Visiting Dachau with My Friend Cliff

Never Again on the wall at the Dachau Concentration Camp.

Cliff and I have been friends since the late 1970s when we were roommates in the Wiesbaden Military Community. We were two of the 250,000 American soldiers defending Europe as part of NATO.  We both left active duty in 1979. Cliff and his family have a long and interesting military history dating back to the Revolutionary War.

Cliff stayed in Germany and eventually became Bruder Timotheus. We have stayed in touch, talking every month or two since 1979.  We had occasional visits before I retired, either when he was in the US to visit family or I was in Europe on business. 

Since I retired, we have been able to travel together. Dachau is the third concentration camp we have visited together. We visited Buchenwald last year and the Osthofen Concentration Camp in Rhineland-Palatinate in 2017.  Last month we spent a week in Israel together. We have both been to Yad Vashem, but not together. 

For Cliff and me, faith and spiritual life has always been the center of our conversations.  Since 2016, Cliff has helped me to navigate the spiritual crisis in my life that began with the election of Donald Trump and became a full-on disaster after Nazis marched at Charlottesville. Trump became the first President since the rise of Hitler who was unable to condemn Nazis and even suggested they are “fine people.”  Cliff suggested I listen to two rabbis with a podcast from Israel who just spoke about the Nazi rally in Charlottesville. We have been talking ever since in ways only two old friends, and two old soldiers can.

Here are some thoughts from Dachau. I will be posting much more about the trip in the coming weeks.

Dachau was among the first of the concentration camps, founded in 1933. It was the very first extermination camp adding a crematorium early in its terrible history. 

Dachau was also very much a slave labor camp. The main camp had 36 satellite camps at various times. Inmates were sent to these camps to work in the arms industry and other industries.

We walked toward the rail station from the camp itself. The route has a series of 11 signs showing where the camp guards lived and the training grounds for the SS troops assigned to Dachau. 

Dachau was a terrible revolving door for SS troops. Before the war, elite SS troops trained in Dachau. The best of these troops led the invasion of the Soviet Union, a war that began in June of 1941 and was supposed to end in victory by October.  Victory never came. That long defeat was best told through the eyes of a man who enlisted at 17 and served through the whole war: Guy Sajer, the Forgotten Soldier.

As the war dragged on and defeat followed defeat, wounded SS troops no longer able to serve on the front lines returned to Dachau to serve as camp guards.  The guards they replaced were sent to the fight the Russians, some of them returning wounded, unfit for frontline duty. 

Dachau, like many concentration camps, sits right in the town.  Housing for the SS officers and men was right outside the camp and part of the community.  Public records show marriages between local women and SS men and many other legal documents such as deeds and police records that show the camp was part of the community.  

On the day we visited we followed a very casual formation of German soldiers touring the camp.  The soldiers wore different several different hats, most were in camouflage coats, but some of the group were in civilian clothes and not all wore jackets. My friend Cliff and I were walking behind the group together, two old Cold War soldiers looking at the young men and women serving in the military today.

I smiled looking at the 30-odd soldiers and said to Cliff, “What a Cluster Fuck!” Cliff smiled back and told me about walking with a friend from the German Army (Bundeswehr) in Israel in 2017. They were near the Wailing Wall in Old City Jerusalem when they saw a group of Israeli soldiers touring the area.  The Israeli soldiers were also walking casually, not marching or in any sort of formation. Cliff’s friend from the Bundeswehr said, “We would never look like that in public in uniform.” 

I asked Cliff if he was going to tell his friend about the Bundeswehr group we saw. He said, “Not sure. You have to be careful about messing with other people’s gods.”

Dachau was one of the last camps liberated by the armies invading Germany from east and west. American troops, including 20^th Armored Division, liberated the Dachau camp on April 29, 1945. The war ended the following week, but the fighting was bitter and costly right to the end of the war. 

Just before the Americans arrived, the SS marched 7,000 prisoners out of Dachau to try to get them to other camps. Most died. The prisoners also attempted to take over the camp before the American troops arrived. They failed. Most were executed. The 20^th Armored identifies themselves as the Liberators on their official division patch. The 20th is one of three American divisions identified as Liberators.

As I write this, I am in the cafeteria at the Dachau Memorial.  On either side of me are long tables with German high school students laughing and talking and looking at their phones and eating snacks. These students, like the students we saw at the East-West border outpost at Fulda, Germany, are letting off steam after listening solemnly to their teachers talk about the atrocities of the last century. Their teachers are off in the far corner eating real food and talking quietly. 

As with every other camp I have been to, life goes on both in the camp and around the camp.  The site is preserved like a cemetery, but as with cemeteries, houses, highways, hotels, Hondas, Hyundais, and haberdasheries fill the spaces around the consecrated space. Nature abhors a vacuum. Around scenes of atrocity and horror, life grows, adapts and changes, and moves on.

Communities adapt to the environment they find themselves in.  In the 1930s and 40s under Nazi terror, Dachau became one of the centers of enslavement and death in the Nazi empire.  Today, Dachau is a town with restaurants, laundries, stores, repair ships, buses, trains, and ice cream.

Visiting Ramallah--Trump Peace Plan Looks Ludicrous

A luxury apartment complex outside Ramallah. 

Built with money from Qatar, it is so far out that it has few residents.

During my visit to Israel, I was able to spend a day in Ramallah and the surrounding region. Ramallah is the largest city in the what would be a Palestinian state. It is close to Jerusalem in the region Israelis call Judea--the Judea part of Judea and Samaria.

T-Mobile deals with this ambiguity with a welcome message unlike the messages for any other border crossing. I wrote about that here.

I went from Old City Jerusalem on a scheduled city bus with my friend Cliff.  The 9-mile trip took us about an hour.  We were the only non-Arabs on the bus.  There was a huge security area about halfway between the Old City and the central bus station in Ramallah. We did not have to stop there on the way over.

At the Ramallah bus station, Cliff's friend Michael picked us up. He lives in Ramallah and has a counseling practice for victims of domestic violence and trauma.  He drove us around the city of Ramallah and the surrounding region.

He lives in the city with his wife and children.  For him, a settlement of the question of Palestine could not come too soon. He is an Arab Christian. He wants to be an Israeli citizen. He hopes that can happen, but would like peace in almost any form.

He says that no one he knows takes the Trump plan seriously. The U.S. did not speak to anyone from Palestine. Michael thinks it does not take into account the reality on the ground. He drove us to an upscale shopping mall with an ice skating rink. A few miles from that mall are Israeli settlements and Arab villages.

A new mall near Ramallah. 

The settlements and villages form a patchwork that will not allow an easy-to-define border.  Unless the settlements and villages are torn down, the border will have to allow for passage of Arabs and Israelis between the places they live and the two states that will result from the Trump plan.

Michael wants to live a good and safe life and have a future for his children.  He took Cliff and I to his home, gave us food, then took us to the bus station.  The 9-mile trip back took more than two hours and included changing buses at the security checkpoint.  Residents of Ramallah who work in Israel take these buses back and forth every day and have commute times as bad or worse than what we experienced.  

Michael had no faith in the Trump plan, but hopes some plan brings peace to the region. I hope so too.

Disposable Health Wealth

When I left Israel, I took a direct flight to Tbilisi, Georgia. I had never been to this country on the east end of the Black Sea with a civilization dating back more than three millennia. I had a vague plan of seeing Tbilisi then heading to Azerbijan and maybe Armenia before returning to the Georgian capital.  I stayed in Tbilisi for all of the four days I was going to spend in the region. A week ago I wrote about how much I loved riding here.

One of my recent meditations is on thankfulness. It occurred to me after I left the Republic of Georgia, that one thing I can be very thankful for is a ridiculous amount of disposable health.  Of course, the fact that I can fly to Israel and Georgia and ride also says I have disposable wealth, but the riding in Georgia in particular says I have disposable health.

Every day for three days I rode up a six-mile or a nine-mile hill and rode back down through switchbacks occasionally passing a car.  Even as I approach my seven decade with the body and mind I was born with (except for a few replacement parts), both still function well enough to allow me to ride a bike up and down a mountain every day, eat local food, explore the city on buses subways in addition to the bike, and then fly off to another adventure.

But as with all the healthiest people I know, health is not the goal. At various times in my life, I have obsessively worked out because I wanted to be a bicycle racer,  to be a soldier again in my mid-50s and then an Ironman. But I have never made being healthy a goal.  The result of being a soldier, a racer or an Ironman is health, a lot of health, disposable health.

I am so very thankful for the health that allows me to make a plan, then change the plan based on what is in front of me.

Welcome abroad!! The T-Mobile Service Message in Ramallah!

Today I got my seventh welcome to a country message from T-Mobile in the past two weeks.  Each one is the same except for the name of the country I am arriving in.  Today's message said:

Welcome to Turkey! Your T-Mobile plan......(benefits)

That is, except for the fifth message. That one said: Welcome abroad! No country listed.  The reason is that I was on a bus from Jerusalem to the largest city in the area controlled by the Palestinian Authority: Ramallah.  Although I passed through a massive security checkpoint going to and from Ramallah, I did not pass an actual international border.  So T-Mobile diplomatically said, Welcome abroad!

One reason to travel is to see and feel and experience the details of life in a given place.  The bus ride from Old City Jerusalem to Ramallah is less than ten miles, but it was one hour to get there, two hours to get back.  At the security area on the way back, we left the first bus and boarded another. It was the same bus route number, but a different bus.

Businesses, big and small adapt to the reality they find.  T-Mobile has, I assume, messages for the 193 nations recognized by the United Nations.  The territory controlled by the Palestinian Authority has observer status at the UN as does the Holy See in Rome.

Welcome abroad!

First Time in the Republic of Georgia--Riding is Amazing!

Looking up from the center of Tbilisi, Georgia, is a ferris wheel and tower

on top of a ridge.  It's a six-mile climb with switchbacks and some steep sections.

After leaving Israel, I planned to see the Republic of Georgia for the first time.  I was just going to visit. I had no definite plans to ride. I was thinking about also going to Armenia and Azerbijan, the other two countries in this land bridge between Russia to the north, Turkey and Iran to the south, the Black Sea to the west and the Caspian Sea to the east.

Then I looked up the mountain from the center of town. A cable car takes tourists up to a park with a ferris wheel overlooking the city. And there is a six-mile road that loops up around the mountain.  I had to ride that.

It's a beautiful climb. Incredible vistas.  Not too much traffic and 180-degree switchbacks on the steeper sections of the climb.  I arrived on Friday, found a bike Saturday morning and rode up twice.  The first time I messed up Strava, the second, I got the whole trip.  

Today, Sunday, I rode up the hill toward the park then followed a fork that led to villages on the next ridge above the park.  I passed though two villages, Shindisi and Tabakhmala. At one point I was looking down on the tall tower next to the Ferris wheel.  

The bike I rented was a 9-speed cross bike with a single chain ring and fat tires.  With the switchbacks and the fat tires, my descent speeds never got above 35mph, but it was fun to descend for nine miles after the long climb up.  Tomorrow I will ride up to the park again. I fly to Kiev the next day.  

One other fun thing about Georgia was the Strava segments.  On today's climb I was on 20 segments up and down, yesterday it was a dozen.  The number of people recording times on segments was in the hundreds. I was in the top third of times descending, the bottom third climbing, but on every segment, I was the top 65-69 rider.  Several times the only rider in my age group.  I did not see any other bicyclists, but there must not be many old guys.

The view looking down from the ridge above Tbilisi

Back to the Latrun Armored Corps Museum

This is my third trip to Israel and my second trip to the Armored Corps Museum and Monument at Latrun.  The museum at Latrun has dozens of tanks from all of the wars in Israel, including many captured Soviet-built tanks used by Arab armies.  Several of the tanks on display are variants of the Patton tank that I served on in West Germany during the Cold War.

On my last visit, I wrote a Patton tank that is sliced in half lengthwise showing the guns, ammo racks, engine, fuel tank and all of the other equipment inside the tank: https://armynow.blogspot.com/2019/11/at-armored-corps-museum-latrun-israel.html

And I have pictures of other tanks on display at Latrun: https://armynow.blogspot.com/2019/11/armor-from-entire-cold-war-and-beyond.html

Below are a few pictures of Patton tanks. Like me, the oldest of them are of early 50s vintage.

Six-Day War Veteran Tells His Story of Ammunition Hill Battle

Micheal Lanier telling us about the battle for Ammunition Hill 

My friend Cliff and I visited the Ammunition Hill Museum and Memorial in Jerusalem. It preserves the site of one of the battles in the 1967 Six-Day War that led to the capture of Old City of Jerusalem where Cliff and I are staying for the week.

We toured the museum which follows the battle hour by hour in film and pictures.  Both of us have previously walked the grounds of the site and climbed in and out of the trenches.  At the end of the museum visit we were going to watch a documentary of the battle, but one of the staff members said we can hear from a veteran of the fight for Ammunition Hill.  We went for the veteran.

Michael Lanir (מיכאל לניר) was a 26-year-old lieutenant leading an infantry platoon when the battalion got orders to attack the Jordanian stronghold at Ammunition Hill. It was held by a detachment of the elite Arab Legion.

Lanir was born in Jerusalem in 1942. He was six years old when Old City Jersalem was besieged by the Jordanian Army and shelled. He told us of water and food shortages and that many civilians were killed and wounded in the siege.

Returning to the battle in 1967, Lanir was a reserve paratrooper called to active duty three weeks before the war began. He and his troops trained to fight in the Sinai, but that battle was won so fast that his unit was redirected to capture Old City Jerusalem.  Lanir led his men into the trenches. He made a point of telling us Israeli officers lead from the front.

Michael Lanir next to the rock he took cover behind when he was shot

Shortly after the battle began, Lanir was shot in the neck.  He showed us the rock he was taking cover behind when he was shot.  His men thought he was dead. They covered him with a blanket and continued the fight.  An alert medic saw movement in Lanir's fingers and sent him to the hospital.  He recovered and today is a 78-year-old member of a group of veterans who talk to visitors to Ammunition Hill about their part of the battle.

Lanir and the commander of the Arab Legion company opposite him in the battle

He told us about a reunion of veterans on both sides that happened in the 1990s. He met the Jordanian commander of the unit they were fighting. They discussed the battle in detail and the Jordanian leader was sure it was one of his men who shot Lanir.  They left the event friends, both men who were doing their duty in the battle and both were happy they survived.