Random Ramblings About the Last Month

The last email update I sent out talked about our time in Poland seems like quite a long time ago. Since then, we have traveled through the Czech Republic, finishing the bike trip in Berlin, Germany. We flew from Frankfurt to Istanbul, Turkey, at the crossroads between Europe and Asia. And now we're in New Delhi, India, beginning a new portion of our journey in Asia..

When we were in Prague, Kurt and I realized that we had more than enough time to make it to Berlin, so we set out on the slowest portion of our bike trip, averaging maybe 50km a day for about a week to stretch out the last section of road. We followed the Elbe River north out of Prague into the Eastern German countryside, passing through Dresden, Wittenburg, and finally into Berlin. One night while we were camping, we heard the scream of a wild cat, which we later learned from a German taxidermist in Istanbul to be a good sized lynx.

We spent a week in the Berlin area, staying in Furstenwalde with some friends of Kurt's family, celebrating the completion of our bike trip (and Kurt's birthday) with some good food and relaxation. Kurt and I ended up riding about 4250 km (2640 miles) in our journey from Athens to Berlin, and were a little sad to see the bike trip come to an end. By the time we had finished, it really felt like we were only beginning.

Berlin proved to be a very fascinating city and we spent a few days in museums learning about the East/West divide of the city and the events that lead to the wall coming down in 1989. Another interesting day was spent at a special exhibit on Albert Einstein, commemorating 100 years since the unveiling of his theory of relativity, which revolutionized physics as well as challenged society into many novel and profound ways of thinking. A new holocaust memorial was opened in the downtown area in May, filling a city block with slightly tilting rectangular stone pillars resembling a field of graves. Walking through this space makes you feel like you are sinking, becoming lost, and eventually find a way to discover a path out.

We had a few days of craziness getting everyone out of Germany and ahead into the next phase: Applying for Indian visas, packing up bikes, getting Kurt to the Berlin airport with two bikes, picking up my visa, driving to Frankfurt, packing up another bike, getting to the Frankfurt airport and flying to Istanbul, all of which happened in less than three days.

My largest goal for the time in Istanbul was to take it easy and try to prepare myself for the transition that was about to occur before leaving for India. Most of my time was spent hanging out with other travelers at our hostel, walking around the beautiful city, and trying to not do very much at all... And now suddenly I'm in India, and the world has once again become a very different place, as India is like nothing we have seen yet on this journey.

The last few months have flown by with incredibly enjoyable memories. I think that traveling by bike has been my favorite mode of transit yet, allowing for one of the most intimate interactions with the surrounding cultures and landscapes. I already have ideas streaming through my mind of where to use this way in the future.

Around four and a half months remain before I will return to the states in mid-December which will be spent mostly in India and Nepal as well as a few countries in southeast Asia. Although it sort of feels like the home stretch, I'm trying to remind myself that it is only 2/3 of the way through. There is still so much to experience here, and less than five months seems immensely inadequate to explore this part of the world. Many travelers I have met here already have said they could spend years in India, and still not see it all.

My immediate impressions of New Delhi are quite chaotic. After staying awake all night on the flight from Istanbul, waiting in an airport, fighting for my rights with the taxi driver to take me where I paid for, and maneuvering through dirty streets jammed with people and rickshaws and meandering cows, I arrived in my room and fell soundly asleep. In the last couple of days I have been adjusting myself to being here with all of the frantic busyness and intense humidity, and I am thankful to say that it is coming along fairly well. Eric arrived yesterday morning and we will be spending a few days here figuring out where to go next.

[You may have been wondering why our writing has become more infrequent as this journey progresses. And I hope some time in the future to try to articulate why. If you're curious in the meantime, feel free to email me (dplandis@gmail.com) and we can start talking from there...]

Oswiecim - "Work Brings Freedom"

Only 60km west of the Polish town of Krakow lies the smaller town of Oswiecim, a place that is better known by it's German name during WWII, Auschwitz. After leaving Vienna, we spent a week biking through northwestern Slovakia to Krakow, Poland, and then after spending a few days in the city, turned westward to visit the infamous concentration camp.

Most of my personal interest in visiting Poland was to see Auschwitz, the largest of all of the Nazi concentration (or more appropriately, extermination) camps. Many of us are familiar with the horrors of the holocaust, but these realities have their greatest impact when we experience them firsthand.

During my time in Israel in 2002 I had the privilege of meeting a holocaust survivor on Kibbutz Afikim over tea and desert in her home. A small group of us spent the evening talking and learning from her few stories, which were clearly difficult for her to share. At one point during this time, I remember her walking over to one of the cabinets in her living room, opening a drawer, and pulling out a paper that displayed her name, showing her identification number and a record of her transport from the Dachau concentration camp in Germany to Auschwitz. I specifically remember this experience because it was one of the first times that I realized how this most tragic chapter in modern human history had devastated so many people. My memories went back to the time that I had visited Dachau in 2000 on a high school choir Trip. Now, finally making it to Auschwitz felt like putting one of the last pieces in the puzzle.

The original Auschwitz (I) camp has been converted into a large museum complex to illustrate the realities of life and death for its prisoners. Many of the 28 buildings that were used to house and execute prisoners are now exhibits containing moving remnants of the vast amounts of hair, shoes, prosthetic appendages, suitcases, and eyeglasses that had been kept after prisoners had been murdered. The words above the main gate to Auschwitz state, "Arbeit mact frei," or "Work brings freedom," a sarcastic reminder to prisoners of the hopeless irony of their situation. One building was named the "death block," where the first experiments with gas chambers were conducted and many people were killed by firing squad. At the other end of the camp is a larger set of gas chambers and a crematorium, which still contains the scratches from prisoners' fingernails as they struggled through the last moments of their lives. The photo gallery for Poland on our website contains images of many of these things, so I will not go into much of their detail in writing.

We spent most of a morning at Auschwitz I, and then moved only 3 kilometers to the other side of town to Auschwitz II, more commonly known as Birkenou. This second camp that was built later to accommodate increasingly larger number of prisoners which topped 100,000 in 1944 and were contained in the camp's 300+ buildings. The breadth of this camp far exceeds Auschwitz I, stretching almost as far as the eyes can see. There are a fair amount of buildings in their original constructed states, but many others only remain as foundations and chimneys, reminding you that only your imagination could bring the camp back to life. Through the main entrance gate runs a rail line which travels to the opposite end of the camp, terminating near the crematoriums and gas chambers.

Jews were transported on trains from all over Europe which were funneled into this final line and, upon arrival, were sorted according to their physical strength and ability to work. It is estimated that over 70% at this stage were sent directly to the gas chambers, and their bodies stripped of all valuables and afterwords cremated. There are pits near the end of the railway containing large amounts of human ashes as the result of this process. Those who survived this initial selection were forced to battle daily for their constant survival in the camp.

The grounds of Birkenou are open for exploration, and we spent a few hours walking its length and peaking into some of the buildings. When we reached the opposite end where the trains were unloaded, we came across the remains of two destroyed crematoriums and a memorial to all that had died in this location. The memorial consists of 1.5 million bricks, each signifying a life that was lost in the camp.

During the holocaust, 6 of the world's 12 million Jews lost their lives due to direct ethnic and religious cleansing by the Nazis. 1.5 million of these deaths occurred in Auschwitz. I have been trying to mentally grasp what this number really meant for this stage in history and for it's subsequent results hereafter, and it has been a difficult process. Standing at that location and trying to imagine the incredible loss of life was something that I will never forget.

During our time in Krakow there was a Jewish Culture week which presented a series of events, one being a film that commented on Christian/Jewish relationships during the holocaust. With the recent death of Polish Pope John Paul II, Krakow was an interesting place to look a little deeper into this topic. One of the main questions that was brought up during this presentation was, why didn't the rest of the world, specifically the church, do more to speak out against the evils of the holocaust? And it's a very appropriate question. Certainly since the event, much has been said wishing different actions, but why not during it? Was it our fear? Our ignorance?

It is astounding how many similar events are present in world history at various scales. In only the past two decades I can quickly recall Serbia/Bosnia/Kosovo, the Darfur region of Sudan, Rwanda, Saddam Hussein's policy toward the Kurds, and the ongoing violence in Israel toward the Palestinians. Although each event varies greatly in depth and scale, all are the direct result of one group's intolerance (ethnically, politically, religiously) of a specific other. What scares me even more than the horrific realities of these events is the potential they have to repeat themselves through reactions that are spawned from the suffering of their victims.

As human beings, I think it is important for all of us to remember that we are capable of playing either side in these events; we can be either the victims or the perpetrators, and by becoming one it is easier to become the other. And by standing aside and doing nothing to speak out against the evils in the world and change our lifestyles to benefit those who are suffering, we become the oppressors.

When we passed by the two crematories at the end of Birkenou that were intentionally bombed by the Nazis when they realized they had lost the war and would be discovered, there was a sign that read, "Keep off the Ruins." This caught me in a strange way because of the word, "ruins." Usually when I encounter this word in points back into the years of the past, dating something that was significant in the progression of human history. Yet, although these ruins were fairly recent, they still seem to deserve to be put in the same category.

Although the holocaust is becoming farther from the personal experience of the world's population, it's realities and repercussions live on. I am very curious about which "ruins" will remain with significance after my lifetime, and how my life interacted with their creation and destruction. My hope is that we can break free from these cycles of hatred and prejudice, and can have the courage to do that in a way that is truly effective. Our work must come first in shaping our own attitudes, as well as those of our community and country. History will tell the rest...

Communism: Dream, Reality, Nightmare?

What a difference twenty years makes. Today, walking the narrow streets of downtown Prague, the atmosphere feels much like any other touristy European city. Near the center of town, I stop for a break at a corner McDonald's, order a small coffee (in English, of course!), and pick up a copy of the latest USA Today newspaper on the table beside me. Now sitting at one of the many internet cafes, I have just spent the last half hour sending and receiving emails with the western world...

This wasn't always the picture here in the Czech Republic, or in the rest of the former "Soviet bloc" for that matter. Talk to the locals here long enough, and glimpses of a very different life are soon discovered. Media sensorship, the Secret Police, socialist ideals, government propoganda, economic policy, a "classless society," and the list of relevant topics could go on and on... Nearly everyone has some very poignant reflections on what it was like to live under a Communist regime. Yet over the past several weeks, I have been surprised to find that not everyone is in agreement on the perceived progress that has occurred within the last two decades.

Curious about some of the discrepencies of opinion that I was encountering, I decided to spend my first morning in Prague at a newly-opened Museum of Communism in the downtown district. Glenn Spicker, the museum's creator, designed it as a place not only for tourists, but also for younger Czechs who don't remember life under Communism. In a recent interview with Newsweek, he remarks that "visitors who see the Benettons and Pizza Huts don't get an idea of how different life was... [and] the younger generation has not been told the whole story by their parents because everyone's too busy living a new life."

Although Karl Marx published his famous Communist Manifesto way back in the mid-1800's, it wasn't until the following century that his utopian ideals really began to take root. Characterized by an extreme hatred of the establishment and the wealthy class, Marx's protege Lenin initiated the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. As a result of the hardships of post-WWII Europe, these attractive ideas began to spread westward. In 1946, with Marx's brand of socialism seen as the answer to the poverty and economic stagnation taking place across the continent, the people of Czechoslovakia voted the Communist party into power with 38% of the vote.

What followed was a steady progression of economic and social changes. Independent farmers were forced to join agrarian enterprises and coops, and industries were nationalized. In the schools, children were taught to hate the wealthy classes and democratic nations, while the common laborers were promoted as being the true heros of society. Religion was also discouraged, as it distracted from economic production and was a barrier in the path towards true revolution. Along with fixed wages for workers, prices in the stores were also determined by the government. Although the idea seemed great, the reality of a huge surplus of demand over supply led to empty store shelves and an underground barter economy.

What I found most disturbing, however, were the ways in which the Communist regimes held on to their power, often using fear and propoganda to force the population into comformity. Capitalism and the west (particularly the U.S.) were depicted as the enemy, an "empire of evil" out to rule the world through exploiting labor and minorities. At one point in the 1950's, a potato bug attacked fields in Czech and East Germany. The government, making the most of the opportunity, informed the public that these were "America Bugs" being spread by U.S. airplanes, and thus initiated a huge media campaign against the west. At one point, the Communist government even began to pass out gas masks, and used repetitive messages of fear and propoganda to promote war hysteria within the general population. The enemy was portrayed as being perverse enough to use weapons of mass destruction on innocent children and families...

It was at this point in my tour through the museum that I began to notice a few parallels. Now I have been out of the U.S. for almost nine months, but all of this talk about fear, an ememy with weapons of mass destruction, and "empires of evil" began to sound strikingly familiar. Sort of like something one might hear while watching the evening news, or in a speech from our commander-in-chief. Yet this was all from a museum dedicated to a fallen, oppressive Communist regime... not a portrait of our mighty nation, a beacon of freedom and democracy to the rest of the world. The irony of it all hit me squarely in the face, and I wondered if some of the same observations were being made by the crowd of internationals passing through the museum as well that day.

As we all know, the Communist system didn't survive. Despite the lofty ideals that it was established under, and its often violent supression of dissenting voices, the system fell at the hands of its own people. In January 1969, a Czechoslovakian college student by the name of Jan Palach burnt himself alive, in protest of the Soviet occupation of his country. This triggered a massive underground movement in the years that followed, consisting of the distribution of pro-democracy literature, music, and art to the general population. People eventually took to the streets, and by 1989 Communist governments in Poland and Hungary were officially ousted at the polls. Several months later, on the 9th of November, the people of Berlin began to dismantle the wall, effectively destroying the most tangible symbol of Communism's "iron curtain." In Czechoslovakia, knowing they had lost the support of their people, Communist leaders resigned and were replaced by their democratic opposition. This has since been referred to as the "Velvet Revolution," in recognition of the smooth and largely bloodless transfer of power that took place.

Here I will return to my original question, which has to do with this lingering support for socialism that is still present among a portion of the population in Eastern Europe. Here in the Czech Republic, for example, in the 2002 parliamentary election, the Communist party still retained 20% of the total vote. In talking with a man from Slovakia a few weeks ago, he said the reason for this support is quite simple. When the Communists were in power, everyone had a job. Maybe there wasn't a huge variety of things to chose from in the stores, but at least most everyone was earning enough money to feed themselves and their families. And that was all that really mattered.

Competition is fierce in the European economic markets these days. And although the growth of the European Union is often viewed as a very positive development, I have also seen a much different side to that coin. Many of the smaller countries of Eastern Europe simply cannot compete with the powerhouses of Western Europe. Although many of these larger countries are expanding their industries into the East, unfortunately the profits from this expansion will not remain here - it will go back to the West. And of course as the Euro is adopted and local currencies phased out, many Eastern Europeans find that their money, while perhaps more stable, simply doesn't go as far (true for those of us traveling with US dollars as well!).

It will be with a certain degree of sadness that I now leave Eastern Europe. After some wonderful interactions with the people, and lots of fascinating discoveries about the history and culture in this part of the continent, I continue to move on. Most of my time here in Prague the weather has been rainy and overcast, which has delayed my plans for the final leg of my ride into Germany. So this evening I will take a train to Cheb, in western Czech Republic along the German border. From there, I should have enough time to ride the remaining 300km along the River Main to Frankfurt, where I will meet my friend Wayne on July 7th.