By birth and upbringing, I am American. My ethnic heritage is German. But music speaks to the soul, and my soul is Eastern European. Maybe it was all those years my ancestors spent in Ukraine, Poland, Moldova, Hungary. It’s certainly not the music I heard in my childhood (which was an eclectic mix of my […Read more]
Warsaw’s Path of Remembrance—a walk through the heart of what was once the city’s vibrant Jewish community. A walk through history as it memorializes the people who died fighting the Nazis in the Jewish Ghetto uprising of 1943. It’s impossible not to know the story of the Holocaust, how Nazi Germany systematically killed millions of […Read more]
Traveling to Poland and learning more about the Solidarity movement and the Warsaw Uprising gave me a whole new view of the Poles … and makes me want to claim some Polish heritage. It’s embarrassing to admit how little I realized the significance of Poland’s Solidarity movement in the 1980s to the ultimate fall […Read more]
Dripping blood, missing rental car, taxi careening through traffic—as I told the rental car agency guy (when we finally found him), “We’ve had a hard time leaving Warsaw this morning.” Once we were on the road though, things proceeded smoothly. Roads were clearly marked and matched my maps from Google. We drove straight to my […Read more]
When I planned my trip to Krakow in 2006, I had no plans to visit nearby Auschwitz. I was told I’d regret it; that the visit would be memorable. I’ve read a whole booklist of Holocaust books (probably my ethnic German background trying to come to terms with the Nazi German regime) and even visited […Read more]