Joe’s May 2008 Trek Thru Israel, Eastern Europe & The Balkans En Route to Auschwitz Along the Same Rail Transport Lines my Ancestors Rode to the Death Camps

May 7 2008-Flight leaves at 7am on Tuesday.  It will be a real push to get everything done with only 8 hours left before I have to be at LAX.  I walked into the office this morning with a long list of things to finish in the office.  Of course, Time Warner flaked out on internet service, and I spent the first two hours of my day trying to reboot the modem.  The customer support woman in India with her terrible command of English was of course very cheery in her high pitched voice, but did nothing to help, and then told me the service tech will be at my office to repair the line on Wednesday.   Well what good does that do me if I am trying to run a business.  Time Warner certainly has gone down hill and over to India since the takeover from Adelphia.  Perhaps it would have been better if the Riga family continued to embezzle company funds from Adelphia as we always received same day service.  Finally, I got to a Supervisor in India who offered me a Tuesday evening repair.  The trick in dealing with these poorly trained monkeys is to demand to speak with someone in the United States.  So after 60 minutes with India, they transferred me to the good old United States.  Trouble was that they erased my file as a means of getting even with me.  The guy finally reviewed my situation and got me an afternoon repair.  But he would not hang up until I gave him a rating of 1-10 (best).  10 was fine as long as I got the repair today.  Since I am writing now from my office, the repair worked and he earned his 10. However Time Warner gets a minus 1 for their customer service clowns in India.

I am doing this trip on my own, as Helayne is finishing her last course at UCLA to get her CFP Certificate so she can sit through the test to become a Certified Financial Planner.  So if anyone is looking for the party scene with a group of hot middle aged women talking literary reviews, head out to Malibu while I am gone.  My flight because it is frequent flyer miles goes LAX to Boston (where I may see my Dead Head Show Partner at the airport layover), then onto London to Rome to Tel Aviv.  Talk about torture!  Thats what I get for grabbing a last minute frequent flyer ticket.  I will be in Tel Aviv for three days with my two sons who are there for six months on work stints.  After three days, I am flying to Athens, Greece and on to the Northern part of the Country for a visit with friends for a couple days before I start my train trip through Bulgaria, Hungary and Poland.   More on the train trip later.  The big problem that I am trying to cope with is that I am going through Heathrow in London which you may have heard the new Terminal 5 has its opening bugs that they can’t seem to work out.  In the month that the new Terminal 5 has been open, the majority of luggage has been lost.  The solution that British Air created was to ship half of the bags to Nashville Tennessee to have Federal Express sort out the baggage mess, and the other half to Milan where they have another warehouse to sort out the mess.  As a result, all of the care packages that I am bringing-all 65 pounds of that large duffel bag are being checked, and I am bringing my suitcase on the flight so I don’t get bagged.  So to speak.  Hopefully, the checked bag will get some frequent flyer miles if it goes to Nashville en route.

I was collecting all the supplies yesterday and I feel like a pack horse bringing provisions to the moon.  The boys need Skype microphone headsets for the computer VOIP, external hard drives and summer clothes.  Of course, they left with winter clothes and now its 95 degrees there.  Oh shit, I just remembered that I forgot to buy the sex wax or whatever it is for Josh’s surf board in Tel Aviv.  One more thing to add to the list of do!  I spent Sunday running around looking for gifts to bring to the friends in Israel and Greece.  You’d think they can get the same crap made in China that we get here!  

On top of that, I received a large care package from Universal Studio from Jacob’s friends comprised of the newest release DVD’s and CD’s that only adds another ten pounds to the load.  Then of course Josh needs every issue of Road and Track, Vanity Fair, Variety, Los Angeles Magazine, New Yorker  and a dozen paperbacks that have been delivered since they left LA.  Of course, Helayne is adding the Jewish Journal to the basket strapped to my back.

So the challenge is to get home, pack my stuff, remember my tickets and passport and make certain I get on this 7am flight to Boston.  I have lots of reading materials for the flight(s). 

No sooner did I wrtte last night that the internet in the office is restored, that the modem get fried.  I had to run out at 8:45pm to Best Buy for a replacment modem and get on the phone with time warner technical support. Of course the new modem is not responding and its now 10:30pm. The tech people now on Monday night claim no one can come to the office until Friday. Time to turn it over to Helayne to see if she can find their jugular. Flight to boston pretty uneventful although I am battling a cold I picked up in Napa last weekend. I used the earplanes which are modified earplugs you use to equalize the cabin pressure. Plane lands and they are stuck in my ear canals. I walk through the terminal with these fricken things to far in my ears. Of course in post 911 world, tweezers not allowed at the airport. Finally I get a coffee stir stick and I looked like the biggest fool standing in rest room using a coffee stir stick prying these things (not the potatoes) out of my eats. But it worked. Next flight to London Heathrow with my carry on entourage of all the baggage I can get by the gate attendant. All that people here talk about is the weather and the large percentage of bags lost at Heathrow.  This clearly has the makings of a true adventure.

Flights are numerous-LAX/Boston/London/Rome/Tel Aviv.  Enough Already!London Heathrow New Terminal 5 is an impressive shopping mall.  Multiple floors of shopping mall from Prada to Ferrari Automobile to Cuban Cigar stores and everything in-between.  Had a wonderful Scottish breakfast at 8am of Salmon, eggs and McMurphys stout on tap.  Six hour layover trying to stay awake.  Arrived in Rome and picked up my checked luggage which had to be rechecked to El Al as they are probably the only airline that does not trust any one else’s security……for good reason.Checking into El Al means you go through their multi step security process. The Mayor of Los Angeles is actually hiring the Israeli Security Agency as a consultant to beef up the security of LAX.  It will be interesting to see the changes next year.
I walke through the army of para military guards in the dedicated wing for El Al Checkin.  They sent me to an atractive young girl for pre-check in interview.  Yes, and interview in line.  First thing is the psychology security profile assesment with the pretty Psychologist who is looking for a panic attack.  Why are you going to Israel?  Who are you visiting?  Have you been there before?  What street are you going to?  Do you speak Hebrew?  Why not?   When were you last here?  IF you are Jewish, were you Bar Mitzvahed?  How old were you on your Bar Mitzvah?   On and on and on.  Then luggage inspection which is full and comprehensive opening of all the care packages and the linings of every piece of luggage.  You get annoyed, but you can’t get mad at them as you know why they are doing this.  It is a real threat everyday.  But El Al has never been jacked or bombed because of the Israeli model of security.  Then on to recheck of my bags.  Because of the Heathrow Terminal 5 chaos, I had carried on my suitcase through all three prior flights and I only checked the big duffel bag with the Chanukah Quanza gifts for the boys.  But this is El Al.  No, my Tumi cannot go on the plane “But I have carried it on every international flight for ten years.  It fits in the overhead.”  No, it is too big and too heavy.  Not on El Al means don’t screw with us or you can go back and talk to our soldiers with their big machine guns.  Arguments about logic mean nothing with these people.   But it was nice not to carry on other than my tote briefcase.  Oh to legitimize and give in.  Arrived in Tel Aviv airport at 2:30am. 

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Sunday Morning-Arrived in Tel Aviv airport at 2:30am.  Went through customs and hopped in a cab.  Nice Russian guy driving.  When we approached the City now it is 3:15am as we go through a lit intersection arriving in the City.  Lots of Prostitutes on the sidwalks.  So he says in his broken English:  You want to take any of the girls to the hotel, I can negotiate good price.  “Welcome to Israel!”  Now I have Russian pimps driving my cab.  No, just take me to the hotel I have been traveling for the last 36 hours.  The hotel lobby is empty and the night clerk does not even help me with my bags off the cab and up the steps.  His name is Igor of course, also from Russia.  So I give him my confirmed reservation number.  Same broken English.  “You have a reservation, but we do not have a room.  But you are lucky, some people just left we will clean it.  You stay in the lobby here and I will call you”.  Well what does that mean…its 3:30am and no room.  So I sit in the lobby and nurse a beer for the next hour until I get in the room at 4:30am.  The boys call me at 4:30am in response to my e mail sent from the lobby and we make plans for them to come to the hotel at 9AM.  Now I know if they are out on the town at 4am that Israel has not changed them enough for me to expect them to show at 9AM.  They call from the lobby at noon and wake me up.  Up to the room and open their care package duffel bag with all the things they miss from the USA.  Sunscreen that is not overpriced as in Israel, computer hard drives, skype headsets, summer clothes, sex wax and lots of food snacks.  Turns out that the size large clothes do not fit Jacob because he has thinned out not having his fast food of LA; particularly when they were on the Kibbutz for three weeks upon arrival in the intensive language immersion course. 

We went across the street to the beach which was packed as today is a National Holiday being Israeli Independence Day.  The beaches are packed with spectators.  Everyone was waiting for the start of the Air Show which was not a disappointment.  The show of the Israeli Air Force and Navy was impressive.  See the photos will upload to this blog.  After the 1pm show, we lounged at the beach drinking beer and swimming with Josh and Jacob’s new cadre of friends from around the world.  Great kids.  Josh and Jacob each have their girlfriends they met in Israel….. Jacob’s from Detroit and Josh from Deerfield, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago (next to Fake Forest Migs-She had the same impression of the closed society in Fake Forrest with their pinkster mentalities).  After the beach, we dragged the bounty of care packages to the boy’s place five minutes form the beach which they each have their own studio apartments completely wired for internet and ipod broadcasting.  They are in their own element and living a great life here.  Their videos of their escapades in Israel that they were willing to share with me were great.  A cruise with their whole group to Turkey, videos of their late nights in Tel Aviv, etc.  They are living a fantastic life here.  Its a lot like being in New York City, but with amazing beaches in the City.  Weather is in the low 80’s and I am there one month before it heads to the very heavy humidity and high temperatures typical of the Middle East.

Got up at 3:30am in Tel Aviv for my 7 am flight on Olympic Airlines to Athens.  Israeli airport security for obvious reasons is a very demanding process just like the Rome to Tel Aviv leg.  In the first line you go through the psychological screening before you check your bags.  Where are you going, what did you do here.  What was the area and purpose of your visit, etc?  Flight only two hours to Athens and then pick up another little Greek airline to Thessaloniki.  My destination is the second largest city in Greece-up in the North towards the Albanian border.  My Father’s family lived there since his ancestors were expelled in 1492 from Spain during the Spanish Inquisition.  I arrived at the airport, took a cab to the hotel.  Actually, I was lucky to get a cab since all cab drivers were going on a one day strike the next day.  On top of this, the gasoline haulers were already in their fifth day of a wildcat strike in the entire country protesting their regulated rates which they claim were insufficient to haul gasoline.  After I arrived at the hotel, I was joined by Fanni and Babys who met many of my friends last year when ten of us did the Mediterranean cruise and they rode their motorcycle six hours to Athens.  Fanni and Babys took me out to a wonderful Greek taverna where we sat outside and had so many types of roasted meats that I lost count.  Lamb prepared in more ways that you could imagine with incredible Greek salads.  The one annoying issue was that it felt like I was eating in Santa Monica on the Promenade with so many weird people panhandling.  The Nigerians have cornered the market in bootleg DVD sales and a different Nigerian comes to your table every 60 seconds waving DVD’s and CD’s.  During the lull, the gypseys from Rhomania and Albania harrass you to buy their cupie dolls and keychains. 

After our incredible feast, we then went to a pastry shop like I really needed to sample all the deserts that they ordered.  Very good and fat deserts.  Of course we were bothered by the same street people.  Fani and Babys told me that the quality of life is definetly affected by the illegal immigration and the aggressive panhandling.  It certainly is not the Greece that I had come to visit at least 20 times in my life.

Monday

I had an open day, so I walked the entire city which has the hustle and bustle of your typical large metropolitan center.  I walked over to the port area and there was a collection of every taxi cab that worked the city parked in two very long rows with every cab driver standing under a banner saying something in Greek which I could not decipher.  The cab drivers were on a one day wildcat strike protesting their inadequate fares in view of rising gas prices.  This was done as a result of the ongoing strike by the gasoline haulers which was in the sixth day was already crippling the entire country as every gas station had a sign on the pumps indicating they were out of gasoline.  Later on that evening, I had dinner with Fannis family.  Her brother Yannis, his wife Maria and their son joined his Mom for dinner with me. 

The mother Maria was married to Theodore who died in the mid 80’s. They have a special relationship with my family as they were given my Grandparents home by the City of Thessaloniki during World War II.  It was part of the Nazi final solution to remove the Jews from Greece and then have the Greek government redistribute the wealth to the non Jews.  After the war, my father went back to his house after the concentration camps with his new bride.  When he was greeted at the door and explained the house was given to them by the Greek government and now owned by Mr.and Mrs. Noulikas   Of   course, there was no compensation to my father as the sole family member survivor of the Nazi holocaust. Noulikas instead invited by Father and his new bride to live them which they did for the first year.  During that first year, my father was drafted into the Greek Guerllla army to serve during the Greek Civil War and my sister Esther was born while he was at war in 1949.

The dinner on Monday night was a spectacular seafood banquet.  We must have had ten different plat4es of seafood-octopus, quid, calamari, swordfish, white fish, trout, and on and on while we were all drinking Ouzo.  Salads and then bunelos in honey for dessert.

Tuesday

I met the tour group who were my Sephardic March of the Living tour partners.  All 17 were from Haifa, Israel.  Now the challenge that I realized was that the tour is in Hebrew which I do not speak.  .  But they found me three people in the group who were fluent in English who stuck by me during the lectures and tours to make certain I understood everything.  Being with Israelis meant that more than half of them were chain smokers.  The tour began immediately after breakfast.  Thessaloniki as the center of Sephardic Jewish culture was the agenda of the day. 

The Turks conquered what is now Thessaloniki in 1430.  Those same conquerors decided to expand the population of 11,000 with the rescue of the Jews who were brought to this area in very large numbers during the Spanish Inquisition (1492).  At that time, the Muslims of the Ottoman Empire recognized the importance of the Spanish Jews who numbered 15,000-20,000 being expelled by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella.  The Ottomans gladly brought the Jews to their land for their technological contributions and skills so badly needed.    Quickly following that, the Jews of Italy, Portugal, Sicily and Northern Africa were also brought to the Ottoman Empire area now known as Thessaloniki.

By the 1890s, the port of Thessaloniki was closed on the Sabbath because the city was 50% Jewish.  Shortly later, the rulers demanded that the port be closed on Sundays rather than Saturdays.  In 1912, Thessaloniki once again became part of Greece.  In 1917, the Jewish Quarter which represented one third of the land area of the city was subjected to a ravaging fire caused by a woman preparing her eggplant and burned so much of the Jewish community.  It was never rebuilt and nearly 55,000 Jews lost their homes and businesses, as well as 31 synagogues.  During the period between the two world wars, many Jews emigrated to what is now Israel, particularly after a disastrous arson fire in 1931 in which so many Jewish homes were destroyed again.  Approximately 16,000 Jews settled in Israel and the Jewish port workers of Thessaloniki created the port of Tel Aviv.  The Jews of Thessaloniki also emigrated to the USA, France Italy and Latin America.  This certainly was the start of the slow spiral downward that culminated with the arrival of the Nazis in 1940 as an occupying force.  The Nazis in 1941 passed their anti Jewish laws which banned Jews from going into pasty shops, cafes, etc. Jewish libraries and archives are destroyed, homes of Jews are confiscated and Jews banned from the Hirsch Jewish Hospital. .

We did a real lot of moving about the city with a large bus for the 19 of us.  There was an elderly couple with us from a kibbutz in Israel.  The gentleman by the name of Benyamin had left Thessaloniki after his return from the concentration camps and moved permanently to Israel.  He had not been back to Greece since the end of the war. Throughout the day, he gave first hand accounts of his experience in Thessaloniki and in the concentration camps.  . Our stops included the restored synagogue in Thessaloniki (which is used only four times a year), the Jewish Day School for K-6 that has 20 students of which half are not Jewish, but friends of the Jewish community, the Hospital that was a Jewish institution up until the war, and the “new” Jewish cemetery.  

It is referred to as the new Jewish Cemetery because there was a major dispute between the City and the Jewish Community before World War II.  Despite the fact that the Jewish Community goes back to 90 BC, the city wanted the Jewish Cemetery removed so that they could expand the University which is now the largest in the country. The Jewish community refused to unearth the graves and relocate them.  When the Nazi’s came into Thessaloniki in 1941, one of the first things they did to both get the confidence of the Greek community and to start their harassment of the Jews was to destroy the cemetery.  The graves were unearthed, and the tombstone destroyed and discarded.  Many tombstones were redistributed into the community for building supplies such as sidewalks.  Thus, the old Jewish Cemetery with so much historical significance was destroyed to make way for the University expansion.  Desecration of the Jewish cemeteries was a very common degredation of the Jewish communities everywhere the Nazi killing machine went through the war.  It was a cornerstone of their reign of terror which started with demoralizing the Jewish population with insults like this activity.

By February 1943, the Nazis required Jews to wear the yellow Star of David and forced them to live in specific areas.  This continued harassment was marked by the event referred to as Black Sabbath when all Jewish men were required to assemble at the City square by the sea and were subjected to the humiliation of calisthenics and exercise.  We went to the site where a beautiful sculpture was erected. in memory of that occasion.  We also went to the site of the old railroad station that was used by the Nazis for the transport of Jews from March to August 1943 when 50,000 Jews of Thessaloniki were transported in rail cattle cars for the four day trip to Auschwitz/Berkinau concentration camps in Poland.  In that period, 19 train transports left Thessaloniki which was the southernmost train transport to the camps.  These trains were averaging 3,000 Jews with as many as 300 crammed into cattlecars with no heat, sanitation or sense of compassion were dispatched for their tasks.   Roughly 50,000 Jews of Thessaloniki perished in the concentration camps.  This represented 96% of the Jewish population of Thessaloniki and roughly 98.6% of the Jewish population of all of Greece.  According to the Holocaust Museum of Los Angles, only the country of Belorussia with an extermination rate of 98.8% had a larger percentage population loss during the Holocaust.  The story was told that the Grand Rabbi of Thessaloniki provided the names of the Jews of the city in the belief that the transports were resettling that population to a better place.  Very few people avoided the transports.  My father was one of th few that did not get sent out of Greece.  He tells me that his Father told him to leave Greece because of the Nazis.  However, my father was captured in Bulgaria and accused of being a British spy and sent to the camps anyway.  At the same time, my mother who traces her roots to Turkey was routed out of her home with her entire family during the Kristelnacht roundup and violence in Vienna, Austria before her teenage years.

The purpose of this trip is to trace my ancestors trip by rail in the forced transports to the concentration camps.  I will be spending the next few days on trains from Greece to Sofia, Bulgaria, through Serbia, Romania, Hungary and on to Poland to understand what went on with the Nazi machine and in these death camps.  Some people are asking me why I am going on a trip like this.  The answer is because I want to learn about my past and trace that route of my ancestors that I was deprived of the opportunity to ever meet.  My father is the only one out of his large family to survive.  He lost everyone.  My Mother was liberated from the death camps with her Father and Brother.  She lost everyone else.

We boarded the train to Bulgaria from the Thessaloniki station for our first leg of the journey to Sofia Bulgaria.  Last minute news on our way to the station was that the train has cancelled the sleeping car, so we are left to fend for ourselves to find seats on the train.  The peasant class train is a six seat stagecoach seating arrangement in a compartment.  With our entire luggage in tow, we board the train only to find that much of the train is occupied and no reserved seats.  We finally get settled into the train with only three of us in my car.  The seats extend out into sofa style seating and we begin the trip.  It’s a run down train, and the window will not stay shut no matter how much effort we use to rig a means of jamming it shut.  So it is cold and loud.  I put on all the warm clothes I can find and dig out some ear plugs for the long trip and try to get some sleep.  Through the course of the six hour trip, we are interrupted by passport control police as we are exiting Greece, and again as we enter Macedonia and again with Bulgarian border control. I woke up to have my passport inspected in Bulgaria, but then went back to sleep.  Shortly after I fell asleep, I hear the loud panic screaming of a young woman.  It was a Romanian woman no older than 20 years old pulled off the train claiming that she misplaced her passport.  Blood curdling screams as she is dragged off to the police station.  Her mother never got off the train according to some of my group who were in the same train car.  How weird!  The issue of illegal immigration is a major issue in this part of the world. 

We arrived in Sofia Bulgaria which was a large train station build communist style.  In other words, it was built for the masses.  The last time that I had been in Sofia, Bulgaria was in 1975 when it had peaked out as a communist country.  Although Communism is dead, the reminders are everywhere.  Reminders like the signs of deferred maintenance everywhere.  Buildings are dark and dismal looking, the automobiles are the left over communist production Trabant vehicles and the busses are very old world.  The Trabant vehicle was a body made of pressed plastic parts, and was a unique product of communist Germany.  Little has changed and there is really nothing to report about Sofia.  Somewhat dingy and depressing.

We are met by a guide who tells us the Jewish history of Sofia.  There were 50,000 Jews in Bulgaria.  The Prime Minister of Bulgaria agreed to hand over to the Nazis all the Jews, but the King blocked the transport of the Jews.  As a matter of fact, after the King met with Hitler to indicate his refusal to allow the transport of the Jews to the concentration camps.  He returned to his home and was found dead from poisoning.  Bulgaria is one of the very few places in this part of the world where they still live in harmony with the other religions.  There are only 4,000 Jews remaining if Bulgaria.  We are back on the train at noon for the next leg of our trip to Budapest which is an 18 hour journey.  The passport control police in Serbia around 3pm are rather rigid and nasty as we journey through their country to Hungary.  There is no joking around with the blond policewoman as she inspects our passports.  It is a very long ride to Budapest and a long afternoon going into the night.  I drank way too much Ouzo on the train.  Arrival in Budapest early the next morning for a full day of touring Nazi Budapest.

After an 18 hour train trip to Budapest in normal sleeping cars of two to a cabin, we arrive in Budapest at 7am.  Our arrival in Budapest once again shows the signs of an abandoned communist system but this country has had a lot of money poured into the country to rebuild it.  We visited at the Main Synagogue known as the Dohany Street Synagogue.  It is a very glamorous building constructed in the Byzantine-Moorish style.  It is one of Europe’s largest synagogues.  Interestingly, it was designed by a Viennese architect in the middle of the 19^th century.  The building has an incredible level of decorative elements and two domed towers which makes it very unique among synagogues.  It has incredible detail work and three levels of balconies.  Truly looks more like a church than a synagogue.  Next door in the courtyard is located the cemetery.  It was a rather impromptu cemetery created during the Nazi occupation. The Jews were forced to live in a small part of the city and they were subjected to incredible cruelties that resulted in the deaths of so many while in the ghetto.  Accordingly, the courtyard is the cemetery for 3,000 Jews during the war that perished under the terrible conditions.  There is also a Jewish museum next to the same synagogue and the last room is a holocaust museum about Budapest.  There were photos on the walls showing the massacres by the Hungarians who carried out the work of the Nazis, including a massacre of the local Jewish hospital where the Jewish Doctors, nurses, patients and all were massacred by the Hungarian locals.  The photos show the criminals standing before the bodies that were exhumed and the killers were all hung for their crimes after the war. In total, 600,000 Jews were massacred in Hungary either by the Hungarians, or sent to the Nazi concentration camps where they perished.

In the afternoon, we went to the Chinese Markets which are supposed to be a shoppers paradise, but was a real bust to me as it was the entire export of China-clothes, kitchen tools, fabrics, cell phones, bb guns and an assortment of awful junk.

Budapest is a very beautiful city.  It combines a centuries-old architectural and cultural heritage with the features of a modern world.  From the top of a hill we were at the Citadel, formerly a fortress, it is now a museum is the most important lookout point of the City provides the most incredible panorama of World Heritage Budapest, including the Buda Castle district and both sides of the Danube embankment.  Budapest has been very seriously damaged during World War II when the Nazi invaders damaged 98% of all the buildings in the City.  The Defense Ministry building in the City remains un-repaired as a reminder with the bullet and mortar holes in the façade of the building as a reminder.

We continued for our third and final night train that has now traveled from Greece to Sofia, Bulgaria, through Serbia, Romania, and Hungary and now on to Poland.  I immediately noticed the more formal nature of the Polish people who are more formally dressed with woman in dresses and men often in sport jackets on the streets.  Our English speaking tour guide was immediately overwhelmed by the nature of the Israeli group that rarely gave her a chance to speak as they always broke into a clatter of Hebrew language, despite a member of the group who was appointed to do the translation.  There are many conflict in the tour presentation in Poland.  Yes, Poland was a dynasty long standing in Eastern Europe that had an incredibly rich history of Jewish people.  The tour guide, who I will go into more detail later on a subsequent entry clailmed that the Poles eres the best friends of the Jewish people.  However, she always presented the Nazi situation as one of an invasion where the Polish people did not want to cooperate with the extermination of the Jewish people.  I will admit that I was not aware that the Nazi machine destroyed the entire country of its monuments, buildings, etc that was completely restored after the communists left.  But nowhere in our tours of Krakow did anyone admit their complicity in the cooperation with the Nazi invaders of the complete elimination of the Jewish people.  It was now becoming evident that everywhere the Nazi invaders went, their initial targeting of the Jews was often welcomed by the people of the countries invaded.

Krakow is a very interesting city as it is different from most Polish cities.  The Germans destroyed virtually every building in the major Polish cities except for Krakow which largely survived in its original form.  Our first stop was the Kazimierz District that housed Krakow’s Jewsfor 500 years particularly after 1495 when the Jews were expelled from Krakow that they arrived in major numbers in Kazimierz.  By the 17^thcentury, Kazimierz was flourishing with numerous synagogues.  The Jewish population increased to approximately 65,000 prior to World War II and a rich cultural life emerged in this community.  But this changed shortly after the start of WWII with the Nazis monstrous ideas of racial superiority.  Only 3,000-5,000 Jews survived the Holocaust.  Of that number, 1,200 survived through the help of Oskar Schindler.  He arranged for many prisoners of the Plaszow camp 2 meters from Krakow to be moved to his factory, shielding them from deportation to the major death camps.  Plazkov camp no longer exists, and a photo is included of the memorial sculpture on the site that we visited. which is a park. We toured a number of ancient synagogues and the remaining cemetary which had all been looted and significantly damaged during WWII.

 One hour bus trip from Krakow to the Auschwitz and Birkenau Concentration and Extermination Camps.  These camps were located in an industrial area of Northern Poland which had existing rail access.  Auschwitz is drarfed in size as compared to Birkenau nearby which was established by the Germans after Auschwitz to be a larger mass production killing machine.  The tours through camps are rather grim and an incredible message about just h0w low human beings can stoop to create a killing machine in the name of racial purity.  I really have so much to say about how moving this place is.  At the same timel, I am having writer’s block as I don’t know what to say about such a terrible place where so many many people were humiliated, deprived of the most basic sustenance as part of any overall strategy to break people and take away all hope before they butchered these people for no reason other than their religion.   Auschwitz Birkenau may have been the largest extermination camps, but they were only two of so many camps that the Nazis set up for the extermination of 6 million jews and many other people including gypsy, Poles, Russians and others who were non Jews.

The crematoriums were all destroyed by the Nazi guards when they knew they lost the war with the allied forces approaching the camps to liberate the remaining prisoners.  The ruins of the cremation buildings have been preserved as a memorial to the millions killed.  The rail spurs have also been preserved where the prisoners arrived for sorting out of the elderly and weak who were immediately sent to their deaths while the others were processed with their heads shaved, possessions confiscated and tatooed with identify numbers.  They were placed in barracks, of which many are still standing and others have been reconstructed.  The place is immense.  There is also a museum on site which is very sobering.  I have attached a picture from a room that was nothing but suitcases.  Other rooms had nothing but spectacles, or prosthesis, or hair from shaving prisoners, or hairbrushes, or shoe polish tins, even bowls removed from the luggage.  These were immense rooms that comprised the German collections of what they planned to amass as part of their museum commerating an extinct people.

Our group left at the end of the day emotionally drained and the mood of the group was markedly different.  We went to the train station in Krakow for a four hour train trip to Warsaw where we stayed for the next two nights. 

At our hotel, we sat down to a dinner prearranged for our group.  You would have thought we were caught in the Polish version of Candid Camera.  It was hard to believe that the servers were serious when they plopped this stuff down in front of us.  The food served to us was some supposedly sliced turkey that had a thick jellied sauce poured over a wad of butter.  The photo was perfect.  The jelly was a hard glaze on the plate.  This food was so disgusting that it just clung to the plate when I turned it sideways.  Needless to say, we would not eat it and I discovered a great thin crust pizza place down the street late that night.  I certainly was hungry after walking away from this not so culinary delight.   As a matter of fact, we went to the Pizza place both nights for late night dinner.

Monday afternoon flight to Athens from Warsaw arriving at 4pm,  trip to Omonia Square which is the real downtown square.  I am so blown away about the absence of Greeks there.  Yes, they speak Greek there, but there are no Europeans there.  Everyone is Nigerian, Pakistani, Rhumanian Albanian and very illegal immigration there.  It really has changed so quickly.  After the stroll, the entire group went to dinner at The Plaka located at foot of Acropolis at 9pm.  Dancers at the Taverna.   Yes it is very touristy, but we had a blast with the bouziki music and the dancers.   11:30pm taxi to airport for 2am flight to Tel Aviv

Tuesday morning arrived at Ben Gurion Airport 4:30am, taxi to the boys apartment for a few hours sleep.  Rented car and drove up to Tiberias and The Sea of Gallillee.  Up in the Golan near the Syrian Border.  Stayed in Ramot for great dinner and night at a Zimmer (wooden cabin) in the countryside.  Wednesday morning drove the Golan Heights along Syrian border.  Went to a cherry and blackberry U Pick Em farm.  Wonderful flavors.  Then on to Zefat (Safad).  Loved the guy serving Yemenite food. 

We drove into Haifa and I called my two friends that I made on the trip.  Avi was not around, and Ophir returned my call immediately.  He drove over to the beach that we were on and insisted on showing us the city; particularly the real surfing beaches.  Turns out he and his kids are hard core surfers.  We found a hotel for Josh, Jacob and Rebecca to stay, and he insisted that I stay overnight at his home.  Turns out that he had worked in a restaraunt in Santa Monica twenty years ago after he finished his military service.  Of course it was called Haifa Restaraunt.  It was very generous of Ophir and his wife to invite me to stay at his home.  Later that evening he succeeded in getting us into a fully booked Greek Nightclub with his wife and his parents.  His parents are from Thessaloniki, Greece.  They had left prior to the war, but his Mom had lost all of here family who stayed in Greece; and like my family persihed in the Holocaust.  He pursued this train trip that we met on because he is so intersted in the Greek Jews which is such a small remaining population throughout the world.  But now lets talk about the Club that we went to. 

This Club is More Greek Than In Greece!  What a blast!  At first I was worried Josh, Jacob and Rebecca would be bored.  As soon as the bozouki player started playing and the singer started bellowing, the kids melted into the four hour celebration of life.  What a pleasant surprise for them and me.  We spent the night in Haifa.  Next morning, I could not get the gang of three moving out of the hotel until the last minute of the hotel booking because they had to finish watching the Laker game. 

We saw the Bahai Gardens which are spectacular and I viewed the entire city from a high point.  From there, we saw the strategic industrial and other sites that were attacked by missiles in the Lebanon War of two years ago.  The oil refinery is in the City and the Chlorine storage tanks are in the heart of this industrial city which is the most important port in Israel.  Also, the Israeli Navy is situated at the port as are two major hospitals.  All of these sites were targeted for missile strikes during the war.   During the war, the Iranian supplied missiles stuck the city, but none of them hit their above noted intented targets.  Instead, they overshot their targets and hit residential areas and the post office that my new english speaking translator Israeli friend from the train trip is the Manager.  He happened to have closed the post office only fifteen minutes prior to the missile striking and destroying the entire building in the heart of the city.  He told me that the missile was so massive, tha the force of the impact crashed through the roof of hte building and burrowed all the way down into the basement bomb shelter which was uninhabited.  He had let the workers leave earlier in the day, and he only left at noon, because his wife called to tell him that she found a dentist that would see him immediately to treat a toothache.  Lucky is an understatement.  The post office, as all buildings that were struck by the missles have all been rebuilt today.  The Israeli government has since concluded that the Iranian intelligence community rented apartments overlooking the city claiming to be studying at the Bahai World Center in Haifa.  They established all the coordinates for the missile strikes, but word has it that they are very angry with the Hezbollah for screwing up so royally the strikes that missed every strategic target.  The problems were compounded by the media who were at the same high vantage point that I stood.  During the war, they were reporting on every hit, thus enabling the Hezbollah to recalibrate their launches with real time news reporting.  These certainly were not Katushas which are firecrackers in comparison to these missiles.

Ophir and his wife took us to lunch at a great restaraunt that only served Humus.  You could never believe how many ways one could serve Humus.  It was in the Israeli Arab part of the City and was a great area.  From there, we did the one hour drive in Saturday afternoon classic Tel Aviv traffic.  Thank goodness for GPS when you drive a foreign country.  There is no way we could have done this 700 kilometer trip over four days without it.

Saturday night checked into Hotel with Rebecca and had dinner with the boys. Sunday was Rebecca’s last day before a late night flight.  We went over to Jaffa old city on Sunday to do the last of the souvenier shopping. The Jaffa old quarter is the real beginning of Tel Aviv’s start in the early 1900’s. Thus, it has the charm of the old Arab world as opposed to Tel Aviv that is a sprawling high rise metropolis.  My boys describe Tel Aviv as being more like New York City. Certainly I can’t disagree with them about the night life, the young people everywhere and the great food.  This is a stark contrst to the Tel Aviv suburbs like Holon where I visited friends that are like family.  Haifa is the very family oriented city. 

Rebecca and I stopped for Falafel and Schwarma which we both agreed that we overdid it on the food thing during our stay. By the way, the thin crust pizza on Shenkin Street which is the Tel Aviv version of Melrose or Abbott Kinney in LA is superb. I still have the rental car, so I dropped Rebecca off at the airport Sunday night. Thank goodness for GPS. Despite the road signs in Hebrew, Arabic, Russian and some English, the GPS was unwavering in its accuracy in getting me to the airport and back. On the wayback, I had to get gas, and the GPS was perfect for getting me to the gas station.  Monday I returned the rental car which was two blocks from my hotel.  I stopped at the red light and then made a right on red.  Within seconds, a policecar pulled me over.  The Policeman walked over to my car and only spoke Hebrew.  I showed him my US Passport and rental folder.  I asked him what I did wrong, realizing you cannot turn right on red.  He yelled at me in Hebrew, and turned away to go to his Police Car.  He opened the door of his car, sat in it and burned off.  At least I dodged the ticket.  The remainder of the day was a walk through Tel Aviv and to the market place called the Shook which has an incredible variety of foods, spices, candy and merchandise.  The foods in this marketplace are a photographer’s paradise. I took so many pictures of foods, spices and people, that I had to condense them into much smaller photos to get them onto this blog.  Of course, all of the Chinese manufacturing is dumped in Israel too.  Farewell dinner with the boys in the evening and back to the airport for an early trip to the airport.

Picked up by taxi at my hotel at 4am.  Flight is on El Al, so you need extra time to make it through security checkpoints (plural).  Do y0u know the translation of “EL AL”?  It means don’t screw with us.  Security is very intense and thoroughwhich is the reason that they have never been hijacked.  When I flew Olympic back to Israel from Athens, the security consisted of an x ray machine and have a good flight.  The only thing El Al has in common is the scanner.  When I arrived at El Al in Ben Gurion Airport, the first stop is the psychological screening.  What are you doing in Israel.  Have you ever been here before.  Who did you visit.  Do you speak hebrew.  Do you have relatives here.  How old were you when you were Bar Mitzva.  On and on.  You can’t really fault them because they are doing their job and do it well.  Then my bags were x rayed in a different checkpoint and they referred me to an inspection station where they had the larger plasma screen forwqarded to them elecronically with the scan of my bags.  Because I had pottery in my bags, they wanted to ask me about the bags and asked me if they could inspect.  I agreed, but instead they only swabbed the zipper of hte bag with bomb swab and asked me where I purchased the pottery.  I answered and they never opened the bags.  Then it was on to the hand baggage screening after passport control.  Actually, the Israeli security is very efficient given the very detailed physical and psychological process.

My first flight was Tel Aviv to Zurich Switzerland.  Beautiful terminal.  Next flight was Zurich to London.

London was the usual.  Cold, grey and rainy at the end of May.  I checked one bag into storage at the airport and then I took the Heathrow Express train to Paddington Station and walked the few blocks to my hotel.  Given that the British Pound is equivalent to 2 U.S. Dollars, things are awfully expensive.  Anyway, I got to my hotel by 4pm and was out walking the city by 5.  I stayed in the Westminster area of London given my 24 hour layover.  I am really amazed at the changes so rapidly to the Westminster area of London.  The amount of Middle Eastern people and the rows and rows of arabic restaraunts is impressive.  I had a great dinner at an Iraqi Restaraunt.  The KaBobs were spectacular.  Every block has so many restaraunts and 5 out of 6 are Arabic, leaving the one British pub on those blocks as the sore thumb sticking out.  It was absolutely amazing to see the number of people sitting outdoors smoking hookahs!  Dozens of hookahs ablaze at every cafe. 

wow.  Anyway, went back to my hotel and was awakened at 1am with the sound of water dripping.  It was raining so hard that the ceiling leaked and caused a huge puddle in my room.  By 3am I ended up moving to another room because of the annoyance.  You can believe I got my 50% discount when I checked out.  At first they said no adjustment and upon my promising them I would spend the day telling people walking in about my experience, the Manager relented and offered the 50% reduction which I gladly accepted.  What a dump.

 I took the Heathrow Express back to the Airport, checked my bags and took a non stop flight back to LA.  Great to finally get back home!  Its been quite an adventure.

I have experienced a wide range of emotions on this trip.  The sadness, outrage, thrill and the joy all converged to create the perfect storm of a lifetime experience. 

A lengthy trip on my own to learn about my ancestry was an invaluable lesson for me.  Traveling through so many countries starting with Israel which grew so much because of the Nazi experience; walking the streets of Thessaloniki Greece with guides who were so well versed in the rich history of Sephardic Judaism in that part of the world; understanding the motivation of the City of Thessaloniki who wanted the centuries old cemetery removed for the expansion of the University; the actions of the Nazi leadership to win over the city by desecrating and removing the cemetery; the 19 train transports that took 50,000 Jews of Thessaloniki to their demise; Hitler poisoning the King of Bulgaria when he refused to turn over the Jews of Bulgaria; the brutality of the Hungarian people to the Jews of their Country, the very very long train ride to Poland that I did in comfort of a seat on the railcar, but knowing my ancestors were crammed into cattle-cars with no sanitation, heat, ventilation or humane treatment in the four or five day train transports to the death camps; the inhumanity of Auschwitz-Birkenau; and the complete eradication of 3,200,000 Polish Jews.  The absurdity in Krakow, Poland of making the Old Jewish Quarter into a huge tourism industry and their celebrating all the Jewish Holidays and festivals without any Jews remaining in the Country. 

I have seen and learned so much.  The Holocaust education that I received is one that I want my adult children and all my friends Jew and non Jew alike to experience and grasp.  Everyone must see what really happened to perpetrate a psychosis that thrived on such a massive scale.  I think that dealing with the Holocaust is a lot like Ground Zero of the World Trade Center.  Most people in California and likely everywhere else outside of the immediate area of New York City that have not seen the World Trade Center before, and now the huge hole in the ground will ever truly grasp the destruction of 9/11 that resulted in the death of 3,500 people.  I feel based upon comments that I heard from people about my trip, that they have a better understanding about 6,000,000 Jews and many others who were Russians, Poles, Gypsys, Homosexuals and others that perished under the Nazi Psychosis in their quest to prove their crazed concept of Arian superiority. 

Going back to Israel on the second trip back in the same month certainly hardened me to the way of life in Israel.  It is not an easy life in Israel when so much of the world faults them for everything they do.  The wars they fight to defend themselves are accused of responding with disproportionate force, the politics of the world always voted against this little country and the oil weapon used against them force Israel to get their oil from a crazy guy in Venezuela.  The Israeli people know their history is rooted in the Holocaust which is not the end of their fight for survival.  Israeli people cope with the pressures of being surrounded by hate of their enemies that will only be satisfied if these enemies can push every Israeli in the sea.  You feel very safe in major cities like Haifa and Tel Aviv, but there are guards at the entrance of every restaraunt, cafe, hotel and shopping mall on the lookout for terrorism.  Its a hard reality of life, but a spectacularly beautiful country that blends high tech and modern city life with the old world.  This is a country that gets half of the hi-tech funding dollars that is allocated to the entire eastern hemisphere comprised of all of Europe, the United Kingdom, etc.  A country so tiny, but an incubator for outside of the box thinking and invention.  It is really over insurmountable odds that this tiny country has a thriving economy as cars pull into gas stations to pump $11 per gallon equivalent gasoline. 

My views are indeed proud of the accomplishments that both Israel and the world have made since the horrors of the holocaust.  But it is a sad realization and should elicit a sense of outrage that the hatred and the genocide continues with mass murders under the guise of nationalistic feelings in the former Yugoslavian breakaway republics of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia ten years ago.  And even worse is that it has been going on for more than the past five years continuing now in the Darfur region of The Sudan in Africa.  That same ethnic cleansing is happening and we are not doing enough to express our outrage.  Chinese merchant ships are finally turned away for the first time from The Sudan when it becomes evident that the ships are delivering weapons from China, but there is no outrage about the mass exterminations going on there now.  This is a genocide emergency with hundreds of thousands killed, and more than 2.5 million displaced from their homes.  Those weapons will find their way back into the troubled areas.  And where is the true pressure on Iran who openly acknowledges their working at a furious pace to complete their nuclear program which will be the culmination of their intentions to dominate the Middle East and follow through on their threats to eliminate Israel as a Country.  And what about these others places like the City of London where the Mayor there now wants all references to the Holocaust removed from the public school curriculum.  What have we really learned as an educated society?

Why can’t we learn from these lessons to be outraged enough to make a dent in the evil still going on today.  We all need to be more articulate and proactive to stop the hate and genocide going on right under our noses.  Get mad and do something to express that outrage.  See the attached website which Darfur is a major focus of the United States Holocaust Museum:

http://www.ushmm.org/conscience/alert/darfur/pdf/darfur.pdf