The Holocaust Deportation Memorial in Paris

At the east end of Il de Notre Dame in the center of Paris is a memorial to the 200,000 people deported from France to death camps by the Nazis during World War II.  A park covers most of the east end of the island. At the very east end it narrows to a point. The memorial is below the surface of the island pointing in the direction of the deportation: east to Auschwitz and other death factories.

Visitors walk down stairs to an open space with sheer walls, then enter chambers with memorials to the dead. The chamber that points east is long and opens to the Seine through a Barred window. I took a boat ride later in the day and looked in from the outside instead of out from the inside. Either way telescopes the view and focused my mind on the point of the memorial: that two hundred thousand people were ripped from the the land the loved by a racist pig Hitler. 

We should never tolerate a racist in a position of power in our country.

The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin

Even though I knew the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin would confront me with some of the feeling of people disappearing, the reality was eerie. I sat at the southeast corner and looked at the square block of randomly shaped stone in front of me. Between the uneven stones were uneven pathways. The pathways were sometimes a few feet lower than the stones they passed between, sometimes they were twenty feet lower.

As people walk through the narrow paths between the stones, they appear, disappear, reappear and disappear again. Heads pop up 50 feet away then they are gone. I did not know the people in front of me, they just appeared and disappeared. Kids seldom showed up. So I would see a man walking and then see two little heads for a moment. Then those heads would disappear. Then the father would disappear.

Here is a video that will let you see what I saw.

A Moving Experience Thanks to Jerusalem's Arab Quarter

The trip to Jerusalem was my first in a desert since leaving Iraq in 2010. Four days after I arrived in Iraq, the combination of low humidity and exercising in 120-degree heat left me terribly constipated.  The cure was Metamucil every day for the rest of my time in Iraq.

I arrived in Jerusalem the morning of Wednesday, July 5. On Friday, I rode downhill from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea. It was nearly 25 miles of downhill, 16 miles steeply downhill. Then in 95-degree heat, I turned around and rode back up the hill--for more than three hours into a 20mph headwind.  I drank all I could, but when I returned after dark I was dehydrated.  And it was Sabbath. All Jewish-owned businesses were shut down. So I walked to an Arab-owned store and bought Gatorade.

But it was too late.

On the Sabbath morning in I woke up in the same state I was eight years before in Iraq: badly constipated in the way only the desert can do to me. 

I am unable to move, so to speak......and it's Sabbath so all the Jewish businesses are closed. Google maps said a pharmacy was open in the Arab district a mile away. After an uncomfortable walk,  I had to ask the young Arab woman behind the counter for Metamucil.

Huh?

Enema?

Huh? 

Then I held my stomach and bent forward. 

"FLEET!" she said loudly with a smile. 

The old Arab woman next to counter smiled knowingly. The clerk sped to the back. When she returned I said , "Two." She smirked. She got another. Usually they ask about shopping bags for purchases here and I don't take them. She put my purchase straight into an opaque bag. I thanked her.

On the way back I stopped at a second pharmacy. The young clerk did not recognize the word Metamucil, but the older pharmacist knew "FIBER!" 

Also loud. Also funny for everyone else. 

Even funnier was that he reached straight for the Israeli brand of fiber. I was clearly an American Jew since I knew no Hebrew and was shopping on the Sabbath.

In an hour I was cured and rode 40 miles up and down a different hill after drinking a lot of water before, during and after the trip. 

I could not even add up all the ironies of having this problem while I was part of the army that invaded an Arab country, then going to Arab pharmacies for the cure when eight years later I am in Israel. 

There are so many jokes I thought of about my condition, I would be wiped out if I made them.

Visiting German Historic Sites with Two Coptic Christians from Cairo

The Altar at the Cathedral in Worms where Martin Luther 

was tried for heresy nearly 500 years ago.

When Cliff and I visited the first Concentration Camp, the Cathedral at Worms and the Jewish Cemetery, a young couple from Cairo joined us. Mariam and Sameh are Coptic Christians. Sameh is a gastric surgeon. Mariam is pursuing a Ph.D in math education. They were staying in a guest house at Canaan also. Mariam had visited Canaan several times before, but this was Sameh's first visit.

The Cathedral in Worms.

On the long drive to Worms Mariam told us about their life in Cairo, their Church community and the work they do. They love their home and their community, but the longer they talked the more thankful I was to hear that they have skills that transfer well to other cultures, up-to-date passports and no kids.  They said things that eerily reminded me of things I read about victims of the Holocaust and ethnic cleansing who could not quite believe the worst could happen to them, and that their neighbors could be complicit.

After a while I asked, "Do you worry about living under an Islamic dictator in a country that is home to the Muslim Brotherhood?" Mariam said she tried to put the danger out of her mind and continue her work and studies, but that the recent bombing of a Church not far from theirs she could not ignore. A very close friend lost her mother in the blast and many friends.

As we walked around the city near the cathedral, Sameh told me about how he came to specialize in gastric surgery. Mariam was quite animated about her future work teaching math. I was happy to hear they saw the future so brightly, but I could not shake the foreboding I felt thinking about their future in Egypt.

They left Canaan two days later, the morning Cliff and Dmitri and I went to visit the former East-West German border in Fulda. At one point I was telling Cliff and Dmitri about my admiration for Ariel Sharon as a tank commander in the '73 Arab-Israeli War. Cliff said, "It's a good thing we didn't come here with Mariam and Sameh. They have a different view of that war than you do." Of course, he was right. They are Egyptians. They are real patriots, working to make their country better, so they think the '73 War was a tragedy in the same way I see it as a great victory.

In "Survival in Auschwitz" Primo Levi describes an inmate who earned the Iron Cross for gallantry under fire in World War I, but was killed in Auschwitz. He was a patriot. I so hope I am wrong and Mariam and Sameh have a wonderful life in the city they love. In a way, I will be like the families of soldiers back home. Families who saw a bombing in Mosul on the news were worried their soldier was injured, even if the soldier they love was hundreds of miles away. When terror against Coptic Christians is in the news, I will be thinking of Sameh and Mariam.

The First Nazi Concentration Camp and the Oldest Jewish Cemetery in Europe

The very ordinary look of mass murder. This small industrial building in 

Hesse was the very first site of slaughter in the Nazi regime, in operation the month after Hitler took power.

In the state of Hesse, I visited the first concentration camp of the new Nazi regime. It was a pair of industrial buildings near a railroad track in a small town. The state of Hesse authorized the site in anticipation of Hitler's need for prison facilities for enemies of the Reich.

Hitler took power in January and the next month Hesse provided the first Concentration Camp. Soon it was a jail for communists, journalists and other enemies of the regime, and, of course, Jews.

"One People, One Nation, One Leader" 

But the facility is an illustration of how authoritarian regimes commit greater and greater outrages--those who want to impress the leader find ways to anticipate his needs. Eight years later, the SS would industrialize the transport and murder of Jews in Auschwitz and other camps. The subordinates, anticipating the Hitler's desires, found a way to kill on a much greater scale than the Nazi leadership thought possible.
The little camp in the state of Hesse was the site of the torture and death of small numbers relative to Auschwitz, but it anticipated Hitler's desire to imprison and kill his enemies out of sight of the population. In that, this facility is sadly significant.

Later in the same day, we visited Worms where Luther was put on trial for heresy nearly five centuries ago.  Not far from the great cathedral is a small Jewish cemetery, the oldest Jewish cemetery in Europe, nearly one thousand years old.  Berlin ordered the cemetery destroyed, but the Mayor of Worms resisted. He did not openly defy Berlin, but as one bureaucrat to another, he continually was faced with other priorities. He said he would comply when questioned, but then another emergency would present itself. In a country that was being bombed and then faced Soviet invasion, there was always an emergency and the cemetery still stands today.

The Mayor, instead of anticipating the demands of the tyrant, stood for civilization against barbarism.  Tyrants are always barbarians, whether they wear suits or animal skins. And even when they have the pretense of supporting civilization, the barbarism becomes the center of what they do. Every tyrant is self-seeking scum who will eventually destroy his own nation through greed and arrogance.

Admiration of other dictators and strong men is an infallible sign that the leader wants to be a tyrant even if he has not yet shown his hand.

Visiting Point Alpha East-West Border Memorial in Fulda

In October 1976, the 4th Brigade, 4th Infantry Division, left Fort Carson, Colorado, for Wiesbaden, West Germany. Within 48 hours of landing in Wiesbaden, the 4,000 soldiers of Brigade 76 had covered the nearly 100 miles from Wiesbaden to Fulda on the East-West Border. We road marched along the fence in one of the many shows of force that happened along the East-West divide.

I visited the Point Alpha Memorial on the former border at Fulda with one of my roommates from my Cold War assignment to Wiesbaden. Cliff Almes, now Bruder Timotheus, a Canaan Franciscan in Darmstadt, Germany, since his discharge in 1979. A guest at Canaan, Dmitri, also joined us. He was not a soldier, but his life was more strongly shaped by the Cold War than Cliff or me.

Cliff and Dmitri in front of the fabled fence.

Some of the fence and towers are preserved, but the effect is so different as a visitor surrounded by bored high school kids than when I was looking across the border at Soviet tanks from the turret of my own M60A1 tank.

An M60A3 Patton tank on display at Point Alpha. 

Most of my time in armor I was in an M60A1. 

As Cliff and Dmitri and I walked along the border, I told them about how tanks hide, and how many ways tanks are vulnerable on rolling terrain with ditches and sharp hills.

The Memorial itself has many artifacts of the Cold War border.

Posters, weapons, and pictures of protests in Communist controlled countries across Easter Europe during the Soviet era.

Before I visited Point Alpha, I visited several countries behind the Iron Curtain. Walking the hills near the former border and the halls of the museum area, it was hard to imagine how real the struggle between east and west seemed in the 70s and how different the world is now.

Cliff Has More Than 200 years of Connections to American and German Military History

Cliff and Dmitri during our visit to Point Alpha.

I wrote about Dmitri here.

During the last week in June, I stayed in the Guest House at the Land of Canaan. My friend Cliff Almes, now Bruder Timotheus, is a Canaan Franciscan Brother at Canaan in Darmstadt.  In the late 70s Cliff and I were both sergeants and roommates in the barracks at Lindsey Air Station, Wiesbaden. He put away his U.S. military uniform and donned the uniform of the Franciscan community after leaving the military almost 40 years ago.

Darmstadt is in the state of Hesse in central Germany. During my stay at Canaan, I found out Cliff has more connections to Darmstadt and Germany than I would have imagined.

First, Cliff's great-great......grandfather was a soldier from Lower Saxony who became a mercenary for the British during the American Revolution. He was what Americans call a Hessian.  After the war ended, the very elder Almes decided to stay in America.  When Cliff's brother came to visit Cliff and look into the family history, he found men with the name Almes who died in World War II.

Immigration was salvation for the Almes family, as with so many others.
Fast forward to World War II and the connections of Cliff's family to the Canaan and Darmstadt are as strange as they are close. On September 11, 1944, the British made a night raid on the city center of Darmstadt. It was not a strategic raid, it was a terror raid, and it was the dress rehearsal for the fire bombing of Dresden five months later.

On that the British bombed the residential center of Darmstadt in an asterisk pattern, intersecting lines that crossed in the middle. First the British dropped high explosive bombs to blow the roofs off the houses, then they dropped firebombs into the houses to start a firestorm. The center of Darmstadt was completely destroyed.

But just outside the center of the city center was the Technical Institute. This Institute was the center of research for the missile V-2 missile program sending rockets to attack England.  The firebombing raid missed the institute. So a week later, the Americans sent a daylight precision bombing mission to destroy the institute. The American B-24 Liberator bombers hit their target. One of the American gunners flying that mission was a young man named Sergeant Almes who would have a son named Cliff in 1956.

The mission was successful. Cliff believes that one of the young women who was a student at the Institute was almost killed. That same young woman would later join the Canaan ministry as a Sister of Mary. Canaan began as a sisterhood in 1947. The student almost killed by the raid in which Cliff's father was a crewman on one of the bombers, would later work together with Cliff in ministry at Canaan. The Land of Canaan itself is located just outside Darmstadt, just three miles away from the city center firebombed to such devastating effect.

When I was stationed in Germany, Darmstadt had a huge American military community. Cliff reminded me that I drove him from Wiesbaden to Darmstadt to join the new Novices at Canaan on my birthday, May 2, 1979. For several months after that I went to the Darmstadt military community once a week, usually on Wednesdays. Many of those Wednesdays, I had a chance to eat with Cliff and the other Novices at Canaan.

The German Military Cemetery in Normandy

The German Military Cemetery in Normandy sits beside the highway that connects Omaha Beach with the Airborne Museum in St. Mere Eglise to the west. The German and American cemeteries are both somber green spaces providing a final resting place for soldiers, but they are very different.

The American Cemetery has a huge memorial statue with tall battle maps show the defeat of Germany after the historic invasion on the beaches below and across Normandy. All of the American headstones face west, toward home, in neat rows.

The 21,000 soldiers interred in the German cemetery are in double rows facing each other marked with flat stones. They circle a central monument to the soldiers, honoring their bravery and sacrifice. The place quietly honors courage.

It may seem obvious, but there are no maps, no flags, no explanations of why these men fought.  There no statues of Hitler, Himmler or any of the Nazi leaders. That cemetery along with the Holocaust memorials I visited showed me how perverse it is that Americans from the South still wave battle flags from the racist war they lost and fight to keep statues of the men who, if they were successful, would have my sons and every other person of African descent in America in chains today.

The South fought to defend the ugliest form of slavery in history, slavery for life with no way to buy yourself out and no hope of release. Greek and Roman forms of slavery in the ancient world were more humane. America was also the last western country to free the slaves, then quickly formed an apartheid region of America.  Since the apartheid state lasted for a hundred years after the slave owners lost their war, its creeping racism still infects American life.

The South not only segregated housing and water fountains, they segregated healthcare. One reason our healthcare system is so complicated compared to European countries is that any federal plan for healthcare in the 20th Century had to allow for hospitals and healthcare plans that were separate and quite unequal in the South.

The soldiers who fought for the South deserve honor as brave men who died for the rebellion they supported. But the Southern cause glorifies racism. In Germany you can't honor Nazism and Hitler. In Serbia there are no pickup trucks with Slobodon Milosovic's name stenciled on them. Nobody publicly honors ethnic cleansing.

Nobody should publicly honor the fight to keep other Americans in chains.

Israel: Everyday Life with Soldiers

Today two events convinced me that soldiers in Israel really are part of everyday life.  This afternoon I stopped at a coffee shop around the corner from my hotel.  The owner was sitting at an outside table with an Army sergeant and a rabbi. The owner is in his forties. The rabbi was older than me. The sergeant was not yet 25.

When I walked up to the counter inside to order a cappuccino, the sergeant made it. He had an automatic pistol clipped into the waist of his pants. A magazine was in the weapon. And he makes a very good cappuccino. He also made espresso for a woman who walked in.

After getting coffee for us, he went back outside and continued his conversation.

Tonight I ate dinner in a small food court where local vendors sell food and people eat at little tables or take out.  I sat with a plate of hummus, salad and chicken at a table with one chair.  A sergeant carrying a wicked looking Tavor assault rifle with a magazine in the chamber stopped next to my table.

The six-foot-tall sergeant dropped a big duffel bag and a backpack next to my table, smiled for a second, pulled out his phone, walked to the end of the room and had a very animated phone conversation with someone. He was clearly angry.  He held the phone with his shoulder, gestured with the one hand while talking and steadied the weapon with the other.

In America, the two kinds of people who would have an automatic rifle in a food court would be a security guard or the kind of jerk who needs to exercise his right to open carry. If either of those guys was yelling in his phone, I would have left the area immediately, then called 911.

But I looked around and no one seemed bothered at all. I kept eating and watched him. After a couple of minutes he calmed down. He ordered a sandwich, walked back towards me, put the sandwich in his pack, smiled again, picked up his gear and walked out.

Soldiers are part of life. They help their friends, they deal with problems and life goes on.

Israeli Defense Forces: What a Democratic Army Looks Like

The Israeli Army is what a democratic army looks like. I would have said that before setting foot in Israel, but after two train rides, two bus rides, and walking in both Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, I saw an army that is of the people.

First, they are young.  I shared bus stops and train platforms with dozens of men and women somewhere around 20 years old at the most with backpacks, smartphones and automatic rifles.

They are also fit. I went to Iraq with a unit in which four in ten of the soldiers flunked the basic fitness test. All the Israeli soldiers I saw would bury me in a fitness test. And they should. Our all volunteer army cannot compel people, so they entice. And some people they entice are really not the kind of people who should be in the military.

They are part of Israeli everyday life. No one thinks it strange to see a young man sling his weapon under his arm so he can read a book while he waits for a train.  At one bus stop a young woman made a practiced move swing her carbine from her side to her front then holding the muzzle with her left hand she bent forward flipping her hair long over her head and brushing it. She then wrapped it into a ponytail. And her weapon was in her control the whole time.

The Israeli soldiers on the street are not like the knots of four French soldiers in combat gear and carrying assault rifles that patrol train stations and airports with their game face on. They are part of everyday life. They read, the laugh, take selfies, smoke. One woman I saw walking and both sip an espresso and smoke with the same hand.

The Israeli Army is a patriotic army. Everyone serves. Everyone makes some sacrifice. Some make every sacrifice. And just as in America before the Vietnam War, no one could run to be Commander-in-Chief of the nation after dodging the draft. That person could not run for anything. Benjamin Netanyahu, the current Prime Minister, was wounded in action in 1972, was part of a Special Forces team in the Yom Kippur War and left the military a captain with a distinguished record. From Truman to Eisenhower to Kennedy, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan and Bush 41, our postwar presidents were all veterans.

A Greek Born in Kazakstan, Living in Germany

Dmitri and Bruder Timotheus at the Memorial/Museum Marking the former border between East and West Germany.  Br. Timotheus was Cliff Almes when we served together in Wiesbaden in the late 70s. He switched to a new uniform when his enlistment ended. Since 1979 he has been a Brother at Kanaan in Darmstadt, Germany. I spent the last week of June at Kanaan. Cliff and Dmitri and I visited Fulda together. More on that later.

During my stay in the Guest House at Kanaan, the man in the room  next door was on a long-term visit. Although he was born in 1967, his story wove together several threads of the politics of refugees and genocide in the 20th Century.

Dmitri was born in Kazakstan in the Soviet Union in a Greek community that came to what was then Russia in the midst of revolution in 1918. His grandfather and many other Greeks had been living in Ottoman Turkey for several generations. As the Ottoman Turks retreated at the end of World War I, the slaughtered more than a million Armenians in one of the first documented genocides. The Turks were allied with the Germans and losing the war.

As they withdrew from the Balkans, they began persecuting and killing Greeks within their borders. Dmitri's grandfather managed to escape to Kazakstan. They managed to survive the rule of Stalin. By the time Dmitri was ten years old in 1977, the Greek government worked out a deal to repatriate Greeks living in the Soviet Union.
During the first years of his life Dmitri spoke Russian and Greek, but to the his Russian classmates, he was a Greek. In school in Greece, he was a Russian. In fact, the returning Greek community was under some suspicion of being Soviet agents until the Soviet Union collapsed. He now lives both in Athens and comes for long stays at Kanaan, helping with the work of the ministry there.

In addition to Greek and Russian, Dmitri speaks English well. I had either breakfast or dinner with im several of the days I stayed at Kanaan. He also joined Cliff and I on our visit to Fulda. He never served in the military, but his life was affected by both the World Wars and the Cold War much more directly than mine. His family survived the murder of Greeks by the Turks at the end of World War I, the murder of anyone under Stalin's reign of national terror. He was rejected by Russian nationalists where he was born and under suspicion by Greek nationalists when he returned home.

The American Cemetery in Normandy

Above Omaha Beach in Normandy, France, more than 9,000 United States soldiers are buried in a field of nearly 200 acres. The Crosses and Stars of David are in symmetric lines. All of the markers face west toward America.

Walking around and across this beautiful field, my mind went back to another area of about a square kilometer honoring people killed in this war: the Death Camp at Birkenau, part of the Auschwitz extermination camp in Poland.

The Americans who gave their lives in Normandy began the invasion that would end the Holocaust and end Nazi tyranny in Europe.

The soldiers buried in Normandy are a small part of the nearly half-million Americans killed in World War II. But the field of graves feels endless. I have been to other military cemeteries with their rows of identical markers, but somehow this one was overwhelming. Any time I turned to the north on this bright, sunny day, I could walked to the edge of the hill looking down on the beach and see where many of these soldiers died.

The Whole World in a Paris Laundromat

I returned from the visit to Normandy with one clean pair of shorts and a shirt, bike clothes. Everything else needed to be washed. I found a laundromat near Luxemburg station in a lovely part of Paris. Most of the machines were busy in the small place so several people were standing or sitting and reading or looking at their phones.

One of the guys was tossing bike clothes in the washer. We started talking about the Tour,and following the Tour and riding. Jay is from San Diego which in my mind is only rivaled by San Francisco as the best bike riding places in America. He has lived in San Diego long enough that he said its strange that it rains any time except January and February.  We both talked about our favorite rides up and down Mount Palomar and along the San Diego coast road.

When he found out I live in Lancaster we talked about Floyd Landis and drugs.  A couple from Australia was in the laundromat also and joined in talking about the Tour. They were leaving for home in Adelaide on Wednesday. Jay was starting the second of three weeks in France with his family.

Tim and Andrea from Adelaide knew about the Tour, but they were in France for the 24 Hour Sports Car Race at LeMans. I used to follow International sports car racing in the 80s and 90s, so we talked about the wide variety of engines back then and how drivers crossed over more.

We also talked about traveling in Australia. I had been to Perth on the west coast more than they had. For most Australians, the west is simply not a place they go. Perth and Bunbury are the only cities. They rest of the huge state of Western Australia is the set of the Road Warrior movies.

The four of us had been to or were going to or lived in most of the time zones of the world and met in a Paris laundromat.

Visiting Omaha Beach on the 4th of July Weekend

The view from the long stretch of beach up the hills above Omaha Beach.

The German view down onto the beach where the Americans 

waded to shore and crossed the long stretch of sand under fire.

So peaceful now.

As my trip continued to change and unfold, a conversation with my friend Cliff led me to change the trip again and go to Normandy, France, before I left for Israel. I had not even thought of visiting Normandy when I planned the trip because I would not have arrived in Paris until just before flying to Israel. But now I had an extra day and decided to spend part of the fourth of July weekend in a place where America fought tyranny and prevailed.

Looking down from the German defensive positions and up from the beach, it is amazing any assault troops survived.  One platoon sergeant quoted in the memorial said he had 35 men when they ran from landing craft and only six survived the day.

Budapest to Bratislava Train to Avoid Rain

If wind looked like fog, you would not be able to see the road in this picture. 

High winds every day.

On the train from Budapest, Hungary, to Bratislava, Slovakia, I sat in a 6-seat compartment with two women in their 70s. One was visiting relatives in Hungary. The other was going to all the way to Bratislava. It was her first time in the city, which is just 120 miles from Budapest. Martine said she was going to see a portrait of a family member from five generations ago in a Bratislava museum that a friend had told her about. She said she was going to look for a hotel when she arrived.  I got on hotels.com and gave her three places within 2km of the train station for under $60. She thought it was funny that you could do so many things with a phone. She just had a flip phone for emergencies and said, "I only use it to talk."

We talked about changing money and border security.  She had seldom been outside Hungary so even this trip to neighboring Slovakia was a big deal for her.  I told her where I had been in the last week. She had been to Yugoslavia when Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Bosnia and Croatia were one, big, unhappy nation and to Serbia after the countries separated.

She had never been to Macedonia or Bulgaria. One of the things I learned in reading about the Soviet Union was how little most people travelled. The same would be true in country under Soviet domination. She was also worried about immigrants and refugees. She told me I should never take my eyes off my luggage. I left the compartment ten minutes before the station to get the bike ready to exit the train. Martine thanked me for the hotel info. She said again she had no idea these phones were so useful.

When I got off the train, I started to ride to Brno in the Czech Republic, 60 miles to the north. It was raining in Budapest when we left, so I took this train to Bratislava to get ahead of the rain. It was clear in in Bratislava, so that part worked perfectly.  I got on the bike and started riding. The rest of my plan then hit a literal 20 mph headwind.  I rode 36 hard, hilly miles in four and a half hours. It would be dark in an hour and a half. My plan to cover 60 miles before dark didn't look so good now. I crossed the Czech border and found a tourist hotel. The phone does so much for me, but it can't make me climb hills faster on a 60-pound bike in a headwind.

German Who Loved Cold War Army

On a local train between Wiesbaden and Darmstadt, I sat next to a guy in the bicycle car who was in his late 40s. He asked where I was riding. I told him I had visited my former commander who was now at Wiesbaden Air Base where I was stationed in the 70s.

Dieter brightened and said, "I miss the American Army." He grew up in Darmstadt and was in school during the 70s. He said Americans came to all the festivals and brought their Boom Boxes. Black soldiers, he said, were at all of the festivals. He made a gesture indicating he remembered boom boxes a yard long or more. They played soul in the 70s. In the 80s when he was a teenager he heard the beginning of Hip Hop and Rap from the Americans.

Now, he said, all the Americans are gone from Darmstadt.  He was on the way to a big festival which he said was less festive since the Americans left.  I told him about letting German kids about his age play on my tank in the woods near Fulda. That story is here. He said he sat in several America vehicles, but never a tank.

In the 70s, I had the general impression that Germans from cities far from the border saw us as drunks they had to put up with, but closer to the border, they liked us a lot more. It was nice to meet a guy who truly enjoyed having American soldiers in his young life.

Small Talk About Life Fifteen Miles from Auschwitz

Riding to Auschwitz dfrom Katowice, Poland, I stopped for a drink at a gas station and met Jakub. He knew I was an American. He told me how he would love to go to America and work.

Like so many people, he sees a guy my age riding a bike he started talking about fitness. He lives at home with his mom and brother. He said his mom who is in her late 40s is always talking about getting in shape, but she drives one kilometer to work. "In case she needs her car. Which she never does."

He also told me that his girlfriend applied to get a visa to work in America and lost several thousand dollars in a scam telling people from Eastern Europe they could get visas to work in America.

He also loves cars. That is not always true of people working in gas stations. He has a little 3 Series BMW hatchback. I was telling him about the Toyota Auris I was driving in the Balkans. He likes hybrids a lot.

He visited America once. Only New York City. He would like to see more of America. I told him I live 200 miles from NYC in a place where some people still drive horses and buggies. He had never heard of the Amish. Then I told him they talk on cell phones while they drive horses. He was going to tell his friends about that. I wrote down Lancaster so he could show them on a map where the horses and buggies are.

Visiting the War Museum in Belgrade

In the Serbian capital of Belgrade, the military museum is in the ruins of a castle on top of the highest point in the city. It overlooks the place where the Sava and Danube rivers flow together. To the north of the confluence is an old Roman tower that marks the only other hill in an otherwise flat landscape--flat for a hundred miles in almost any direction.

From the walls of the old fortress, it is easy to see why Belgrade is among the most conquered cities in the world. In the museum on the property, you see how many times Serbia and Belgrade have been rolled over by conquerors from antiquity to now.

The first room in the museum has artifacts of Alexander the Great and the Greek Army from 2,300 years ago. The Romans, then various barbarian tribes took over Serbia.  They had a run of sovereignty in the middle ages, followed by the Turkish conquest in the late 1400s. The Ottoman Empire remained in charge until its collapse at the end of World War I. Belgrade's independence lasted only until Nazi tanks rolled in at the beginning of World War II. The Russians defeat the Nazis and formed Yugoslavia from a group of countries and peoples that hated each other. Marshall Tito kept a lid on that mess until the collapse of the Soviet Empire. Then the Serbs started years long slaughter of Bosnian Muslims and Croats that only stopped when American bombers attacked Belgrade.

Outside the museum is a display armor and cannons from World Wars I and II.  Some of them are here.  While I was near the tanks, I overheard a French group talking about the German tanks on display as early models. We ended up talking about the invasion of France and how the French and British tanks were in many ways better and that the Allied forces outnumbered the Germans 3000 to 2000 in tanks. The difference was that the French and British spread their tanks from Dunkirk to Switzerland and the Germans put nearly all their tanks on a 20-mile front through the Ardennes Forest and into France.

In the lead of that formation was General Erwin Rommel, the best tank commander in the German Army. The lightly armed and armored German Panzer I and II tanks were stopped several times when they faced a formation of heavier Allied tanks. Even the Panzer IIIs were outmatched by the much bigger British Matilda tanks. But the German light tanks were supported by large-caliber towed guns with well trained crews that would take out the opposing tanks so the Germans could move forward.
On paper, the French and British had the numbers and the equipment to stop the Wehrmacht, but the greatest and most storied victories in military history occur when brilliant tactics  overcome sheer numbers. The Fall of France in 1940 was one of those victories.