Sightseeing: Whirlwind Trips 2005 - 2008

By Edwin M. Woods

Travel on six contnents and numerous places on the planet. Travel covers trips from 2005 to 2008 and tells of people, places and cultures through the author's eyes. It will take you on adventures that few people experience. You will be next to glaciers and icebergs and penguins of Antarctica and in the palaces of Russian Tsars. You will travel on the Nile, and cruise the Amazon Rivers. You will experience the depths of the Amazon rainforest on an eco-tour. You will go inside a hut in a Zambian village, to Victoria Falls, and sunset on the Zambezi River. It visits Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Jericho,and other biblical cities. The author travels to the Taj Mahal in India, the bathing ghats of Varanasi and to Katmandu and takes an aerial view of Mount Everest. In turkey you will experience the countryside and see the rock formations and underground city in Cappadocia and you will visit Ephesus and Istanbul. You will be taken on an illusive quest to see the fall colors of New England, USA.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 30, 2008
• ISBN: 9780595628209

Edwin M. Woods

Between Latitudes is the the third book, along with Sightseeing and You Go Home, Make More Money, and Come Back, in a series that tells of the author's travel on seven continents and eighty-five countries and territories. Mr. Woods was born and raised in Washington State. He received a BA in Geography from WSU in 1965. Most of his work years were as an investigator until his retirement in 2003. Woods has lived in Washington and California, and presently makes his home in Yakima, Washington. The author adds a personal touch to the travelogue, along with descriptive details, to give the reader an insight into his day to day experiences: the good and the bad.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

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Central Europe

Egypt

Turkey

New England

Antarctica

Vietnam and Cambodia

Portugal, Spain and Morocco

South Africa

India and Nepal

Finland, Russia and the Baltic States

Israel

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FORWARD

Sightseeing is a book about travel. I wrestled with the concept of travel—some ‘authorities’ say you are only considered a traveler, if you go it alone, spend considerable time, finding accommodations and sights and leave yourself to the vagaries of circumstance. You are a tourist when you go on group tours or trips where pre-arrangements have been made. I asked a fellow tourist one day. I told him I was thinking someday of writing a book on my experiences but I had, admittedly, in my older age, been taking tours. He said to me, What’s the problem? Just call it Sightseeing. So, this book is about sightseeing. I call them whirlwind trips because they last from one week to one month—leaving home, taking a trip to sightsee, and returning home, a few times a year.

After a period of ‘whirlwind trips’ I will soon have to slow down as I fear my finances have taken a beating. Was it worth it? I think so. Is a lot of sacrifice involved? For me, yes.

I wanted to tell about my travel experience, some of the sights and a little background. The information was gleaned from various sources, most of it from tour guides. Admittedly, some of the information is not accurate and some facts and figures change over time. My understanding and my memory of the facts are certainly subject to human frailty. The important thing I wanted to portray were basic concepts so that the reader could gain a general insight into the places I went.

This book covers the years 2005 to 2008. My first book, You Go Home, Make More Money, and Come Back, covers the years 1969 to 2004. My goings and comings were in bits and pieces, but I managed to set foot on seven continents and over 70 countries and territories.

CENTRAL EUROPE

I landed in Frankfurt, Germany, on May 8, 2005--sixty years after Victory in Europe Day. Our guide, Bruno, introduced himself: fifty years old, married, with two teenagers, and a resident of Munich. First, I consider myself a European; then a Bavarian—not a German. I was born in Munich, in Bavaria. In 1871 the Prussians took control of the individual states and Kaiser Wilhelm I unified them before WW I. They were all dictators.

May 9. Frankfurt-am-Main sits on the River Main. It is the financial center of Germany and has the only high-rise buildings in the country. Germany has 80 million people and is the size of Montana. At 7:45 a.m. we drove out, heading north on the autobahn, past rolling hills and plains covered with villages, forests and crops. Green wheat and yellow canola were major crops growing here among stands of mixed deciduous and conifer forests. Forests cover 20 to 25% of the country. Small villages were spaced every mile or two apart, surrounded by farm land.

We stopped at a rest area off the roadside. Typically, the rest area consisted of a gas station, restaurant or café, a convenience store and pay toilets. Benzene (gasoline) sold for 1.16 euros per liter (roughly $6 per gallon) and diesel sold for 1.03 euros per liter. I spotted a village with bright yellow canola fields in the foreground and took some pictures.

Canola oil is used for fuel in diesel engines as replacement for diesel fuel which has to be imported and is expensive. You can tell a car using canola because they smell like French fries, quipped Bruno. He had a German accent but was familiar with American speech because he married a Seattleite and was used to American tourists so he was easy for me to understand. Thirty per cent of electrical power was generated by nuclear plants but ever since Chernobyl (in the Ukraine, USSR) the use of nuclear power has become less desirable and solar and wind generated electricity has grown. Cars zipped by us frequently; as if we were standing still at 65 mph.

We stopped at Kassel, in central Germany, to see the statue of Hercules on the hill. Kassel was the home of the Grimm brothers who wrote Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

We passed through the province of Hesse (provided the Hessian mercenary soldiers to the British during the American Revolution) and traveled through Lower Saxony. Saxons had migrated from here to settle the British Isles.

Villages were settled between 1000 and 1300 AD. Before that Germanic tribes were nomadic. In the 12th century roaming bands of robbers made it prudent for local people to group up for safety in numbers. Three buildings were prominent in every village: the pub; the church; and the civic building. Villages were erected with a square in the middle and with roads radiating outwards. Farms were placed along the radiating roads. When the farm owner died the land was inherited, resulting in some land being in the same family for 300 or 400 years. Sometimes the farms were divided up and sold off. Bruno said that some of the people live the same way today as their ancestors did two hundred years ago.

For the most part, however, village life has changed. Over the past thirty years an overproduction of food in Germany has resulted in depressed prices but, at the same time, production costs have been rising. Small scale farming is no longer profitable and the younger generation has left the small farm. Many old farm houses and villages have become popular for city folks to move into. They commute to their city jobs.

The Hartz Mountains were at a distance to the east of us. The tallest is 4000 feet. With the cloudy conditions you could barely make out their silhouettes. It was raining off and on with 48 degrees Fahrenheit.

Nearly every nation except the U. S. uses the metric system, so I have to constantly convert the measurements and temperatures. I don’t use it enough in my daily life (except traveling) so I don’t think in metric terms as a matter of course.

We stopped for lunch at Brunswick. I went in a small street luncheonette with Sonja for a sandwich. Afterward, we walked over to the old city hall and St. Stephen’s Church for some pictures.

Asparagus and sugar beets are grown in the Brunswick area and food canning is half of the total industry here. We continued eastward across the, now, imaginary border with East Germany and into, what used to be, communist countryside. Before 1989 the border was heavily guarded, lit up with floodlights at night, and there were 400 miles of barbed wire fence, mine fields and a two-mile no go section with electric wire in between. It was virtually impossible to cross borders. It would take from 3 hours to 24 hours of waiting for a person to cross through the border checkpoint here on the autobahn. We breezed through the vacated border at 65 mph. I saw groups of modern, tall, three-bladed windmills, used to generate electricity, strewn for miles.

Communist East Germany had a problem. From 1946 to 1961, two million people left the east for the west, mostly via Berlin. Most of them were the younger, more educated and ambitious cream of society’s crop; and this was leading to brain drain. They left for better prospects. Reasons why the economy of East Germany stagnated while West Germany became better off after World War II were: little incentive to work hard; Russia could not help its new protectorate, as too much of Russia had been destroyed during the war; after Russia overran eastern Germany, it dismantled whatever factories and infrastructure, and plundered whatever resources it could to take back for use in Russia; and no Marshall Plan, here, had been put in place like that by the United States in West Germany. The obvious solution for the government to the brain drain problem in 1961 was to erect a wall to separate East Berlin from West Berlin.

Estimates give 20% of the population as pro-communist; 40 to 50% as indifferent to government and 30 to 40% against the communists. Germans had never been used to having a democracy or many civil rights; only from 1918 to 1933 had they even tasted it. They were, however, keen on travel and missed it. With the wall and crack down in the east, they couldn’t even travel within Berlin. Berlin was a divided city. Individuals, mostly through their churches, slowly demanded more rights, especially to travel, and increasingly protested to the eastern government, which was slow to respond. By 1989 things came to a head—they could continue to shoot people for trying to cross the wall or let them travel. Communist governments were beginning to lose a grip on the people. The choice was suddenly made on November 9, 1989, when a journalist put it to a government representative, Are you going to open the gate? After a short pause, he answered, Yes.

We entered Berlin and checked into the Berlin Mitte hotel. Mitte means middle—the middle of the city and in East Berlin. It is only a block and a half to Checkpoint Charley on Freidrichstrasse. It was one of four checkpoints in the city. This was on the border of the American Sector with Russian East Germany pre-1989. You can see parts of the Berlin Wall that have been preserved, with some white crosses nearby, to memorialize the dead who tried to cross. I walked here with Nancy and Sherrill. A museum takes up three floors of a non-descript brick building on the street at the checkpoint. The checkpoint, now, is preserved with a small guardhouse in the center of the street with a large photo of an American soldier-guard. The museum is dedicated to the wall and has exhibits depicting escape attempts and stories of the wall and its times. One exhibit was a bullet-ridden car which had been used in an escape attempt. The front passenger seat had the upholstery stuffing removed so that a slightly built person could sit and be covered in such a manner as to appear invisible to a guard. Another exhibit showed a small aircraft used to fly over the border. It was all beat up so it must have crashed.

May 10. It was raining most of the day. We did a city tour of 750 year-old Berlin. We stopped at Brandenburg Gate, built in 1791, which faces east-west, and took a photo from the eastern plaza. This is a high, broad, columned monument with a flat, built up cap along the length and topped with statuary.

The Reichstag, completed in 1894, houses the German parliament. In 1933, a fire, set by arson, was an excuse Hitler made to blame it on the communists to further impassion people for his cause. During WWII, the original dome was bombed and it was subsequently replaced by a glass one. That evening I returned to visit inside and ascended a spiral ramp leading to the rooftop. Large plates of mirror-like glass, inside, give a surreal experience on viewing.

We passed what used to be Hitler’s bunker, and is now a cleared away garden area. We came to Kaiser Wilhelm Church, bombed out during the war; it has a partial bell tower standing as a memorial. The new Holocaust Memorial was scheduled to open later in the day. It has different sizes of square pillars, set in a large concrete square. We went past Goering’s Luftwaffe headquarters, a rectangular block building with no particular embellishments, and crossed the Spree River, downtown, and then traveled along some horse chestnut trees on the streets. We crossed Unter den Linden street. The street has linden trees on both sides so they call the street Under the Linden. The Ratskeller, or City Hall, is an old stone building that was not bombed during the war.

We made a photo stop at Charlottenburg Palace, now a museum, which housed the King of Prussia. By now it was raining pretty hard and I tried to huddle under a small tree while waiting for the bus.

You can see vestiges of the wall from time to time. Tracings of it on the ground consist of a couple of strips of metal, flush with the pavement, that have been placed there as a memento. The wall had stretched one hundred miles throughout the city. It was 12 feet high, about 8 inches thick, reinforced with re-bar, topped with barbed wire and a rounded rubber cap. It was made so that one couldn’t get a good grip on the wall’s top.

Pergamom Museum, in Berlin, was established to contain artifacts and structures from Pergamom, in Turkey, and also Nebuchadnezar’s Babylon. The white marble structures, dated from 180 BC, make up parts of an adorned temple and, probably, other buildings, and placed against the high walls to make it seem as if you were looking at the façade of a real, life-sized building. The Babylon exhibit is a processional hallway, built with the original bricks and adorned with brick, high-relief lions. The Pergamom items were brought to Greece from Turkey and then to Germany. The Turks have asked for these missing structures to be returned but the Germans have refused. I bought a gold colored replica of a Pergamom coin for 2 euros at the museum gift shop.

Later in the afternoon, I took a 15 mile trip to Potsdam, which was founded in 993. On the way we stopped at Sans Souci palace, built by King Frederick II of Prussia in the 1700’s. The name in French means ‘without worries.’ Part of the building was scaffolded for restoration purposes. It was painted a bright yellow color. We were not allowed to go inside. Nearby was a several hundred year-old windmill that was still in use for milling grain. We drove across Glinika Bridge, noted for the exchange of spies. Francis Gary Powers, who was caught spying on Russia when they shot his U-2 plane down, was exchanged here for one of the Russian spies the U. S. had caught.

Cecilia Hof, at Potsdam, known as Princess Cecilia’s Palace and Court, was built by Frederick III. Stalin, Churchill, and Truman signed the Treaty of Potsdam here in 1945.

May 11. The autobahn highway stops at the Polish border and narrows to a two-lane road heavily traveled and overcrowded with vehicles. It is dangerous. I was sitting toward the front of the bus and had my seatbelt tightly fastened. Most of the drivers along this road seem well-acquainted with the nuances of negotiating the drive. Timing is everything. Here’s how you overtake and pass another vehicle: you drive up just behind the vehicle in front of you, maybe honk, and then pull into the oncoming lane to proceed with overtaking him. He notices you passing him and pulls onto the right-hand shoulder a few feet. There is usually an oncoming car or truck, which sees you oncoming in his lane. He is maintains his speed as he pulls over a few feet to his right road shoulder in time for you to pass in between. You are constantly doing this to make any kind of time. We are in a big (Greyhound-sized) Mercedes bus and have an excellent driver. Every so often you spot a small building with a Night Club sign outside and you first think it odd to see so many nightclubs alongside the road in the boondocks. The answer came as Bruno explained that these are brothels to serve the truck drivers on this main east-west highway between Poland and Germany. I saw some older, drab, gray-brown, rather austere buildings--residential housing; a hold-over from the communist days. We continued on for an hour or hour and a half until we came upon the newly opened freeway. We were on part of the North German Plain in flat, open-country, green, with croplands and wooded areas. The villages and towns are spaced further apart, several miles, in contrast to Germany. The forty million population of Poland is about half that of Germany. Barley and vegetables grow in the area.

We stopped at Poznan’s central square for lunch. The Nazis had destroyed most of the town and it had to be rebuilt. We walked about a block into the square, past the town hall, to the Heinz Café, six of us. I ordered a cola, cauliflower soup and a ham baguette sandwich. Lunch in Poland is a leisurely affair and we were only given one hour as we waited for the food to arrive. We literally had to scramble to pay the bill and run to the bus stop. Bruno had been waiting. You are nine minutes late, he admonished. Some words to the effect that punctuality was the key to success and verbal threats to leave laggards behind to fend for themselves were indicated. He was a strong believer in punctuality and keeping things running on time. Well, a tour leader needs to be.

A few miles later we left the freeway, turned south onto a two-lane highway, and traveled another 130 miles toward Warsaw. Barley, wheat, potatoes, and cabbages were growing along the way. I spotted two people, kneeled down, plucking weeds in a row of vegetables. They looked older and wore well-worn, gray sweaters with dark trousers. The farm looked big and the rows were very long. The scenery also included chicken, beef and dairy cattle, and pig farms. The animals are kept in stables; not pastured outside. Ducks and geese are popular and are a big Polish export. I saw some fancy homes, too; large houses built like little castles—for the neuveaux riches. We arrived in Warsaw, the capitol of Poland.

May 12. Warsaw has been completely rebuilt since WWII having suffered 85% of its buildings destroyed. In 1939, before Hitler attacked, the city had 1.9 million people. In 1945, at the end of the war, 300 thousand were left. Eight hundred thousand Warsaw citizens had died. By 1998, the population had returned to nearly pre-war level.

Poland, itself, had been a free country for only 20 years, from 1919 to 1939. Prior to 1939, the land had been divided among Austria, Russia, and Prussia; from 1939 to 1945 Germany took over; and, from 1945 to 1990, Russia controlled it. Since then it has returned to freedom. You can see the pride beaming from the face of Dr. Tadeusz Jedrysiak, as he guides us around the city, and talks of his beloved country.

We walked around Old Market Square in Old Warsaw. The whole square was destroyed in the war and rebuilt in 1953 to resemble the original buildings. Buildings contain apartments and hotel rooms, bookstores, restaurants, art galleries, and surround a plaza with outdoor cafes and flower markets. I took some photos. Before entering this plaza, we walked past the Royal Castle, a large redbrick building with prominent, white cornerstones, three stories tall, built around a courtyard that you can’t see into. It was originally built in the Renaissance style 1598 to 1619, razed during WWII, and rebuilt 1971-1984 by the Poles. We took in a church and had a brief photo shot at the Opera house. Of interest, was a monument to Jerzy Waszyngton 1732-1798 in downtown Warsaw—George Washington. A 42 story building, built in 1955 by the Russians as a gift to the Polish people, is actually the tallest in Poland. Although the Polish have made peace with this Palace of Culture and Science building, it was not without consternation.

Now, as you pass into the Warsaw Ghetto, you can’t really tell much; a non-descript area of gray buildings and streets. In 1940 the Germans built a ten-foot high wall around a one and a half square mile piece of city in the north end. They removed the non-Jew residents and replaced them with Jewish people. Eventually 450000 were crammed in here. Food supplies were restricted with ration coupons allowing for an average of only 230 calories per person, per day. My dietician wants me to lose weight on 1800. Along with that, was a dearth of medical supplies, bad sanitation, and a lack of jobs; or any way, for many, to earn a living. Jews tried to overcome these conditions but really couldn’t. In April, 1943, the Nazis made a move to dispose of the remaining Jews which sparked the ghetto uprising of April to May. It failed and thousands were killed. Eventually, nearly all were either dead or transported out to labor and/or death camps and the ghetto existed no more.

Occasionally, I would see bullet holes in buildings as we went by. It is hard to tour this place without its dark history looming up. The Poles, themselves, seem to look more to the future, these days, than to the past, as the younger generation takes over.

The Polish uprising of August through October, 1944, by partisans, ended in failure and resulted in 200000 Polish deaths and further destruction of the city when the Germans retaliated.

After I had left on a side trip to Wilanow Palace, I ran into Gloria in the hotel lobby and she wanted somebody to accompany her on a walk to Lazienki Park. At one of the entrances we stopped at the monument of Frederic Chopin for a photo. Chopin was born here but later moved to Paris. This is a large park that sits on a level bank for a ways before rolling down the side of a hill and you can walk down a series of steps. We visited the outside of Lazienki Palace and then went to the gate of Myslewicki Palace. Neither was open to the public when we visited. We walked back towards the Old Market Square down Ujazdowskie Avenue to where it becomes Nowy Swiat Avenue and, by now, we were getting some rain. We arrived within a few blocks of the old square when we decided to get something to eat. It was getting late and we needed to work our way to our hotel before dark.

Wilanow Palace (New Villa) was a side trip of only a few miles. The Palace was completed in 1683 by King John III Sobieski. It has two stories and has 3 wings in a square ‘horseshoe’ with the main entrance facing the large open courtyard. The palace has baroque (fancy swirl decorations of the era) raised features and a mixture of Italian/French influence. Formal gardens surround the place. A sundial on the second floor on one end includes the head and shoulders of a realistic looking man, made of sculptured stone, with its head outside the window looking down.

May 13. We left Warsaw heading south on a four-lane highway passing a collection of five to nine story, drab, gray apartment buildings in a rather poor area. There were some sidewalk markets, and a collection of tiny farm plots, which produce higher quality foods than the old collective farms. Bruno, who has been traveling this area, said the roads and infrastructure have been improving every year. The countryside is flat, with farms and mixed deciduous forests. Forests cover 30% of Poland and are natural compared with Germany that has 90% of its forests replanted artificially.

The communists nationalized individual farms after they came to power and formed them into collective farms. It would take from 20 to 50 small farms to make one collective farm. People who were landowners were now reduced to mere farm laborers with little incentive to work. By the 1980’s production had decreased to that of the 1930’s. After communism, some areas have remained in collective farms. Old records, if they still existed, made it hard to establish who had owned what; a major obstacle to re-privatization. There was no capital to invest in plant and equipment since nobody had money. Banks charged 15-20% interest on loans, besides; Polish people were not used to borrowing. Modern farming requires more know-how while, at the same time, the government provides no subsidies. Ninety percent of northern Poland remains in collective farms. The remainder of the farms is small plots; some with 2 or 3 cows, some geese, and the crops are organic. The maximum earnings are $l50 to $200 per month Twenty-eight percent of the labor force works in agriculture. Overall there is a 12% unemployment rate. We passed some ‘summer roadside’ farm produce stands. Bruno advised they might gross $20 per day and, after being open all day long, might net a profit of three dollars.

We reached Czestochowa (pronounced Chesto-ho-va), where the Jasna Gora Monastery is located, and made a stop. The church and fortified monastery were established in 1382. Father Eugene guided us around. A crowded mass was being said in the main church and it was a squeeze to get through the church. They get 4 million visitors annually here. This is a popular place for children from all over the country to take their first communion. Since this is considered the ‘spiritual center’ of Poland, pilgrimages are made from all over Poland with some fifty pilgrimage trails. The most famous one is the 150 mile trek from Warsaw, which begins on August 6, and takes nine days to complete. It was first organized in 1711 and has occurred each year since. The monastery has a shrine dedicated to the Black Madonna. This painting is on a wood panel with the Virgin Mary as a black woman with the child Jesus. I took a picture. The only other similar painting is housed at St. Luke’s in Jerusalem.

We continued through Silesia province, a coal mining and industrial area. I noticed a couple of nuclear plants in the distance. Wages are higher here than the rest of Poland. Chinese and Ukrainian coal is cheaper here than locally mined coal and one of the local problems is closure of coal mines. Another is the transitioning from reliance on heavy industry. Bruno mentioned that Poles were waiting 10 to 15 years to get into an apartment, before the communist government built blocks of apartment buildings, and that about 30% of them share bathrooms.

We crossed into Lesser Poland province and stopped at Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps. "Arbeit Mach Frei," said the sign over the entrance to Auschwitz. It means ‘Work brings freedom." The Jews and Poles that were transported here were misled by the Nazis as to the real reason they were here. They were told to place their names and addresses on their luggage so that, in case of loss, they could be found and, when they arrived, saw this misleading sign. They were given the impression that if they worked they would eventually earn their freedom. The exhibits inside showed the names on various luggage pieces. The Germans took everything away from the prisoners, even the gold teeth, and used the materials to fashion products needed in the homeland; nothing was wasted. Most of the manufacturing in Germany went to the war effort. Auschwitz prison served two main functions: as a concentration camp for prisoners of various nationalities and, as a killing center for Jews. Our Warsaw guide, Dr. Tadeusz Jedrysiak, told us that his father, who was not a Jew but a Catholic Pole, had been imprisoned here. The prison was opened in 1940 with the killing of Jewish persons beginning here in 1942. They used Zyklon B granules that were poured through holes in the ceiling to create poisonous gas when the people were enticed into the showers for bathing. The bodies were disposed of in crematoriums made of metal and brick, fired by coal to 1000 degrees, with 3 huge ovens going. It is sobering to walk through this camp. Four million died here until the place was closed in 1945. Brick buildings housed the prisoners and also wooden barracks. Beds were wooden bunks that, on a first glance, look like crude shelves with an aisle between and people were packed in. Block 10 was used for human experiment. Block 11 served as a prison within a prison for torture and was known as the block of death. A brick wall section just outside in a small courtyard was used for executions by firing squad where mostly Poles were shot. You see fresh flowers, lots of them, on the ground at the base of the wall placed there, even today, by loved ones. The complex is surrounded by a double line of electrified, barbed-wire fences with watchtowers. Across the road is another prison camp, Birkenau, next to a railroad. It is of wood construction and was in business from 1940 to 1941. No one was talking much as we left the area.

We headed for Krakow. A sudden stop in traffic caused Gloria, who was sitting in the back row without a seat belt on, to lurch forward and fall face down in the aisle.

A little ways down the road we stopped again on the highway for traffic in front of us; it was 5:30 p.m. I heard a thump at the rear but felt no shock wave. I was sitting toward the back. We were rear-ended. Bruno and the driver inspected the accident while we passengers waited inside. There was no damage to our bus—just a scratch on the bumper. The car, however, was a heap of crushed metal in the roadway. No one was hurt. Bruno and driver returned to the bus while the car driver was on his cell phone. We drove off. Bruno said, No, we are not calling the police. We had no damage. He begged us not too. Besides it would take at least an hour and a half for the police to show up and we could be stuck here during their investigation and we don’t have the time. Poland has zero tolerance for alcohol and driving so they would take him to jail and he is only 19. A friend is coming to haul off his car. Why ruin his life with a police record at this point? What would you do?

Bruno said that he had done a lot of research on the subject of Hitler and the German people and explained what had happened as follows:

Hitler’s main backers, when he first started, were disillusioned officers and soldiers coming out of World War I on the losing side and tended to be war mongers and racists; the unemployed and desperate; business people (financiers and industrialists); and, the anti-communists. The financial world financed Hitler’s campaign and provided the funds for armaments while the industrialists made the armaments. There was a major depression in Germany and, after WWI, high inflation. A lot of people were desperate. Forty-two percent of the people voted for the Nazi Party in 1933. With added help from other right wing parties and the senility of then chancellor, Hindenberg, Hitler got elected to national leadership. Within months after Hitler became chancellor of Germany, the SS removed their enemies from government jobs and, within a year, the Nazis were in complete control.

Hitler had made promises to the people and generally he kept them. Hitler reduced unemployment. He built the autobahn system (it facilitated troop movement.) He promised availability of radios for people’s homes. Radio was the main form of mass communication in those days and the people tended to believe what they heard on the radio; radio also made it possible for Hitler to spread his propaganda. At the same time laws restricted news from outside Germany. He introduced Social Security. Hitler was economically successful. To the officers and former soldiers he fulfilled war promises by re-building the military and, in 1939, beginning the Blitzkrieg, which was victorious. Hitler used the Jewish people as a scapegoat, blaming whatever ills had befallen Germany on Jewish people, exploiting anti-Semitism. He blamed Jewish financiers and communists for selling out Germany after WW I. Hitler had written a book, Mein Kamph, explaining his views and plans after his attempted putsch of 1923 in Bavaria. During WWII many Germans did back Hitler (war tends to unite people behind a leader.)

Did Germans know about Hitler’s racism and his concentration camps? In the big cities many did know about Jews disappearing; or they did not want to know about it. Jews were different: they stood out, and not really assimilated with most of German citizens, had a different language, religion, and, often, manner of dress. Hitler said Jews controlled the financial world and it was true that a few did own some big banks. His program led to a sort of mass psychology to see Jews as scapegoats and trouble makers for the German nation and he used his charismatic personality in move the people toward shunning the Jews.

Why was there so little resistance against the Nazis? The main resistance movements came through church groups, labor unions, and the Communist Party. The problem was they were split up, never coordinated with each other, and, in some cases, mutually exclusive; i.e., atheist communist and the Christian churches. Resistance was not as effective as it needed to be. Hitler worked on getting rid of resistance leaders. The Germans were not used to living in a stable democracy. Except for a short time they had always lived under a dictator.

Are the Germans to be blamed for allowing Hitler to succeed? Bruno says the answer is a definite YES. All of the Germans who lived and let him come to power could have read Mein Kamph, which was widely distributed after 1923, or Nazi pamphlets, in order to educate themselves, but they didn’t. During the War, who could have resisted? Maybe some soldiers; but the real blame is for people who were not informed or aware. There was definitely not enough resistance shown to Hitler.

What do the Germans think now? Those in their eighties, who were there, don’t want to talk about it, Hitler stole our youth. The 45 to 80 year-olds, who grew up in the post-war years, are aware of what their parents did and feel guilt and shame. The 25 to 45 year-olds say, The war was over 60 years ago. What do we have to do about it? And, the 15 to 25 year-olds, who have seen such movies as Schindler’s List, are aware of the war and tend to be very critical of it. The feelings of the generations today is why we will not participate in any war, said Bruno, as he closed this lecture.

We arrived at the Polish city of Krakow and checked into the Sheraton Hotel next to the Vistula River. A very heavy afternoon was closed and I was looking forward to more joyful activities.

May 14. In the morning I went on a trip to Wieliczka salt mines, just a few miles south of Krakow. They are no longer used for mining salt, but serve as a sanitarium, for mine tours, and a church made out of salt. Gift shops and eateries are located on one level. I bought a one-inch cube of pure salt. In one part of the mine is a place that is used to treat people with breathing problems, I am told, because the air is purified with the existence of surrounding salt. This is the oldest salt mine in the world. This mine was begun in the 13th century to mine salt as and has been in existence for over 700 years. The deepest part of the mine is 1050 feet and we would descend to 435 feet. There are 180 miles of mine shafts bored