 years earlier. This man remembered the tanks and military men in the streets that day and in his mind, those men saved his family and his country. Armando smiled and didn't answer for a while. He said that he supposed that perhaps they thought he was. His smile was slow. It is worth celebrating 70 years if for only to let one veteran know that his courageous efforts and service in the World War II really mattered. Armando is an ordinary hero from Texas whose actions 70 years ago defined greatness.

Berlin - The Presence of Absence

So far Berlin might be my favorite city in Europe. Paul and I decided to go there on a whim when our bike ride from Munich to Prague was canceled the week before we were supposed to go (that's another story . . . ). In Europe you can just jump on an airplane for the weekend easily and cheaply. And so we did. We arrived on a Friday afternoon and stayed at the Hotel Am Steinplatz in the Steinplatz neighborhood of formerly West Berlin. The hotel is decorated with a 1920s theme, There are videos playing in the hallway and lobby that were shot in 1920s Berlin in the neighborhood that we stayed in. Our room had a photo of a 1920s Berlin flapper on the wall. Germany had fought in WWI which ended in 1917, but the videos of the city at that time didn't show any effects of the war.

 We walked around the neighborhood and found nice shops and many outdoor restaurants. The neighborhood had a vibrant feel to it and the restaurant our first night was at a tapas bar called Mar Y Sol. The food was tasty and uniquely prepared. In a funny way, we felt like we were home. Berlin is a green city, the vibe was alternative and edgy, and there were bikes and street musicians everywhere. Except for the language difference, it almost felt like we were in Austin, Texas.

And then we noticed 4 inch by 4 inch brass nameplates
in the sidewalks in front of many houses and at the corner of many streets. These plates had the names of the Jewish person that lived in that house prior to being murdered by the Nazis during WWII. There is a concept called the Presence of Absence, introduced by Micha Ullman when Berlin started to be restored. What used to be there, isn't any longer. The people that used to live there had their lives cut short by evil. And the absence - what was lost by war - is noticeably present in the way the city was rebuilt. One monument had the shelves of a library with no books on them. Hitler had a book burning in 1933 in one of the central areas of town that was known for being an academic area. 40,000 people participated and they burned a total of 25,000 books identified by Hitler as being anti-German. Scars of Nazi Germany still exist throughout the city.

The next morning we jumped on the train and got off in the Alexanderplatz - in former East Berlin where we met a group from Fat Tire Bike Tours to tour Berlin. We met under a TV tower that was built by communist Russia who occupied East Berlin, to show off their advanced technology to West Germany. Communist East Germany had to have it's own broadcasting system to restrict the programming that it allowed it's citizens and to show West Germany that it didn't have a monopoly on new technolgoy. We could see in the sunlight that the shape of the ball at the top allowed for a reflection cross to be portrayed onto the ball of the tower. The West Berliners called this the Pope's Revenge. We were fitted with our bikes quickly and we were off.

Fat Tire Bike Tours is based in Austin, Texas and has a shop also in London, Barcelona, and Paris. Neal, our guide was very knowledgeable about the history of the city and was easily able to answer all of our questions on the 3-hour tour. We knew we would be very interested to see how the city has been restored after WWII, both in East and West Berlin and to see the differences between the two parts. We knew the city had been rebuilt after the Russians bombed and pretty much destroyed the entire city at the end the war.

On our ride, it was intriguing to me to see how they rebuilt the city to make it look old. The stone for many building restorations was burnt before it was cemented in place to give it a centuries old look. There were several churches restored after the war, but they were used as museums, not churches in Communist Berlin. Several buildings still had the evidence of artillery fire from the war - 70 years earlier. We saw the area where Hitler's bunker was located. Hitler committed suicide May1, 1945 and he had asked that his body be burned so that it wouldn't be hung in effigy as Mussolini's had been in Italy. There is a dirt parking lot where his burnt body was found. The bunker was later  destroyed and was so thick that it had to be bombed out of the ground.

We visited 2 of the 3 remaining stretches of the Berlin Wall. Like many Americans, I've always just taken freedom for granted.  In Berlin, the concept of freedom,  and how precious it is, permeated just about every block we traveled.  

There is an imprint of where the entire wall used to surround the city embedded in the streets as we rode along. The remaining sections of wall are almost entirely covered with graffiti, some of it very nice artwork. When Reagan said the famous words "Mr. Gorbechev, Tear down this wall", it was not taken down by government officials or a wrecking crew. It was taken down by the people in the streets who were reclaiming their freedom. My husband Paul thought the graffiti on the wall was a bit disrespectful of something historic, but I saw it an expression of freedom by the people that tore it down. A person affected by Communism, who was walled off from freedom, has the right and privilege to be creative on the very wall that restricted him for 28 years. In riding through Tiergarten, a large park and garden in the center of the city, many men were sunbathing in the nude in the open field. This might be another edgy expression of being free. 

We saw Checkpoint Charlie and the site of a museum that stands where the offices of the Stasi (SS) used to be. It's called the Wall of Terror, and is a memorial explanation of what the Nazi SS did in Warsaw, Poland. It's staggering the evil and destruction of so many lives that were caused by the Nazis. He oversaw the killing of 11 million people, 6 million of those were from Poland. This museum let the horrors be known and felt that were the result of the evil of Hitler's empire.

We rode by the Jewish Memorial. From the outside, it gives the impression of undecorated grave markers. To go into the memorial gives a very different experience. The floor of the park is created in rolling waves, and the stones are very tall. To walk along the rows, you get the feeling of not having sure footing and it's a bit disconcerting to not know what is around the corner as you turn. I felt it was a beautiful way to memorialize the Jewish people that were murdered.  Hitler also killed homosexuals, Roma Gypsies, as well as Jehovah's Witnesses, priests, and ministers of all denominations and the disabled. There are several more memorials throughout the city. I have been in many parts of Germany, but I was deeply impressed in Berlin to see the honor, solemn respect, and apology that is given the victims of the war. In the rest of Germany, it is hardly spoken about.

To visit Berlin is to have hope.

The practice of rebuilding, forgiveness, and healing gives Berlin a very unique soul to be enjoyed when visiting. Healing those wounds in history is the central story in all of Europe. Berliners are acknowledging the evil of the past, but are also letting hope, not the hurt, shape it's future.