Berlin Part II: Sachsenhausen

(Left: Crematorium ruins, Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp)

On my last day in Berlin and Europe, I took the S-Bahn (subway) to Oranienburg to see Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. Sachsenhausen was at its core like any other concentration camp: it was the site of premeditated torture and murder on a mass scale.

I wandered the grounds for several hours by myself, and am grateful to have had the opportunity to see and reflect on the place on my own. There are times when it is good to have friends, be they close compatriots or new acquaintances, while you travel. Other times, it's best to be just be alone in your own thoughts. For me, Sachsenhausen was one of those times.

Sachsenhausen, though it was similarly the scene of unimaginable cruelty and misery, differed from most of the camps Americans are familiar with in several extremely important ways. It was located not on Germany's fringes but right in Berlin's suburbs; like myself and most current-day visitors, the earliest prisoners at Sachsenhausen walked there from the S-Bahn/railroad station in the middle of town. The Nazis made the marches into public spectacles, and the obliging local population was encouraged to line the streets and hurl insults, fruit, and stones as the prisoners walked past. Although the marches were eventually discontinued for logistical reasons, the site of ashes falling in Oranienburg was not unfamiliar in the war's later years. Many historical revisionists claim that the Germans had no idea what the S.S. was carrying out in the East. They may not have known the full extent of the horrors there, but Sachsenhausen, just 23 miles from Brandenburg Gate, strikes me as definitive proof that they had at least an idea.

It also was not part of the Final Solution, the seminal point of Nazi madness that was the orderly genocide of millions of Jews, Gypsies and Slavs, although many of those people did pass through on their way to their deaths (and many thousands of Russian POW's were executed there). Rather, Sachsenhausen was primarily a "work" camp for political prisoners and P.O.W.'s; if you lived in Berlin during the Third Reich and actively opposed or resisted the Nazi regime, there's a decent chance you would have ended up there. Most (not all, but most) of the people who came through its infamous doors freely chose to resist Nazi crimes rather than collaborate or ignore them for their own behalf, either by resisting German aggression (P.O.W.'s), actively fighting back against Nazi rule, or simply by refusing to fight for a morally defunct nation. Many hundreds or thousands of those in the latter group who died could have received their release - right up to the moment of their deaths in the case of many Jehovah's Witnesses - simply by signing their conscription papers and joining the Wermacht (the German army), but only a handful did.

It is difficult for me to recount the tales I heard there; the pain the prisoners suffered is in many ways impossible to convey first-hand, let alone second-hand in my words instead of theirs. But I will say that I did not leave Sachsenhausen or Berlin emotionally troubled. Instead, I felt renewed confidence in humanity. There are bad people in this world, there are many more who do very bad things, and untold more who refuse to speak up. But at Sachsenhausen, a small detachment of brainwashed murderers stood guard over tens of thousands of people who did speak up or fight back, usually against near-impossible odds. Each of the 200,000 people who passed through the gates before their liberation in 1945 was likely just one of many in a circle of friends or family that refused to buy into Nazi madness. If that ratio doesn't bode well for humanity, I don't know what does.

Sachsenhausen to me is not merely a symbol of the horrible things we are capable of doing to each other. It is a symbol of the sacrifice we are capable of making for each other. It is not just a memorial to the murdered peoples of Europe; it is an everlasting memorial to the hundreds of thousands who endured unimaginable torture and death rather than take part in those crimes or sit silently by. Sachsenhausen is not just a monument to hate. It is a testament to hope.

Berlin, Part I

Since I've been back, a lot of people have asked me what my favorite place on the trip was, and I've never hesitated. The answer is Ios, which is literally the most beautiful and enjoyable place I've ever been. Since Ios is basically fake life, though - it's a tourist-driven town on a beautiful secluded island full of 20-something English-speakers, and is apparently pretty miserable in the winter - I usually follow up that answer by saying Berlin was my favorite normal place.

Most people are somewhat taken aback by this. I'm half-Jewish and full American, and I picked a German city as the best I've seen in Europe?

Thing is, I'm also a nerd when it comes to history, and to know the story of 20th century Berlin is to understand the entire Western world during that time. The juxtaposition of different eras is everywhere in this city. On the way back to my hostel on my last day in Europe, on a subway line that runs from Oranienburg (site of Sachsenhausen concentration camp) to Wannsee (site of the Wannsee Conference, where the Final Solution was planned) and twice underneath where the Berlin Wall used to be, I sat across an elderly woman who I deemed to be in her mid to late 80's.

I remember sitting there marveling over all the different traumatic events that might have happened to her in her lifetime. Maybe she was a Nazi, or maybe she came from a family of resisters. Maybe her husband, father, or brother died fighting in World War II, or maybe in a concentration camp. Was she stuck in the city for the terrifying Allied air raids, or even worse during the Soviet invasion (in which untold thousands of German women were raped by vengeful Red Army soldiers)? Did she spend the Cold War in the West or the East? Did she know someone (perhaps her or her own children) who fled for freedom, or was she an informant for the Stasi? How did she celebrate the fall of the Wall (or did she mourn it)?

It's obviously impossible to know the answers to these questions. It's possible that all of the answers are yes, and it's just as possible that she immigrated from somewhere else along the way. But for someone like me, who has spent so many hours reading about these horrific events, being in the locale where they took place was remarkable.

Of course, simply being the site of some of humanity's worst atrocities would not make Berlin an amazing place. But I don't want all my posts to be novel-length, so I'm breaking this one up for all of our convenience. Especially mine.

A Word on Italians

In truth, this clip is not really representative of the Italian people; I didn't really come across any situation this dire during my total of eleven days in Rome, Sicily, Venice, and the Sardinian airport from hell. But it does do a good (or maybe just amusing) job of reflecting upon the cultural divide between Americans and Europeans, especially that between Americans and Italians.

Now, let it be known that although I am of thoroughly mixed ethnicities, I identify with my Italian-American heritage as much as anything else. I have an Italian last name (Grillerio was actually abbreviated to Griller at Ellis Island), grew up on Italian food and traditions, and am Roman Catholic. My great-grandfather, who immigrated alone at age 13, is a legendary figure in my family and he lived to be so old that I got to know him as a child. So I truly expected to love Italy and Italians.

In some ways, they didn't disappoint. They all spelled and pronounced my last name correctly (in fact, better than I do/can) and cooked delicious food. From what I could tell, their lives revolve around their families, their faith, and their food, an admirable lifestyle and one that seemed to encapsulate the older generations of my own family as well.

But I knew from the day I got there that there was something offsetting about Italian culture. It took me a while to admit it, but being stuck in airports for fourteen hours forced me to acknowledge the truth: many Italians are simply lazy, rude, or both.

Now, I'm sure I'm going to catch a lot of flak for this, and this is not to suggest that I didn't meet many Italians who were extremely nice and/or extremely hardworking, or that I myself (and many other Americans) am known to be anything other than lazy and rude. But in the Italy that I saw (with the exception of Venice, which revolves around tourism), values like hard work and common courtesy simply weren't prized.

It was in Olbia Airport that I came up with my Theory of the Italian Peoples. It's quite simple, really. Around 100 years ago, Italy - especially Southern Italy - really sucked. Most hardworking, decent Italians who had the means left for America. All the lazy, rude, and/or privileged ones stayed behind. Nowadays, their descendants reflect that divide, only magnified by 100 years of separation from each other.

You want proof? Look at the style of play of American teams coached by Joe Paterno, Joe Girardi, and Tom Izzo (to name just a few successful Italian-American coaches) vs. the Italian national soccer team. The Americans' teams reflect hard work, respect, and honor, values instilled in Italian-American culture (and American culture at large) by the immigrant experience. American athletes as a whole play through injuries, hesitate to make excuses, and value sportsmanship. When they don’t, the public vilifies them (see: Rodriguez, Alex, or James, LeBron). Cal Ripken, who never won a title after his rookie season, is nationally beloved for his grittiness and his sportsmanship, not because his teams won (they didn’t). The Italian national team flops and dives, fakes injuries and yells racial slurs at opponents, in order to win the referees' favor. They don't care how they win or who they dishonor along the way; all they care about is themselves. What's worse, Italians love them for it.

I had a great time in Italy and would go back again despite the way I was often – and I mean often – treated in my role as tourist or customer. But there is no doubt in my mind that our Italian cousins are just that: cousins. They definitely aren’t siblings; they grew up in a home with different values and different rules. We may have more in common than we have apart, and there are certainly aspects of their culture (especially their appreciation for relaxation and their care for the poor) that I and many others find preferable. Having been there, though, I for one am glad to have grown up in this country instead.

Venice

Venice is a lot like Orlando, FL (rustic charm and history vs. plastic tackiness aside). As far as I could tell, it was full of crowds and overpriced food and souvenirs, and not too many people actually live there (on most days there are more tourists than residents in the entire city). It feels a lot like one big theme park.

But if Orlando is the place you must see before turning ten, Venice is a place to see before turning dead. In other words, it's a perfect bucket-list destination, even if you can see most of its sites in a few days. It's definitely the most beautiful city I've ever seen; just getting lost in it (which is easy enough to do) is an attraction all in itself. A few things that stuck out to me:

1) Definitely the coolest attraction in the city is the Doge's Palace and St. Mark's Square. Once upon a time, the Venetian Navy dominated the Mediterranean world and the small city-state challenged the massive Ottoman Empire as a center of regional trade. Venice was a republic - albeit one with a complex system of government that would strike most Americans as quite foreign - and had a figurehead leader called the Doge who was elected for life. The palace was one of the most beautiful buildings I saw in all of Europe.

2) Although it seems like kind of a cushy job, being the Doge had many, many downsides. He was expected to be the lifelong servant of the Venetian people, not their leader or king, and he was reminded of this whenever he went outside to give a speech to his people (or indeed upon being inaugurated). Standing at the top of the Great Staircase, he'd be dwarfed by gigantic statues of Mars and Neptune, meant to symbolize for all the people his relative insignificance. What's more, from his angle (which I got to see) he was being mooned by both Gods (and it's hard to describe the extent of the mooning going on here; these are massive statues). I'm not sure if that was intentional or not, but I would have preferred a different greeting upon leaving my home.

3) In fact, the Doge couldn't really leave home, and he had to get special permission if he ever wanted to leave Venice (keep in mind that this is a lifelong job). The palace map room is known as one of its most beautiful, but it struck me as an extremely sad place. I imagine the Doges of Venice looking upon a vast world they'd never get to see, wondering what adventures lay outside the city borders, their huge palace a prison where they were always watched. It seems to me a very lonely existence.

The Blog is Still Alive!

You probably thought this blog was as dead as the corpses in the Palermo Catacombs. Maybe you found some other amateur blogger to fill your days with laughter, tug at your heart, and bring you brief moments of joy and enlightenment. As you read this, you're probably filled with the same sense of shock, awe, and ecstasy as Pam had when she found her dead ex-husband in the shower in place of the man she'd married the night before.

I'm not going to go down the Dallas route and pretend that all of Season 7 (i.e. the last two weeks of no new posts) was a dream, although it may have seemed like a nightmare for my devoted readers. Let's just say I lost my way in a sea of Weeds and Dexter episodes, but I'm back where I belong now. I hope we're never apart again.

P.S. Obviously this all means I've been extremely lazy the last couple of weeks. My bad.

A Long Day and a Cold Beer

There's a famous scene, in Lawrence of Arabia, when Lawrence emerges from the desert and orders a glass of lemonade at the officers' parlor. On the worst day of my travels, when I lost all motivation to keep going on, I thought about that scene. I thought that if I finally got to my hostel, at the end of the day, I'd order a single, cold beer and just sit back and relax with it.

My miserable day, of course, is far too long to describe in a blog, and there are of course parts of it that aren't worth going into detail. Some memories, like the check-in clerk who ignored me and two other Americans for 35 minutes before ushering five Italians through the gate just before the day's last flight to Venice took off, are simply too recent and bitter to relive. Others, like the question of where my bag was or how I could get it, the small plane that crashed on the sole runway just as we were ready to leave Sardinia behind (nobody was hurt), or the extended journey from Verona airport to my hostel in Venice (only took 3.5 hours!), are just too outright traumatic. Just know that during a single 24 hour period, I was treated like dirt by the baggage handlers, check-in clerks, customer service reps, claims officers, and pilots of Alitalia, all on separate occasions. My journey, which originially should have been no more than 4 hours door-to-door, ended up taking 16, most of which was spent in one of Italy's smallest airports.

So, did I handle myself with restraint during this time period? It depends on how you look at it. Click on the video above and you can see my general behavior toward pretty much every Italian at that moment. I think, actually, that my failure to kill anyone was indicative of remarkable restraint.

In any case, when I finally did get to my hostel at 12:45 AM and ordered that beer, I enjoyed it to the fullest. Mentally and physically exhausted, my anger had run out. A whole day in Europe had been wasted by incompetency at every level of Italy's social pyramid (more on that in a future post). But at that moment, as I felt the coldness against my fingers and in my throat, and realized there were no more connections to run to save for the inviting bed to sleep in, life was good. And that's how the worst non-tragic day of my life ended on a high note.

Sicily

When I told people the itinerary for my trip (Dublin-Amsterdam-Istanbul-Greek Islands-Rome-Madrid-Sicily-Venice-Berlin), one of the most common remarks I received was "Why Sicily?"

I wanted to see Sicily for three reasons.

1. Adventure: to travel alone in a place like that, a little bit off the beaten track, would offer a different experience than major city after major city
   
2. Heritage: my great-grandma left Palermo as a little girl with her family more than 100 years ago. 1/8 of my heritage came through that island and that city, and I wanted to see it first-hand
3. Food: I love to eat. My dad learned how to cook in large part from the aforementioned great-grandma, and I grew up in suburban New York where Sicilian cuisine has left a large imprint on our delis, restaurants and holidays. I wanted to get to the source of it.

So, keeping those things in mind, here is my time in Sicily, in a nutshell:

• The Sicilian countryside is the most beautiful I've seen. Unfortunately, I only passed through it on trains and buses. But it looked really nice.
• The beaches, too, looked beautiful. But the day I had penciled in for the beach was cool and windy, so I skipped it. This is one of the bigger regrets from my trip.
• Palermo is the dirtiest city I've ever been to. By a lot. This statement includes Guatemala City, Sarajevo, and the Mods at Boston College. There is garbage strewn throughout the city, and when you think about that fact it's important to remember that, since Palermo lacks modern toilets and sewage systems, that garbage is full of dirty toilet paper.
  
• There are also buildings throughout Palermo, some in large clusters, that have not been fixed or demolished since they were bombed during the Allied Invasion of Sicily. For those who aren't history buffs or math wizards, that was in 1943, or 67 years ago. Small parts of the city look more devastated by war than most parts of Sarajevo did when I was there three years ago, just twelve years after the longest siege in modern history. I found out after my trip that the locals refer to the postwar period as the Sack of Palermo because of its mafia-fueled deterioration. In any case, it's pretty gross/depressing, especially since they could make lots of €€€ off of tourism.
  
• Catania, on the eastern side of the island, is much, much nicer than Palermo. In the shadow of Mt. Etna (Europe's largest active volcano), it seems like a golden paradise compared to the regional capital
• In terms of my heritage: it was very cool to see familiar last names (Catano, Siracusa, Leonardi, etc.) around the island, and...
• I am so grateful to my ancestors for leaving there. Putting aside the fact that I wouldn't exist if they hadn't, I was repeatedly blown away by the realization that almost none of the gifts and opportunities afforded to me in life would have been there if I was raised in Sicily (unless, and only maybe unless, I was one of the richest people there)
• The food in Sicily is as good as advertised and is dirt cheap. You can eat like a king for €15 a day. I had the best calamari, eggplant, and cannolis of my life there. I also highly recommend trying horse, which they seem to take great pride in but oddly enough isn't found at the Italian deli near my house.
  

Sicily was definitely the least enjoyable part of my trip, but I expected that going in. I wanted to have an adventure and get in touch with my heritage while eating very well, and I did that. As a traveler, I'm much more seasoned for having experienced it.

(Thanks to Boots in the Oven for the photo)