Piranesi, a Novel by Susanna Clarke

 

Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi is a compact, hypnotic novel written as the journal of a man who calls himself Piranesi—though he does not know that this is not his real name. He lives in a vast, labyrinthine House made of endless halls, statues, tides, and clouds. The House feels sacred to him, and he moves through it with reverence, cataloging its features, tracking the movements of birds and tides, and caring for the thirteen skeletons he believes inhabit it. He thinks he is one of only two living people in the world: himself and “the Other,” a man who meets him twice a week, gives him tasks, and praises his intelligence while subtly manipulating him.

From the beginning, the reader sees what Piranesi cannot: he is being controlled. The Other is Valentine Andrew Ketterley—a name deliberately echoing the pathetic villain Andrew Ketterly from C.S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew. Clarke’s nod to Lewis and the Inklings runs deep: themes of lost worlds, magical thresholds, and moral corruption hang over every chapter. But unlike Lewis’s straightforward moralism, Clarke places the reader inside a consciousness so innocent and unguarded that the truth emerges slowly and painfully.

As Piranesi records his life in meticulous, lyrical prose, clues appear. Strange footprints. Forgotten journals in his own handwriting. Mentions of a world he does not remember. Eventually, another outsider enters the House and breaks the illusion. Gradually Piranesi learns that the House is not the world. He was once Matthew Rose Sorensen, a journalist investigating occult researchers. Ketterley forcibly trapped him in this alternate dimension, using him as a pawn in his search for hidden knowledge and power.

The revelation is not played for shock but for tragedy. Matthew Sorensen was stolen from himself, and Piranesi—the gentle, observant man shaped by the House—is what remains. By the end, he regains pieces of his past but refuses to abandon the compassion the House taught him. The novel becomes a meditation on identity, memory, and what survives after exploitation.

Piranesi reads like a quiet spell: precise, humane, and exquisitely crafted. It honors Lewis and the Inklings without imitation, offering instead a modern myth about wonder and the endurance of the self.

Renting a Bike from Olek's Radsport

While staying in Darmstadt I rented a bicycle at Olek's Radsport in Einhausen. They still rent road bikes, not just city bikes or e-bikes, although they rent both of those. 

I rented the bike for four days. The fee was 120 Euros which I paid with a credit card.  To rent the bike, I had to leave a 300 Euro cash deposit, which meant I walked to a nearby bank to get cash.   

The staff is friendly and helpful and includes an American from Seattle who is married to an American from Harrisburg.  

They have a huge inventory of bikes.  Their main business is clearly e-bikes.

They also have a tube vending machine on the wall outside. 9 Euros.

Berlin Airlift Memorial--Marking the First Major Confrontation of the Cold War

The Berlin Airlift was the first major confrontation of the Cold War and one of the most audacious logistical operations ever attempted. It began in June 1948 when the Soviet Union blockaded all land and rail access to West Berlin, attempting to force the Western Allies—primarily the United States, Britain, and France—out of the city. Two million civilians were suddenly cut off from food, fuel, and basic supplies. Instead of withdrawing, the Allies chose to supply an entire city by air.

What followed was an operation without precedent. Using the U.S. Air Force’s European bases—most importantly Rhein-Main near Frankfurt—the Allies launched round-the-clock flights into Berlin’s Tempelhof, Gatow, and later Tegel airports. The workhorses were C-47s and C-54s, flying narrow air corridors just 20 miles wide. Each plane carried coal, flour, medicine, and countless other necessities. Precision mattered: aircraft were scheduled at three-minute intervals, day and night, in every kind of weather.

The scale grew astonishingly fast. By the fall of 1948, more than 8,000 tons of supplies were arriving daily—more than Berlin had ever received by land before the blockade. Pilots perfected steep approaches into Tempelhof’s short runway and learned to unload and take off again in minutes. British crews added their own stream of flights, and engineers built new runways in record time. The Soviets harassed the airlift but never dared shoot the planes down.

By spring 1949, the blockade had clearly failed. The Western powers had kept Berlin alive, demonstrating that the city would not be abandoned and that Soviet pressure could be resisted without triggering open war. On 12 May 1949, after 322 days, the Soviets lifted the blockade.

The Berlin Airlift memorial at Berlin and at the former Rhein-Main air base—where so many of those flights originated—stands as a stark reminder of that effort: a moment when logistics, willpower, and moral clarity aligned to keep a free city alive.

The Majdanek Nazi Death Camp--Horror in Plain Sight

 

Majdanek was unlike any of the other death camps we visited on this trip. The others were hidden in the woods, operating in secret.  This camp, built on the outskirts of Lublin—so close to the city that streetcars once ran within sight of its fences—was never hidden. The chimneys of its crematoria, the rows of barracks, the watchtowers, all stood in plain view of civilians. Unlike Sobibór or Treblinka, where almost nothing remains, Majdanek endures as one of the most complete and chilling physical testimonies of the Holocaust.

Construction began in October 1941, originally as a prisoner-of-war camp for captured Soviet soldiers. But by 1942, under Operation Reinhard, Majdanek was expanded into a full-scale concentration and extermination center. It became both a labor and death camp—part of the machinery of genocide that included Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. Jews, Poles, Soviet POWs, and political prisoners from across occupied Europe were imprisoned here. Estimates of the dead vary, but at least 78,000 people—about 60,000 of them Jews—were murdered at Majdanek between 1941 and 1944.

The camp covered nearly 700 acres, divided into six large prisoner fields surrounded by double barbed-wire fences and dozens of guard towers. Within those fences stood barracks built for 50 but often crammed with hundreds, their wooden walls soaked with lice, disease, and despair. Prisoners were forced into brutal labor—building roads, sorting belongings from the murdered, maintaining the camp itself. For many, starvation, exposure, or random execution preceded the gas chambers.

Majdanek’s gas chambers still stand today. They were small, primitive structures with steel doors and blue stains left by Zyklon B pellets. Nearby is the crematorium, where bodies were burned on open grates or in brick ovens. When the Soviets liberated Majdanek in July 1944, they found everything largely intact—records, canisters of gas, mountains of shoes, and thousands of unburned corpses. The Nazis had not had time to destroy the evidence. It was the first major camp liberated, and the world saw immediately what the Germans had done. Soviet journalists and Allied investigators documented the site within days; photographs of the crematoria shocked even those already aware of Nazi atrocities.

The most horrific single event at Majdanek was “Operation Harvest Festival” (Erntefest), on November 3, 1943. In a single day, 18,000 Jews were shot in trenches outside the barracks to the sound of loudspeakers playing music to drown out the gunfire. It was the largest single-day massacre of Jews during the entire Holocaust.

Today, Majdanek remains almost eerily preserved. The barbed wire still coils along the perimeter, and the long rows of barracks line up against the Lublin skyline. At the far end of the camp stands a vast concrete mausoleum containing the ashes of victims—gray, powdery, and exposed beneath a dome that reads: “Let our fate be a warning to you.”

Unlike the hidden forest camps, Majdanek confronts the visitor directly. It is not a place reclaimed by silence, but one where the machinery of death remains visible—rusted, weathered, and undeniable. Its proximity to the living city of Lublin serves as both accusation and memorial: a reminder that genocide can unfold not in remote secrecy, but in plain sight.

Becoming a US Citizen While Serving in the Military

While I was in Washington DC advocating for Ukraine, I met Lesya Jurgovsky. We were both members of the Pennsylvania delegation. She lives in the Pittsburgh area. 

Lesya emigrated from Yazlovets, Ukraine, in 2004. She worked in agriculture after earning a PhD in biology in Ukraine.  Then in 2009, she joined the U.S. Army Reserve, serving for eight years.  The next year, in 2010, while on duty with the Army, she became a U.S. citizen at a ceremony for serving soldiers.  

In addition to her work with the American Coalition for Ukraine, Lesya is the President of Sunshine for Tomorrow Foundation
, a non-profit that supports and orphans and children with disabilities.  

Since I first joined the U.S. military in 1972, I have met and served with many soldiers who became U.S. citizens while on active duty with the military.  One of the soldiers I served with became a citizen at Camp Adder, Iraq. 

During the same advocacy trip, I met Ihor Chernik. He also emigrated to the U.S. after the fall of the Soviet Union. Ihor served in the Soviet Army in Poland. I was a tank commander on the other side of the border.  Now Lesya and Ihor and I are all together in support of Ukraine against the Russian invaders. 

The Sobibor Nazi Death Camp

Sobibór, deep in the forests of eastern Poland near the Bug River, was one of the most secret and lethal of the Nazi death camps. Built in the spring of 1942 as part of Operation Reinhard—the codename for the systematic extermination of Polish Jewry—it functioned solely for mass murder. Between April 1942 and October 1943, an estimated 250,000 Jews were killed there, most from Poland, and others from the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, and France. Unlike Auschwitz, Sobibór had no vast complex or barracks for slave labor. It existed for one purpose: to kill as efficiently and invisibly as possible.

The camp was divided into three sections. Camp I held the SS staff quarters and workshops; Camp II served as a reception and sorting area for those arriving by train; Camp III—surrounded by tall fences and thick forest—contained the gas chambers and mass graves. Victims were transported in sealed freight cars that arrived directly at a small rail spur leading into the camp. Deceived into believing they had reached a transit station for “resettlement in the East,” deportees were forced to undress in a so-called “undressing yard.” 

Men, women, and children were then driven down a fenced and camouflaged path cynically called the Schlauch (“tube”)—a narrow, 150-meter corridor leading straight to the gas chambers. There, carbon monoxide from an engine killed hundreds at a time. Their bodies were first buried in mass pits, later exhumed and burned on open pyres to erase evidence.

In October 1943, the prisoners staged one of the most remarkable revolts of the Holocaust. Led by a group of Jewish inmates that included Soviet POW Alexander Pechersky and Polish Jew Leon Feldhendler, the plan was both desperate and daring. They secretly armed themselves, lured SS officers into workshops and killed them quietly, and then cut through the perimeter fences. When the alarm sounded, hundreds of prisoners made a mad dash across the minefields and into the woods. About 300 escaped, though most were recaptured or killed. Fewer than 50 ultimately survived the war.

After the uprising, Heinrich Himmler ordered Sobibór dismantled. The gas chambers were torn down, the ground plowed over, and trees planted to disguise the site. Only faint traces remained—railway embankments, bits of concrete, scattered bones in the sandy soil. For decades, Sobibór seemed to vanish into silence.

Today, that silence has been reclaimed as sacred ground. The entire area where the murders and burials took place is now blanketed with thousands of white stones—a sea of pale, uneven rock that both shields and reveals. The stones make it impossible to walk casually over the killing fields. They serve instead as a physical barrier between the living and the dead, a quiet admonition never to tread on the graves. Seen from above, the stones gleam like bleached bones, marking the outline of a place where civilization broke apart.

At Sobibór there are no buildings to tour, only absence and the memory of what happened there. The forest presses close again, as it did in 1942, but the stones ensure that this time, nothing is hidden. 

The Treblinka Nazi Death Camp

 

After visiting the Chelmno Death Camp, Emily and Cliff and I drove to the Treblinka Death Camp, located about 80 kilometers northeast of Warsaw.  Treblinka was one of the most efficient killing centers of the Holocaust—second only to Auschwitz in the number of victims murdered. Established in July 1942 as part of Operation Reinhard, the Nazi plan to annihilate the Jews of occupied Poland, Treblinka’s purpose was extermination. 

It was not a concentration camp or labor site. Within just over a year of operation, between 870,000 and 925,000 Jews—mostly from the Warsaw Ghetto and the surrounding districts—were murdered there, along with several thousand Roma and Polish prisoners.

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We began our visit at 9am. As we parked, four tour buses rolled in with almost 200 Israeli high school students touring Treblinka. Israel sends student groups to death camps to see this terrible history. 

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The camp was divided into two main sections: Treblinka I, a small forced-labor camp opened in 1941 to supply gravel to local rail projects, and Treblinka II, the death camp built in 1942. The latter was hidden in dense forest near the Bug River, chosen for its isolation and proximity to rail lines that could bring victims from across the urban areas. 

The deportation trains, operated with chilling precision by the Reich Main Security Office under Adolf Eichmann’s logistical oversight, arrived daily—often carrying up to 6,000 people each. Most transports came from the Warsaw Ghetto during its liquidation in the summer of 1942, but many also came from Białystok, Radom, Lublin, and even from Austria, Greece, and Czechoslovakia.

Upon arrival, victims were told they had reached a transit station for “resettlement in the East.” After being forced to undress, they were driven through a fenced, camouflaged pathway cynically nicknamed “the Road to Heaven” (Himmelstrasse) leading to the gas chambers. 

The chambers—first three, later expanded to ten—were disguised as showers. Diesel exhaust was pumped in until all inside were dead, usually within twenty minutes. The bodies were initially buried in mass graves, but later exhumed and cremated on large grates made from railway tracks to erase evidence of the crimes.

The entire operation was run by a small detachment of German SS officers and roughly a hundred Ukrainian guards, with Jewish prisoners forced to perform the daily labor—unloading trains, cutting hair, sorting belongings, and burning corpses. Those workers were themselves regularly executed and replaced. 

The efficiency of Treblinka’s killing process reflected the bureaucratic genius of Eichmann and the cold coordination of Heinrich Himmler’s Operation Reinhard team under Odilo Globocnik. Within the span of just thirteen months, from July 1942 to August 1943, Treblinka accomplished what the Nazis called “the liquidation of the Jewish question” for much of central Poland.

In early August 1943, the Jewish laborers, realizing they would soon be killed, staged a desperate revolt. They overpowered several guards, set fire to camp buildings, and about 300 escaped through the perimeter. Fewer than 100 survived the war. In response, the SS closed and dismantled Treblinka, plowing over the site, planting trees, and erecting a farmhouse to disguise the ground saturated with ash and bone.

Today, Treblinka is a place of stark silence. The forest clearing is marked by 17,000 jagged stones symbolizing destroyed Jewish communities—each one a village or town erased from the map. There are no buildings, no ruins, only the memorial stones and the undulating earth where hundreds of thousands perished. Standing there, one feels the scale of the killing machine that Eichmann’s logistics and the Nazi state’s ruthless precision made possible—a place where almost an entire people vanished without a trace.