March 2001

March 2001

KRAKOW

By Carl Korn

March 14, 2001

The trip began with the yellow bathroom toilet leaking, my travel watch strap breaking—I kind of expected that to happen for some reason, my wife’s new travel suitcase being too heavy for us and so we had to unpack it and pack the older, smaller suitcase. Normal stuff.

The shuttle van driver was EARLY—a miracle. Then he went around the neighborhood for what should have been a 5 block direct trip to pick up a man with a long coat and a suitcase that I hadn’t seen since high school. Arnold Weiss was a retired IRS agent and was on our same flight to Paris.

Getting through security at LAX was a hassle today. The very young people running it turned over my coins and keys into the x-ray machine and refused to retrieve them. There was no recourse with them; they used their little power base for omnipotence and it worked for them.

The flight to Paris was fine but our short hop from Paris to Vienna found a piece of our luggage missing. Gratefully the loss occurred in Perfect Vienna where there is not a smidgen of dust on or in the entire airport facility. They found our luggage on the next flight in from Paris and it was delivered to the hotel exactly as the airport personnel stated it would be.

Exhaustedly, we passed out at our Hotel Austria, where the same day clerk from our last visit was still working. Christian has been a day clerk for 18 years at this hotel and is only 40+ years old.

We awakened to walk down the Karntnerstrasse and eat at the NordSea fish restaurant as we had done before. Then to the Vienna State Opera House to attempt to buy tickets for the next night for “Turandot” and the following night for a ballet based on “A Masked Ball”.. All tickets were sold out. So, I suggested we hang around for the first break in “Turnadot” to see if anyone was leaving and attempt to get their seats for that night.

My brilliant wife latched on to an Asian mother and daughter in the cloak room and, in sign language, managed to have them donate their seats to us. SECOND ROW DEAD CENTER FRONT ORCHESTRA. The performance was totally fabulous. The voices soared above the greatest of all opera orchestras. What a wonderful thrill for us.

We walked home in a drying out weather pattern and ate disappointing 3 flavors each cones at Zanoni and Zanoni gelateria.

Vienna does not feel as safe as 3 years ago. There are too many young men wandering about.

But it is much more elegant than any city we have been in.

The exactitude of service was in keeping with the marvelous way in which the Viennese speak both German and English. The speech pattern would make Queen Elizabeth sound

as if she were speaking Cockney. “Velcome to Vienna” with a delightful twist to the high pitched last syllable.

Friday, March 16, 2001

We took a long walk about town seeing the Anker Clock, asking a dead-ringer woman of my old friend Doris directions, the University of Vienna, Beethoven’s House, the Rathaus, Parliament, Mozart Park with yellow pansies planted in the form of a treble clef in front of the statue of Mozart, a Goethe statue, Maria Theresa Platz with the surrounding museums.

Then there was the Holocaust Memorial with a crouching old Jew in cement, scrubbing the pavement to remove the anti-Nazi graffiti as had occurred with the Aunschloss. We ate pastries with melange across from this Memorial, behind the Opera House. And then we bought tickets for the Ballet that night.

A free tram ride to the Belvedere Palace and the breathtaking Klimt’s. They may belong in Vienna, but I don’t blame the Los Angeles family of Klimt’s patron who claim propriety.

I have irritable bowel syndrome and I am very fatigued.

We window shop along the Karntnerstrasse and go home to rest and change into darker clothes for the Ballet at the State Opera. The seats were in the Royal Box. We paid for these, sadly. The performance was awful.

On the way home there was a political rally taking place in the main square, St Stephen’s Platz. I understood enough to determine it was an ANTI-Racism rally. But the sound of German from loud speakers, the milling about of young men—many of whom refused to tell us what the rally was about—put me into a state of terror. There seemed only to be young men in the Platz. I have never been so scared. We made our way to the closest McDonald’s for the worst hamburger of our lives.

Saturday, March 17, 2001

We walked two blocks from our hotel to Herr Korn’s Patrician House site on Fleischmarkt strasse. We took my picture at the site and walked around the corner to the most elegant synagogue. Herr Korn had built this Orthodox temple of cochineal blue ceiling and golden stars about an opening to the sky, cream- colored-wandering trellised railings along the balcony for the women, and deep red cushions on the seats. I was thrilled to pieces. And Sandra was immediately adopted by a women during the Sabbath Service who told Sandra her entire life tragedy in sign and German.

Of course, we had to pass a major quizzing by a 20 year old to get into the temple. Security, you know. There were police all over the area that morning.

But the quizzing had been worth it. The service and the beautiful voices. The most extraordinary torah covers in silver. I kissed two of them.

The rest of the day was filled with politics.

First we walked to the Naschmarkt area to see Klimt’s “Beethoven Mural” at the Secession Museum and then into the flea market for lots of wares and foods.

Dynamite coffee with fresh strawberries and cheese samples. My wife is a marvel, in spite of her not being able to eat the open-faced cream cheese herring sandwiches earlier in the day off the Graben.

On the way, we encountered local political representatives who explained their varying party’s platforms. They all seemed to be based on protecting this small land of 7 million, who live in the most clean and neat and efficient and elegant of all worlds, from outsiders. The Viennese elections were one week away, and voices had to be heard.

The Austrians want to maintain their way of life. Foreigners threaten that way and are not needed for any economic or political purpose.

Again on the Karntnerstrasse and window shopping in the early evening, we saw a mime show put on by American Bible Students. It was against drugs and alcohol and was very effective. This enclave was studying in a southern province of Austria.

But at Zanoni and Zanoni the 20 year old boy from the rural area of the American state of Georgia was rabid in his saving people for Jesus. He was a missionary zealot, more intense than any I have ever encountered. “YOU ARE A CHRISTIAN…YOU DO BELIEVE!!!!!”

And this is Vienna.

Sunday, March 18, 2001

The train ride from Vienna to Krakow required 4 border checks. And terror occurred when the Czech police came aboard and ordered everyone off the train. A 3 year old child was screaming. No one understood what was happening. And then it became apparent that we were not in the middle of some political problem, and there was no detention camp immediately ahead, but we were to walk through a disinfectant solution to protect the land from Hoof and Mouth Disease.

The train continued over the Polish border and the air became dark and acrid. It was filled with sulfuric acid. The wet marsh land lay about the rail lines as black pools of liquid with brambles and tree stumps creeping out of them The attempts of the vegetation to bud were met with darkened sprouts of gray-yellow. The earth became the color of black coal as the train barely inched along.

And then the barbed wire fences began along the train tracks. And a guard tower. And then another one and still more into the distance, all arising from the putrid, rotting swampland.

I said: “This is the entrance toAuschwitz”.

In the city of Krakow, our well situated Hotel Francuski was sumptuous, faux fin de siecle. It suited us fine. And after eating the first of 3 meals at The Pink Elephant—we ate perogis and steak this evening—we passed out in bed at 6 PM.

Monday, March 19, 2001

Our hired car driver, Roman, charged us $120.00 for the day. It was a bargain. He drove us to Bendin, where my father was born.

I walked up the small hill with the small limestone-feudal castle on it, surrounded by an orchard and a stream at the hill’s base.

My father had, many times, poetically, described it to me. I could see his daffodils covering that hill in the spring time and the beauty that this carried with him all his life. I heard him recite a poem about daffodils, from his childhood.

Across the way, was a torn down street or two bearing a signpost of Josefov. In other cities, Josefov was a name given to a Jewish street or area. There is a grand district in Prague called Josefov. It is the most beautiful living area in the center of a city that I have ever seen.

This street in Bendin was empty except for some shacks that Roman responded to our statement of “These must be storage areas” with a quizzical look. Roman had taken a piss earlier on my father’s hill. These shacks weren’t storage areas, they were the shacks that Jews had lived in. And the earth all about was coal black. There was nothing in Bendin but a few streets of minimal shops. It was a very poor coal mining town. I had never seen anything this impoverished before.. Anywhere…

Whatever else had been on Josefov in Bendin was no longer there.

There were lots of these shanty towns along the Oder River—both sides of the Oder, all the way to Frankfurt on the Oder.

We insisted that they were storage areas until we saw a swing or two and a TV antenna or such indicating present habitation.

These shacks made the one’s in the movie “Fiddler on the Roof” look like mansions.

These were not fit for human inhabitation.

They were unfit for dogs.

They had been fit for Jews for the past 1000 years.

I bought pastries at a bakery on the main street of Bendin..

We walked it’s streets for awhile and I wondered at a woman being able to raise 8 children and having how many pregnancies. I wondered if my grandmother really wore the head dresses and heavy clocks that she had to. Such childishness.

We left and went to Katowitz. It is both a major railroad junction and mining city surrounded by silver mills as well as by steel mills. One steel mill has 35, 000 workers in it.

We ate at a Mc Donald’s on a major road of Katowitz.

Then through a back road to Birkenau.

A vast field with 2 adjacent front gates, railway lines running through each.

The trains dropped off, is it only 4 million people, to be exterminated here.

The buildings are gone, but a large pool at the back corner remains, filled with human ashes from the crematoria.

There are a couple of signs commemorating a Jewish uprising one day in the camp.

It was like being at a vacated Ford or GM plant.

There was nothing in anyway personal about the place.

Once you arrived there you had to know that you were to be killed. And you didn’t have to take that personally.

There was and is no other thought to be had.

A giant industry for extermination.

There was no feeling there at all.

Next onto Auschwitz, which is nothing but a museum of brick buildings that once were military barracks or such.

Whatever should have been moving about it wasn’t.

Dachau had been personal and terrifying.

Auschwitz-Birkenau were precisely, effectively cold.

I don’t think anyone has been able to describe any of this well enough.

A horror beyond all others.

Tuesday, March 20, 2001

We had an early breakfast as the snow began to fall. I have never walked in a snow storm before.

We walked forever it seemed from north of the Barbican to the Gruenewald Statue north of the ancient walled entrance called the “Florian Gate” into Krakow down to the Jewish Ghetto of Kashmiriez.

Of course we walked into St Mary’s Cathedral where the Poles take mass constantly. It is in the giant central square of Krakow, which also holds the Cloth Hall, a large souvenir gallery. We bought many amber pieces here.

By the time we got to Kashmiriez and the 4 synagogues, my face was frost bitten. I thought I had had a stroke. I had never been that cold before.

The area was fine. People could have lived there well, and Poles still do. We were so tired that whatever cemetery we wanted to find and which town hall, we didn’t. The weather was hard. The central square was touristy and that was fine.

On a hill overlooking this ghetto stands Wawel Castle. We walked up the “hill” in the snow storm and found that we had to go all the way up for the ticket booth and the come down and then go back up the other side of the hill, in true Polish manner, to get into the Castle. We passed on that and missed being healed by standing at a wall in the Castle’s courtyard that is one of the 7 places in the world where such electromagnetic healings can occur.

By now, I was using my collapsible cane and doubted if I was going to be healed by any Pole.

Interestingly, I looked like the Austrians, like the Czechs, like the Eastern Germans—but I, nor anyone I know looked anything like the Poles. My girlfriend in high school and her friends looked like the people I thought I looked like. Not one person I am related to or ever grew up with looked like a Pole.

Was the extermination that complete. Or did we never look like Poles and only happened to live there??

The trip continued into Berlin where we saw a brilliant production of “The Flying Dutchman”. The voices were great and Goetz Friedrich’s production of the captain leading his ship “:Exodus” with teams of people on board and not finding safe haven until Senta gave up her prior life to give him eternal, uncommitted love and then the hoards, that the captain had led for eternity, wearing prayer shawls-long coats-beards-lederhosen-yamulkas came from below deck into the light.

We continued to Prague where the snow flakes were 1 inch in diameter and I used a cane for 2 of the 3 days; then, one last night in Vienna, where politics were over for a time and then a final 5 nights in Paris.

But this trip had been to and from Bendin. It had ended at my father’s “Castle”.

His poetry had made me want to travel all these years.

And so I did.

Did Senta come home with me?

And can I stop???