Sorting and Savoring Trip’s Impressions

My wife and I have just returned from three weeks in Europe. Several days in Paris, coming and going, served as bookends for an extended journey through East Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia. We traveled by train, both to save money and to better pick up the flavor of these countries. We avoided tours like the plague except to take brief orientation trips in each new city we visited.

We were fortunate enough to travel with the news. We were in Berlin on the first day the border checkpoints went unattended and a common currency was adopted. And we were in Czechoslovakia just a few days after the newly freed citizens of that country elected Vaclav Havel as their leader in the first democratic presidential election there in almost five decades.

Americans--including a good many from Orange County--are flocking to Eastern Europe this summer, fired by the same curiosity that sent us there. I suspect that these visitors--like us--will come home with their heads stuffed with information, impressions and not a little confusion, since things were not always what we expected them to be.

It will probably be many weeks before we sort them out for ourselves, but here are some of the vignettes from that trip that come quickly to mind:

* The most universal sign of creeping capitalism in the countries of Eastern Europe is the sudden appearance, in every city we visited, of the International Herald Tribune. Thus, even in the depths of Poland, I was able to keep abreast of the collapse of the Angels.

I also got some tastes of American politics that led to curious reactions in Europe. For example, one of the highlights of our trip was the accidental discovery of the Rodin Museum in Paris. A few hours after we immersed ourselves in this magnificent place, I read an item in the Herald Tribune setting forth Orange County Rep. Dana Rohrabacher’s conditions for supporting artists through the National Endowment for the Arts.

And it occurred to me that Rodin would never have qualified under the Rohrabacher rules. Much--perhaps most--of his work is highly erotic and quite specifically, gracefully and magnificently sexual. Thank God he lived where he did--and when he did.

* Through happenstance--laced with a small dash of stupidity--we probably had the honor of taking the first cab ride from East Berlin to West Berlin. Traveling to our hotel, we had peered anxiously out the train window at Berlin’s Bahnhof Zoo--which turned out to be only a few blocks from our hotel--but didn’t get off because our ticket read “Friederichstrasse.” We finally got off the train about 6:30 in the morning in East Berlin without visas.

When I finally determined that’s where we were, we went out to a cab stand, showed a driver the address of our West Berlin hotel, and asked him to drive us there. He was stunned, consulted with half a dozen other drivers, and finally threw up his hands and motioned us into the cab. He passed through a checkpoint gloriously empty, the first morning that such a trip would have been possible.

Once in West Berlin, our driver was totally lost and had to ask several times how to get to our hotel. I suspect it was the first time he’d ever been there. But he found it, and we shook hands, all of us glowing at this new and shining manifestation of freedom.

* Many other signs of incipient capitalism were manifest all over East Berlin. Peddlers had set up shop along the route of the wall, selling purported chunks of the wall and Russian military hats, among other artifacts. Additional entrepreneurs were on hand to rent hammers and chisels to visitors to knock out their own sections of the wall. We paid 5 deutsche marks for this apparatus and chipped away for 15 minutes, finding the wall virtually impenetrable and working up a considerable sweat--but coming away triumphantly with a pocketful of chips.

Throughout our stay, we watched armored cars, escorted by police with high-decibel sirens, carrying money from West to East to support the merging of currencies. One German told us with almost lip-smacking eagerness that the land released by the destruction of the wall would be very high-priced real estate. I could envision Wall Drugs and Wall Barber Shop and the Wall Restaurant. And we saw a poster in East Germany advertising an upcoming game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the “Orange County” Rams.

* Music offered a constant--and changing--accompaniment to our travels. Jazz bands played on the streets of West Berlin, and sidewalk flutists played Bach in East Berlin. Warsaw and Krakow in Poland were devoid--totally devoid--of music. In Prague, street music was joyously present on almost every corner, mostly light rock and ethnic music offered up by a people suddenly and wonderfully free and wanting to sing about it. And in Vienna, canned Strauss waltzes provided a Muzak accompaniment to the clack of cash registers in almost every drug store and restaurant.

* It is difficult to give things away, even amid the grinding poverty of Poland. My wife brought along a batch of T-shirts and an assortment of small children’s toys, intending to pass them out when opportunities presented themselves. I was a little uneasy about this, remembering Hershey bars in World War II. I was even more uneasy when a little Polish boy stiffed an offer of a toy. But then we discovered that the gifts could be better offered for services rendered. Even so, we came back with several T-shirts, mute evidence that pride--and perhaps a little suspicion--takes precedence over poverty.

* The World Cup was going on while we were traveling, and the natives everywhere--especially in Germany--were glued to TV sets while the games were in progress. I watched, more or less in self-defense, and got mildly hooked on soccer, at least until Cameroon was eliminated. But I couldn’t help thinking that these posturing and frequently sulking soccer millionaires wouldn’t last 10 minutes in the NFL.

* These random, and occasionally piffling, observations were acutely necessary in order for us to cope with our day at the Nazi extermination camp in Auschwitz. The enormity of what took place there, seen and felt in the actual surroundings, simply can’t be easily grasped nor dwelt upon, for it would exclude every other impression. But it has impregnated our consciousness and will be there always.

The (necessary) ability of the human mind to look sideways rather than straight-on at a horror like Auschwitz was accentuated by a bizarre turn of events the day we visited. When we rounded the corner of the first set of barracks, we ran into a whole covey of prisoners, dirty and bedraggled, dressed in prison uniforms and being herded by Nazi officers restraining snarling dogs. The effect was both frightening and surreal.

A Polish film company was making a movie there, and for the rest of our visit, we kept running into the actors. This merging of reality and unreality made me realize that the only way we can grasp these extermination camps is to see them as some kind of movie. And for several hours we had to look at the reality--shower rooms that spewed deadly gas instead of water, crude ovens, gallows on which Jewish prisoners were hung as examples to the other workers, torture chambers, medical laboratories where experiments were performed on living people--superimposed on the mythic being performed by actors. We’ll never be the same again.

On Friday I’ll offer some reflections about the political scene in Eastern Europe from the vantage point of an Orange County tourist, along with some of the surprises we found that will condition our thinking in following the news during the months ahead. Then back to the Orange County scene--in which there are more than a few parallels.