My left leg is bruised, in four places. The first is from a graceful trip over my computer cord; the second, from an even more graceful encounter with a chair; and the third and fourth from the rhythm of a very heavy bag (but less than 20kg!) that broke blood vessels from Clamecy to Paris to Vienna to Prague, and back the other way. A charming description, I know, but I had such a good time they forgot to hurt. In Paris the sun was everywhere and so were we – watching models pose in the Place des Vosges, drinking wine on the Canal St Martin, pausing in front of exhibits about the Marquis de Sade in the Musée d’Orsay before awkwardly realizing they were penises and we’d been looking at them for too long. In the metro on the way to the airport, a sudden waft of feathers blew into the bored face of a boy standing at the door, and his expression of sudden shock and disgust and confusion made me laugh out loud. In the airport, the carpet was ugly and the sandwiches expensive. The man behind the counter told me that my sweater went very well with my hair, and that was nice. The clouds as we flew out of the sunset looked like colored dust. And then we fluttered down into the glittering lights of Prague. Immediately lost in apparently vowel-less words, I was rescued by someone I’d only met once before – in hipster glasses and a pair of scrubs, my friend J. of 20 minutes in a dingy bar in DC had driven three hours to come pick me up, which was my first indication of the expanse of his generosity. He and I and his New Zealander coworker stopped in the city center for a welcome pint, and then, armed with cappuccinos from McDonalds, drove back through the darkness to Vienna, and discussed Lord of the Rings and the future and politics. The week that followed was possibly one of the best of my year. I woke up lazily every morning to a sunny room and coffee, and went to bed to Louis C.K.’s thoughts on life. I visited most of the major sights in Vienna during the day. I went to the Albertina, Vienna’s most beautiful art museum, and saw an exhibit on the artist Miró – an incredible and delicate interpretation of a fascination artist. You could literally walk through the progression of the artist’s work like a lifeline, from his minutely detailed pictures of life on the farm he adored to the point where his horizons and his work explode into geometrics and colors and generously rendered stick figures of women screaming red-breathed rebellion against the tyranny of the Spanish Civil War and men with erect penises, to scenes of birds among constellations where the title is the thread that binds the shapes together. It was like watching someone spin with open palms. Miró scattered himself and it was beautiful to watch.
The rest of the Albertina, an old palace, is pristine and royal and classical-music-flavored salons with walls covered in oils of Hapsburg chins and sketches of ladies in waiting and charcoals of women with their legs spread in lascivious idleness. Another room of Picasso and Modiglianis and Monets, pointillism paintings of a pink Venetian sunset, Andy Warhol’s Mao’s and his many colors of the horrors of the electric chair. It was one of the loveliest museums I have ever visited. I also wandered the gardens of Schönbrunn, the old Hapsburg palace and navigated my way through the pastry shops and gardens of the city center. In the evening, friends of friends adopted me as their own and we ate potato wedges and drank good Austrian beer (maybe) and laughed too much and I got a Sharpie tattoo of the Viennese skyline. I was spoiled, truly spoiled, and cannot think of a kinder bunch of people.
Then on Thursday J and I drove up to the top of the city to look at the lights in the darkness, and then decided it was too cold and continued our journey to his parent’s house in the hills of Austria. Green and treed and like those in the Sound of Music – which I finally introduced him to because, like most Austrians, he’d never seen it – and with increasingly narrow roads, it was one of the most beautiful places I’d been. In the car I sang off-key and told historical stories. At his parent’s house, his ineffably kind family welcomed me with smiles, broken English, and homemade schnapps. In the morning, we woke up to homemade apfelstrudel and coffee and homemade blackcurrent jam and I stuffed my face and didn’t have the words to adequately say thank you. Then we went to Mauthausen. It was cold and I was burrowed into the folds of my scarf and didn’t feel ready. It was the first time I had ever been to a concentration camp, though the Holocaust had been a central part of my research for years. It was grey and windy and the emptiness, the truly ghostly emptiness, consumes the whole structure. My boots echoed on the gravel. We glued our ears to audioguides and walked through barracks and the wide awful open apelplatz. That was the easy part, if there was one.
J headed down the stairs before I was ready, and I followed him out of the clean airy museum into the dark of the basements. In the room with the cremation furnace there are hundreds of pictures, plaques in dozens of languages, flowers, and I started to cry. We walked through the next room of remembrance, with thousands of names writ small, quietly glowing in the dark. And then into the gas chamber – innocuous as a shower, uniform tiles, the banality of evil. I left much faster than J and waited for him in the cold, trying to wipe my nose. I barely remember the crematorium—felt sick around the autopsy table, and by the time I stood inadvertently underneath the gallows in the final room I was in flight mode. Ugly cried outside against the wall. J came out and sat around the corner. We were silent for about half an hour. “In my own country,” he finally said. “I hate seeing my flag above this place.”
We walked through the graveyard of bleak monuments from different countries, and I left a stone next to dozens of others, including one on which someone had painted “Liebe.” Neither of us cared to visit the stone quarry, also known as the Stairs of Death, and so we walked back to the car and didn’t feel like talking. I once met one of the liberators of Mauthausen at the Holocaust Museum in DC. His name was Sidney Cousins; we walked through the whole museum together and he told me about the smell and the eyes, and I thought of him.
That afternoon we recovered a bit with wienerschnitzel and red wine on a huge platter at a restaurant where everyone knew J and there was no menu so you ordered whatever you wanted. Then we went back to Vienna, went dancing, ate kebabs, danced some more. I got on a bus and wended my merry way to Prague. “You have to go to Prague!” said everyone, and I’m sorry everyone, but I wasn’t so taken with it. My first night was spent dancing with Brazilians – a decent evening, until at the third bar a rando decided to pin me in a corner and try his luck at nonverbal communication. This was surprisingly not the most convincing of maneuvers, so I decided I’d had enough, got a kebab, and went back to the hostel. The next day I wandered around the castle gardens and into a café in Vrsoviče, where I had a sinfully good pastry and listened to 1920s music and Czech. That evening was spent in the basement of a smoky bar with two Swiss pharmacists, an Australian PhD student and a seventeen-year-old from Alaska, all absolutely darling people. And the next day I went to Terezín. I had wanted to go to Terezín since the seventh grade, when I did a huge research project on the performance of Verdi’s Requiem that was done there (if you want to know more about that, go here : http://holocaustmusic.ort.org/places/theresienstadt/schachter-rafael/). I’d interviewed survivors and worked with the music, Rafi Schächter is a personal hero of mine, and it was extremely dear to my heart. Given my experience at Mauthausen, I was both excited and nervous to go, worried it might be too taxing on my emotional state. Not to worry, though. There’s nothing to ruin the experience like too many people, a Filipino woman named Rosa tapping her way through the camp at breakneck speed telling me about the imprisonment of Gavrilo Princip, the 10-12 people stacked in a room the size of a closet, the typhoid epidemic that swept through the camp leaving people too weak to leave after liberation, but MOSTLY about her Czech husband and about her coworkers who are jealous because her contract says that she can work until 1965 but ha ha of course that’s a mistake but her supervisor will never fire her because she’s his favorite so really they’re just jealous. And then, of course, the couple making out next to me during the screening of a propaganda film. Mauthausen was impressive because you felt the ghosts there, and there wasn’t room for ghosts at Terezín.
And so, tired of the endless touristy-ness of Prague, I jumped on a bus back to Vienna. I successfully ordered a pastry in the train station of Spittelau, and my friend and I bundled up and went on a long walk through the city. Vienna is truly, truly beautiful. I appreciate Prague, and how cheap it is, and the fairytale setting, but on this trip it was Vienna that I felt the happiest in. The next morning I took a stupidly expensive train back to Prague; on the way, had the delight of meeting a French student, studying to be a pilot, and so after a week of incomprehensibility had the joy of speaking (relatively) fluidly; and finally flew back to Paris. Paris is what Paris always is—a moveable feast of things I hate and things I love. On Thursday, one of my dear friends and I, on the search for a dessert crepe, ended up helping to close up the crêperie and set it up for the next day; in that time frame, I picked up another friend from the metro, a friend that I haven’t seen in seven years ever since we competed in the same competition; and all of us danced and drank wine with French waiters until five in the morning. The next day was Halloween and my friend’s birthday, and so I was an uncreative tiger and my darling friend and his girlfriend terrified small children in St. Denis as Dios de las Muertas skeletons. It was tiring. It was lovely. And so – finally—I am now back in Clamecy, in desperate need of sleep, but so incredibly grateful for everything and everyone. I met unbelievably kind and generous people; I went to amazing and terrible and wonderful places; sometimes there is this bubble that blooms in your chest when there’s just nothing to say, when you can’t imagine being anywhere but where you are, when you feel like you maybe don’t deserve how wonderful everything is at that moment, and you can’t wait to make that happen for someone else someday. Thank you to everyone. I am truly lucky.
Emily Wolfteich 