On the Road Again - Adventures from an Empty Nest

Almost 25 years ago, when we were living in Hungary, our friend, novelist Denise Giardina, came to visit us from her home in West Virginia.  She was writing a novel about theologian Dietrich Bonhoffer and the White Rose, a group of students at the University of Munich who led an anti-Nazi resistance movement during the Second World War.  She wanted to visit the concentration camp where Bonhoffer had been held and ultimately killed, and to interview an elderly monk who had known him. Since Denise didn’t speak German and I had enough of the language to stumble on, I went with her on her visits and helped translate what we saw and heard.  One of the places we visited was Regensburg, where Bonhoffer was held before being executed at the nearby Flossenbürg Concentration Camp.   Denise went on to write a magnificent book – Saints and Villains – and I went back to my life in Hungary and later Charlottesville.  I hadn’t thought muc...

Today's blog is mostly visual, since it is about what is arguably the most beautiful city in the world.  We are camped on the river near the Prague Zoo, and a quick tram ride took us downtown this morning.  Another tram carried us up the hill to the castle and cathedral, built in the 1300s.   There, we happened upon an amazing event - the reburial of a Czech Catholic cardinal who died 50 years ago but had been buried at the Vatican, where he died in exile. Today's procession included clergy, bishops, cardinals and religious organizations from around the world.  From a French report of his body's return to the city yesterday afternoon:   Bells rang across the Czech capital Prague on Friday marking the arrival of the remains of a Catholic cardinal, persecuted by both the Nazis and the Communists, for reburial at home after he died in exile at the Vatican decades ago.   Josef Beran, who survived two Nazi camps during World War II...

What a world we’ve seen since last I wrote!   The weather in Europe seems to have turned upside down, and last week saw temperatures in Spain and southern France in the 50s, with wind and intermittent rain, while sunny weather covered Eastern Europe with highs the 70s.   Ever seeking spring, we sprang, and drove northeast.   We stopped briefly in Lyon, to see our friends Dominique and Roger Micallef.   Roger fed us incredibly well for dinner, and the lively conversation made me feel like I hadn’t been away for almost 13 years.     This visit, we were only breezing through, on the way to Slovakia, but we’ll be back to Lyon soon.  Before we left, we stopped by the neighborhood market, where farmers and vendors sell vegetables, fruit, cheese, meat and wine, and picked up a few provisions, including the rotisserie chicken and potatoes that our youngest daughter Maria and so I loved when we lived there.  It took us three days to get to Sl...

I was 11 when I pulled my parents’ copy of Albert Speer’s  Inside the Third Reich  off the bookshelf. I remember thinking at the time that this was not an appropriate book for someone my age, but I couldn’t put it down. When I finished, I read  The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich , just as  Diary of Ann Frank  was assigned reading in school. Those books made me first ask the question: “what would I do if an authoritarian regime took over in my country?”  I spent many hours in my early adolescence (I was an only child) fantasizing elaborate scenarios where I would have to carry secret messages for the resistance, hopeful that my status as a child would put me beyond suspicion, but recognizing that my actions could just as easily lead to imprisonment or death, as they had for my age-peers in Nazi Germany, some of whom died at Dachau. Dachau symbolized to me – and to many others – the cost of resistance, and the terrible face of Nazi extremism. I realiz...

Happy Easter! We woke up on Easter morning in a parking lot in northern Spain. It was the first Easter in our married life that we didn’t celebrate in church, but the winds on Saturday were just too strong to keep driving to our destination in southern France.   First, we had been startled by a dramatic BANG as the van’s skylight popped open in a particularly strong gust, and we had to stop to fix it. Like us, trucks and other campers crept along at half the posted speed limit, trying to keep from being blown off the road. The trip that was supposed to take six hours had already taken that long, and we were only half-way up the coast when we saw a pull-along caravan upside down on the highway, where winds had flipped it, and it seemed prudent to stop for the night and try again the next day – Easter. As it turned out, the parking lot we found, in a corner of a stadium complex in Granollers, Spain, abutted a canal, a park and a wildlife refuge, and was within walking distan...