I looked up at my calendar and saw that today is "Holocaust Remembrance Day".
In memorial of the day, I'll share a bit from my travel journal during this past tour.
A Hole in Texas & the Holocaust
(written in my travel journal on March 23, 2010)
Each tour, I spend the most amount of time beforehand planning what camera equipment, what art/journal supplies, what magazines and finally what books to bring along. Every ounce and every square inch counts, so these are no small decisions.The camera, journal & art supplies are more tools to express my voice and capture moments along a tour whereas the books, seem to be a special seasoning to color the landscape, to heighten the scents and flavors, to shed a light on the different cultures and to show the shadows of my own Americanness.
One tour, I brought Ken Follett's "Pillars of the Earth" and "World Without End" which more fully immersed me into what actually went into the building of the amazing cathedrals & castles and why cities are laid out the way they are over here, the church & nobility politics... and so much more of the European Culture.This tour, I brought along Herman Wouk's "A Hole In Texas". I read his "Winds of War" and "War and Remembrance" while I was an exchange student over here. Mr. Wouk is a master of weaving social history with individual destinies, of taking world events and bringing them down to the human individual level. "A Hole In Texas" is about the Super-Collider, a story very much rooted in Texas as that hole still exists in Waxahachie. This very readable text made the complicated physics behind this tale very approachable and understandable - and it shined a very astute light on the mechanics of American Politics.
However, today, as I walked around Hamburg, Germany... as I walked through the Memorial at St. Nikolai... the 3rd highest church in Germany burned down in the firestorm of 1943... the remains of which, the shell of which still stand as a memorial, as a reminder to that violence, to that holocaust...
a statue of an angel reaching to the sky with haunting hands grasping her from below,
a statue of a man with his head in his hands sitting atop actual bricks from one of the camps where more than 50,000 jews lost their lives...
That human drama becomes so much more real, so much more tangible but also so unbelievable at the same time.
...and Mr. Wouk's story about the super-collider is brought full circle. If Hitler had not been that particular madman - had he not driven persecuted jews like Einstein out of Germany... had all those things not come to pass, then Hitler would have had the discovery of the atom and the atom bomb and we would all live in a different world than the one we do today.
I have no more peace about those times in our past, but I do have more of an understanding... their voices are still heard, their voices still reach out from the past, their tales are not lost nor forgotten...
