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The Jewish Ghetto in Kraków, 1941-1943
Some pictures from the Schindler Museum and the Jewish Ghetto in Podgórze, Kraków, Poland. Yes, you’ve seen the film. But this strange yet fantastically organized museum, in the original Schindler factory on a road so small you can barely find it, is a revelation. How all three groups lived, fought, and died: Poles, Jews, and…
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Keeping Up With the Kashubians
A quick visit to the Pomeranian coast of Poland, the famous port city of Gdansk, and then down to Torun, a Renaissance delight along the Vistula. Traces of German heritage, scenes from modern history, and a lot of beer and sauerkraut…
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On the Berlin-Warsaw Express
Over twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and over six decades since 1945, you still know that there is something different about traveling east from Germany. Instead of a thick network of high-speed rail binding Frankfurt to Paris, and Cologne to Amsterdam, modern state-of-the-art train routes are nearly nonexistent across the eastern…
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Dealing With the Past
Going through my papers for this blog today, I found my mother’s birth certificate. Born in Cracow, Poland in 1941, her first years were in the heart of the greatest tragedy of the 20th century. Every time I see this I go through my own kind of “Vergangenheitsbewältigung”, dealing with the past. In the same…