Back to Vienna after 10 days in Eastern Europe

I returned yesterday to Vienna after 10 days on the road in Eastern Europe, going to Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. I visited friends in Budapest for a couple of days, and then took an overnight train to Krakow, Poland, where I spent a night in that wonderful old city.

Night-time train station scene in Bratislava, Slovakia. I stopped here around midnight on my way from Budapest to Krakow.


The next day I did a roundtrip by bus to Auschwitz, which is about 50 miles from Krakow, and it was a sobering experience to visit the former concentration and extermination camps (Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau) which are near the Polish town named Oswiecim. Though I had seen films and photos of Auschwitz, I wasn't prepared for the huge scale of the Birkenau extermination camp, a veritible death factory on a mass scale. Though the barracks and crematoria were destroyed by the Nazis prior to their abandonment of the camp as the Russians approached in January 1945, several of the barracks have been recreated, and the railroad siding where the box cars of people were unloaded is still there, along with the miles of barbed-wire fence and watchtowers. We also went into the barracks and the one remaining gas chamber at the Auschwitz - I concentration camp, which was used for part of the set in the movie "Schindler's List." How human beings could be so cruel to one another is hard to imagine, but to see the evidence of the genocide that happened there is something I never will forget.

Entrance gateway to Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the extermination camp where 1.1 million Jews, Gypsies, Poles, political prisoners and other "social deviates" were mass murdered by the Nazis from 1942-1945. It was a haunting place to see.


Krakow is a beautiful and well-preserved old city. If you ever want to experience what "old world" Europe looked like, I would highly recommend going there. It has a huge main square, with quite a few of the medieval-era buildings still there, some dating from the 1400's. I found the Polish people I interacted with to be uniformly friendly and hospitable, in contrast to the somewhat more sophisticated, urbane, and (yes, let's say it) "snotty" Viennese people I've been around for the past two months. It's the contrast between Western Europe, so advanced and developed, and Eastern Europe, trying so hard to catch up, but still with a long way to go, but not as jaded and privileged as their Western neighbors.

One of the old Jewish synagogues on a foggy morning in Krakow


Two older ladies on the main square of Krakow, Poland

I then returned to Hungary, and traveled from Budapest with a friend who is a Hungarian Reformed Church pastor to Romania, where she is working on her doctorate degree at the Reformed Theological College in the Transylvanian city of Cluj, also known as Kolozsvar in Hungarian. Transylvania has changed hands many times throughout its history between Hungary and Romania. It is currently part of Romania, but has a significant Hungarian ethnic minority living there still. The land has been degraded by decades of Communist mismanagement and repression, and even now, 20 years after the end of Communism in Romania and most of Eastern Europe, the signs of economic mismanagement and environmental degradation are very apparent. The people are working hard to catch up to the West, but they still have a long way to go. Frankly, after 3 days in Romania I was never so glad to leave a place as when we crossed the border back into Hungary. I have a lot of sympathy and respoect for the good Hungarian Reformed church people I met in Transylvania who are trying to do a lot with very few resources. I'm just glad I don't have to live there with them!

The gray, pre-fab apartment buildings from the Communist era are typical of Romania and the many towns we passed through in the Transylvania region.


Here you see the see the contrast of generations in Transylvania. The younger woman was part of a Sunday afternoon wedding party in Cluj. The older woman is probably her grandma, and most likely lives in a village outside of Cluj. The generations of Romanians seems light years apart!



This is a Roma (Gypsy) man and boy who came up to our car and tried to sell us onions along the side of the road where we stopped in central Transylvania near their village.



Sigisoara, Romania, also known as Segesvar in Hungarian and Schässburg in German. This town and others like it were inhabited for centuries by German immigrants to Transylvania, who brought their Saxon German architecture to the part of Transylvania known as "Siebenburgen." They mostly all emmigrated to Germany after the war, but the traces of their history are everywhere to be seen in Transylvania. Sigisoara is one of the most picturesque towns in the region.


Finally on my way back to Vienna on Oct. 28 I stopped off for part of the afternoon in Bratislava, Slovakia, where I was hosted by last year's Havel Symposium speakers, Martin and Zora Butora. Many of you may remember the Butoras, who asked to be remembered to the House of Hope congregation. They were very hospitable to me on what was a busy day of meetings and receptions for them. Bratislava has a charming old town section of the city, which we toured on foot, and then we ended up in a cafe. The town seems more economically developed than many of the other Eastern European cities I had seen this last week.

Zora and Martin Butora in Bratislava, Slovakia, on Oct. 28

So now my time in Vienna is almost over, and I'm heading on Saturday to Dubrovnik, Croatia for a week. Lucy will meet me there, which I'm definitely looking forward to. Then on to South Africa, and the dedication of the church in Malungeni on Sunday, Nov. 15. And finally, back to St. Paul on Nov. 18. Do you think I may be ready to get home and stay put for a while? We'll have to see!

In Budapest

I'm in Budapest tonight, having arrived here this afternoon from Vienna by train. I'll be staying the next couple of days with friends of mine here whom I've known since my Milwaukee days back in the early '90's when they were studying linguistics at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Hungarian is a nearly incomprehensible language to foreigners, so I am fortunate that both Gyöngyi and Marton, being accomplished linguists and translators, speak excellent English! It's fun to catch up with them after not having seen them for 9 years since I last was in Hungary.

My travels since last I wrote have taken me to Salzburg and the Salzkammergut lake district of Austria,
Salzburg, Austria

Halstatt, Austria

Cesky Krumlov and Prague in the Czech Republic,

Cesky Krumlov in southern Bohemia

Prague, Charles Bridge by night

Dresden in Germany,

The reconstructed Frauenkirche

Some young street musicians in Dresden

and to Slovakia last Thursday, 10/15, to visit an orphanage supported by a Viennese church group called "Project Centipede." We distributed boxes of toys and supplies to the 20 or so children who are staying there in a church sponsored orphanage in the village of Jelko, mostly because of domestic abuse and neglect in their homes.

Some of the boys, receiving the gifts we brought



It was interesting to see the contrast between Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, which has new malls and all kinds of economic development springing up, and Jelko, 25 miles to the east, which looks like a town time forgot, out in the middle of the Slovak farm country. It was a pretty forlorn scene, particularly as it was snowing that day, the earliest on record in 25 years (not unlike Minnesota!), and our van nearly got stuck in a muddy road that we'd taken a wrong turn down by mistake on our way there.



Lest you think that I've been doing too much church-like work on this sabbatical, which is meant to be time away from church-related endeavors, I will close this with some photos taken from the last two days I spent in Austria, seeing castles and palaces, etc.,

Burg Forchtenstein in Austria's easternmost province, Burgenland

visiting the graves of great composers,

Beethoven's grave in Vienna's Zentralfriedhof

and having a "Jause" (high tea) in a Viennese cafe (Dommayer's) where Johann Strauss got his start playing in his father's orchestra. It was a very "gemütlich" atmosphere, sipping "cafe melange" and eating a piece of raspberry torte there on a rainy Saturday afternoon!

At Dommayer's Cafe in Vienna's Hietzing neighborhood

So I leave Vienna after six weeks of being based there, having had the chance to absorb not only coffee and pastries, but a lot of the sights of Central Europe as well as some spiritual insights about life, which I look forward to sharing with you when I get back to St. Paul in the middle of November. Vienna is a mellow place with a slightly melancholy sense of timelessness and eternity about it that I thought this last photo of a man walking with his hands clasped European-style behind his back in the Schönbrunn Palace park expresses.

Half Way Point of My Sabbatical

I realize with the beginning of October that I'm at the half-way point of my sabbatical. It seems hard for me to absorb all the experiences I've been having, of being a foreigner in a foreign country, of trying to negotiate everything in German, the language of Austria, and feeling at times like a loner and stranger in a big city, Vienna. On the other hand, I have also had several experiences of hospitality, offered, strangely enough, by church people of the English language Protestant congregation I've attended twice now, the Vienna Community Church. In both cases the people inviting me to meet them for coffee in a cafe or to dinner in their home have been American women married to Austrian men, who live on a semi-permanent basis in Vienna and know what it's like, from personal experience, to be a foreigner in this culture. The Viennese, though often charming at one level, are not used to welcoming the stranger in their midst, and though the city has become quite multi-cultural over the past 15 years since Austria joined the E.U., the cultures tend to co-exist side by side, with little interaction between them. There are a lot of immigrants in Vienna from Middle Eastern and African countries, but rubbing shoulders together on the public transportation system or in the streets doesn't mean communicating much with each other. You see quite a few women wearing burkas or head scarves, and I would estimate the population of Vienna is now maybe 10 to 20 per cent Muslims from Turkey and other countries in the Middle East. There is an uneasy co-existence between them and the Austrian people who've lived here forever, and you see political posters plastered all over the place advocating getting tough on immigration and crime, linking the two as one phenomenon in the Austrians' minds. Whether the crime statistics actually support this linkage is hard to determine, but there is an assumption in many Austrians' minds that the immigrants are responsible for a sizable increase in the crime rate in Vienna over the past 15 years.

Muslim immigrant women in Zell am See, Austria

Anyway, it's an interesting social phenomenon to observe. I've gotten quite well acquainted with the subway and tram system. It's wonderfully well engineered, and you can get anywhere in the city quickly and cheaply using the public transportation. It makes the Twin Cities light rail and buses look pretty paltry in comparison. Taxes are high here, but there are a lot of social services provided which make the quality of life better for all. This is part of the reason why there are so many immigrants... they are here for economic opportunity and an improvement in their quality of life. Perhaps with their kids making up a sizable per centage of the school age population, the next generations of Austrians and immigrants will get to know each other and learn to appreciate and accept ethnic and cultural diversity as the norm and not a problem to be groused about!

New faces of Austria.

I've had a busy week hosting my mother who came to spend 8 days with me here. We rented a car and drove south, to Slovenia, Croatia, Italy, and then back up into the Austrian Alps. We had excellent weather most everywhere we went, and I got to hike on the glacier leading up to the highest mountain in the Austrian Alps, the Grossglockner. You can see some of the pictures below.

T F-S by the Grossglockner, Austria's highest mountain at 12,000 ft.

You can see a crevasse here that is characteristic of the glacier's rapid melting, due to global warming. There were markers showing how far it's retreated over the past 40 years.