Returning from Ukraine with Canadian Cyclists Going to Auschwitz

Ride for the Living, Auschwitz 

In June of 2017, I rode from Belgrade, Serbia, to Lviv, Ukraine. Along the way, I rode in Bosnia, Croatia, Hungary, Slovakia, The Czech Republic and Poland. I rode through beautiful country, up and down long hills and through the home country of my favorite pro cyclist Peter Sagan.

Peter Sagan, World Champion

After crossing into Poland, I rode to Auschwitz and spent a day there wandering through a place of terror I cannot fathom. I wrote about the visit here. 

After leaving Auschwitz, I was glad to be riding alone to think and to process what I saw. I had no problems until the border crossing into Ukraine from Poland. Usually at the borders, I rode past the long lines of cars and trucks waiting to cross and up to a checkpoint with a guard outside the booth. Once there, I point at the bike and ask where I should go. At most border crossings the guard sends me through the next open lane. They don’t get a lot of bikes.

Ukraine-Poland border crossing The Polish guards stopped me and sent me to the pedestrian line. It took more than three hours to get through the long line of people walking from Poland back home with all kinds of consumer electronics and other goods. When I left Lviv, I decided to take a train to the other side of the border rather than struggle with customs on foot pushing a bike. 

In the station I met a group of Canadian cyclists who were in Ukraine for the same reason I was: to visit Holocaust sites. They were on the way to the annual Ride for the Living at Auschwitz. They had done the 100 km ride before, but this was the first time they had visited Ukraine. I had ridden from Auschwitz a few days before. 

We talked about how the Lviv and Auschwitz were among the worst site of the Holocaust, but very different. About half the Jews murdered by the Nazis were already dead when Auschwitz went into full operation in 1942. Most had been murdered by shooting over pits as in Lviv and Kiev. German police were sent to conquered lands to murder Jews with rifles and pistols. In Auschwitz Jews were gassed and the burnt in ovens. 

Then we talked about bicycles, riding in Europe and even about motorcycles. One of the Canadian riders had ridden sport bikes in the 1980s. We both had ridden Honda 500 Interceptors and talked for half the train ride about our former bikes. The rest of the group left us alone.

Honda 500 Interceptor 

At the border station, the Canadians stayed on the train and continued to Krakow. I left the train and started riding. The customs check on the train took an hour, but it was a comfortable hour in a train seat instead of in a pedestrian line. I was happy.

Book Report 2020, Book Groups In this year of Pandemic and Social Distancing

In this year of Pandemic and Social Distancing, I am part of more book groups than ever in my life. Most of the discussions are on Zoom, but also on the phone. Zoom is not as much fun as talking in person, but distance does not matter, so I can connect with people in Germany as easily as here in Lancaster. 

ESL Book Group 

Four years ago, I volunteered with a local ESL (English as a Second Language) group run by Andrea Bailey. While volunteering I met Sarah Gingrich and Emily Burgett. We talked about books sometimes and asked each other about books we read or wanted to read. We ended up reading the same books, then getting together to talk about them. We became with a book about a Russian Holy Fool. The book is a novel titled Lazarus. 

From there we have read books about faith, the plague, and many other topics. Other people have joined depending on the book. In the past two years, Andrea moved to Wisconsin and Emily moved to Massachusetts then joined the Army, but with Zoom we can still meet. This summer, in the midst of the pandemic, we discussed Decameron.  For that discussion, we were joined by Chelsea Pomponio, a professor whose research is in Medieval Italian Literature focusing on Boccaccio. After Decameron our book was Love in the Time of Cholera.  As part of that discussion, Sarah Reisert gave us an impassioned critique of that book as beautifully written sexism, racism, child molesting and promotion of patriarchy.  It was delightful. I love a negative review. In October we talked about Free Will by Mark Balaguer.  The next book is Breaking Bread with the Dead by Alan Jacobs. It is not a book about sharing Avacado Toast with Zombies. 

The World Conquest Book Club 

This summer I talked with a former co-worker who returned to the library and museum where we both worked as a director. We were talking about leadership and decided to start a monthly book group to prepare Michelle to go from director of the library to ruling the entire world. We settled on six books that would be the basis of world domination. Naturally, the first was The Prince by Machiavelli. Next was The Art of War by Sun Tzu, followed by Plato’s Republic and a critique of Republic by Karl Popper called The Open Society and its Enemies. In November we will read Lioness a biography of Golda Meir. I have been promised a cabinet position in the Michelle World Government. 

Writers in Residences 

This is a monthly book group organized by the Jewish Community Alliance in Lancaster in cooperation between local Synagogues. This month we are reading Witness: Lessons from Elie Wiesel’s Classroom by Ariel Burger. It will be the first time I am participating in this new format. We will discuss each book with the author. So Ariel Burger will be on the Zoom call. In February I will be introducing the author Raffi Berg as we discuss his book Red Sea Spies: The True Story of the Mossad's Fake Diving Resort. 

Pre-COVID, the Hillel group on the campus of Franklin and Marshall College had book discussion group during the normal academic year that I would attend when I could. 

The Evolution Roundtable 

This group has met Monday’s at Noon on the campus of Franklin and Marshall College since the early 1990s. Most regular attendees are retired professors, along with some current professors, and members of the community like me. I joined about a decade ago. Each semester the group reads a book about some aspect of evolution. The current book is The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Consciousness. In past years we have read books on many aspects of evolution including The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, and, of course, The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. In the late 90s Stephen Jay Gould joined the group for one of its meetings. 

Virtual Reading Group: The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College 

Like the Evolution Roundtable, this group meets weekly to discuss books by the philosopher Hannah Arendt. We are currently finishing Essay in Understanding: Formation, Exile and Totalitarianism 1930-1954. The 90-minute discussions have a lot of context and background and different interpretations. The group will start again in January looking at The Promise of Politics followed by the book I most admire of all Arendt’s works The Human Condition. I have written on every page of the copy I read in 2012. 

Torah Study 

Each Saturday morning my Synagogue has Torah Study. The book each week is The Torah. We go through in a cycle determined by the Hebrew calendar. This group is very different on Zoom than in person. In the Synagogue, Rabbi Jack Paskoff clarifies points in the Torah using his white board and explaining often ambiguous Hebrew. On Zoom the Rabbi has to manage the discussion much more than in person. 

The New York CS Lewis Society 

I joined the NYCSL Society in 1979. Since 1980 I have been able to go to monthly meetings once or twice a year to the meetings in NYC. Last year I went to the 50th anniversary celebration on Long Island. I have not been to a meeting this year but hope to join the Zoom meeting this month. It will be a discussion of books by Lewis and G.K.Chesterton written in wartime.

 

Books with Friends

I am also reading books with friends on topics we agree and disagree about. A very sincere friend from Greece who is living in Germany asked me to read a book with him about Trump: Evangelicals at the Crossroads: Will We Pass the Trump Test?

I like Dmitri, so I read the book. I hated the book but discussed why with Dmitri and with our mutual friend Cliff. Following that book, Cliff and I are reading a book on abortion titled Beyond the Binaries by Thomas Horrocks. We will be discussing it next week.     

Another friend, Christina Hu, and I are talking about creating a podcast. This summer we discussed basing the podcast on books about America, its place in the world, and its effect on the world.  We read Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War and Band of Brothers.  We are now talking about something different than a book-centered podcast.  But the books led to some really good discussions.

                   

Captain George Gussman on Motivating Americans

1st Lieutenant George Gussman, US Army, 1943

My Dad, George Gussman, grew up in Boston. He was the fourth of six sons of a Russian Jewish couple who fled to America in 1900 to escape murder and oppression.  My grandparents quickly assimilated in their new country.  They named the first two boys Abraham and Immanuel. The next four were Ralph, George, Lewis and Harold.  

Dad enlisted just before World War II, almost too old to enlist at age 34. When the war broke out, he was sent to Officer Candidate School and commissioned.  His fist command was a Black company in the then-segregated Army.  He later commanded a Prisoner of War Camp for German Afrika Korps prisoners.

Whether running a warehouse, or an Army unit, Dad said the best way to motivate Americans was to tell them they could not do something.  "Tell 'em they can't and they will show you they can," Dad would say. "Tell a driver there's too much snow to get to a load New Hampshire and he'll be there ten minutes early and calling to bitch they haven't plowed the unloading dock."  

If Dad were alive today he would be 114 years old. But he is still right about Americans. Tell us we can't and we will.  

America kept the world from falling into tyranny by defeating Naziism and then defending the world against Soviet Communism.  I have been terribly worried about tomorrow's election, but right now I am thinking about the poll workers in 3,000 counties who are being told by Trump forces that they can't do a fair vote count and they can't protect their polls.

They've been told they can't. 

They will. 

They are Americans. 

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My Top Ten Favorite Trump Memes and Cartoons, Plus One

 

Reliable Randomness Makes Air Apparent

Every yard or meter that a bicyclist or pilot or runner or driver or anyone else travels through the air means passing through trillions and trillions of molecules that together make up what we call air. The faster the rider, runner, pilot or driver travels the more molecules per second bang into their body, bicycle, car or plane and spin off in another direction. The first philosophers called air a single substance.  Reality is quite different. 

Each molecule of oxygen, nitrogen and water, as well as fart smell, scent of lilac or Corona Virus moves with through three dimensions in any possible direction depending upon all the physical forces acting on it. Each molecule of what we call air moves freely. Heat speeds them up, collisions with other molecules and with bicyclists send it off in another direction, gravity keeps individual molecules from favoring the up direction but with a mass of a few or a few thousand atoms, gravity is not a huge influence. 

In describing the motion of these molecules and the forces affecting them, I did not include wind resistance. Together the molecules of air are wind resistance, but they are so small that the forces on them are heat, gravity, and collisions. They move in what is effectively a vacuum. The effect of trillions of molecules per second smacking into a rider from random directions at varying speeds is completely predictable in its total effect--a surprising and wonderful reality.

If a rider maintains 20 miles per hour in still air, that same rider will reach the same speed at the same effort an hour or a month or a year later. And assuming the same air density, the same effort will achieve the same speed in Belarus, Borneo, Botswana, Bosnia or Belgium. The random motion of molecules in air has the effect of totally predictable wind resistance. 

When the air moves collectively, when there is wind, the effect is exactly, predictably the same. Uncountable trillions of molecules of varying sizes and shapes moving in unpredictable directions with different speeds will cause exactly the same amount of friction on a car, bicycle, runner or airplane everywhere there is air. 

Wind resistance is both invisible and unavoidable. When I feel strong, I leave my house and ride with the wind knowing that the exhilaration of riding 25mph in a 20mph tail wind will turn into a 12mph slog on the return leg. When I don’t feel so great, I ride into the wind first and give myself the tailwind at the end of the ride. 

So much of the history of science is discovering that reality is not what anyone guessed or expected. Few of the ancient scientists could wrap their minds around the idea of atoms in a vacuum. Even some of the alchemists who provided the first experimental evidence for atoms could believe what they demonstrated. 

Before atoms, air was considered a single substance. The discovery of atoms showed air is a complex mixture of molecules. Physicists then showed that the individual molecules of air, moving randomly, together became, in effect, that single substance the ancient scientists believed in. All that randomness taken together is as predictable as the motion of the moon. And at the same time any single molecule can and does move as randomly as a toddler in a room full of shiny toys. 

Lancaster, a Blue city, Inside a Red County, Inside a Red State

The polls in Pennsylvania say the Keystone state will vote for Joe Biden by a narrow margin in the election in November.  But since 2016, Pennsylvania has been a red state. Republicans control the state legislature. Both the house and the senate delegations are split between Republicans and Democrats. 

I live in Lancaster City, a 7.5 square-mile blue dot in the middle of Lancaster County. The country is a 984 square-mile red triangle in south eastern Pennsylvania. About 59,000 people live in the city and vote nearly 70% for the Democratic Party. Including the city, Lancaster County votes 80% Republican. Nearly of the Democrats among the 545,000 people in Lancaster live in or near the city. 

On my street in the northwest corner of the city, Biden signs outnumber the Trump signs and flags by a lot. But when I ride out of the city several days a week I pass almost nothing but Trump signs. 

 One of my favorite roads to ride is Snyder Hollow, nine miles south of Lancaster city. All of the signs on that three-mile hill are Republican.  Two weeks ago, after the debate, one of the signs was missing. Two-thirds of the way up the hill there was a big Trump 2020 sign all summer.  Then the sign was gone and a little American flag was in its place on the tree stump at the edge of the road. I passed that stump three more times and the little American flag is still there. Alone. No sign. 

I am hopeful, but not crazy.  If Lancaster County elected the President, America would be fucked.  Every sort of crazy lives here, including Klan rallies and the occasional cross burning in southern Lancaster County.  

I will be up all night on November third watching the returns and hoping 80 percent of my fellow Lancastrians are big losers.

I am officially in love with Strava.

I am back to riding and in the absence of racing I am going up and down hills and and comparing myself to other riders on Strava--socially distanced competition. 

Some places have way more riders than others. Strava compiles riders and ranks them by their best times on a hill, stretch or road, etc. Anything from 100 meters to several miles. 

Recently, I rode Bear Mountain NY, a place I had always wanted to ride and never did. It has lots of other riders. I did three repeats of Perkin Memorial Drive, the main climb. My best effort put me in 14,609th place of 17,836 riders. Younger, skinny riders are much faster. But going down the hill, my gravitationally enhanced self is in 1,238th place. 

There is a hill 3-mile climb 9 miles south of my home in Lancaster PA called Snyder Hollow. I have ridden that hill more than sixty times since I returned from Europe and dropped into the Corona Virus crisis. Strava has been my riding companion for the last six months.