And We're on our Way...

It’s the first time either of us have been in an airport since the pandemic began, and it’s a little surreal to be going so far for so long after two years spent almost entirely in our own home. We, and everyone around us, refresh our newsfeeds looking for news about the war in Ukraine 🇺🇦 more than we need to, half out of worry and half because those of us already here are midway through a long layover with nothing to distract us.

Gate E9 in Atlanta airport

The Atlanta airport is emptier than I’ve ever seen it, and about half the shops are closed. It might be busier in the domestic concourses? But here in International flights, it’s a lot more like a 3am airport than a 3pm one.

We will land in Munich at 9am local time and then take a shuttle to Salzburg. We’ll quarantine for a few days—we’re both people of abundant caution, and we have time—and then the work of it starts. I want to get the parts that might be hardest if we are travel-weary out of the way first, so we will head to Mauthausen and Berchtesgaden. We don’t bicker, really, when my research turns to the Nazi past, but we can each get a little touchy. Best, then, to get it out of the way.

I meant to go to Mauthausen on our last trip, and my friend J even flew over so I could have another Jew with me… but on the morning we meant to go, my heart just couldn’t, so instead we did the Sound of Music tour. It’s a very happy memory, but this time I’ll gird my loins and actually visit the death camp. I’ve been to Berchtesgaden, too, for a Christkindlmarkt. You can read about it in my essay, Christmas in Austria, from Still: A Journal. This time, we will tour the Eagle's Nest, which Dominik tells me mostly draws American tourists who are there in admiration.

All this, of course, happens as Putin commits atrocities in Ukraine and claims he is “denazifying” the country. And, in spite of its Jewish president, Ukraine—like, it seems, everywhere—does in fact have a few Nazis in its government. But, of course, so does Russia. And so, I’m afraid, do we.

This book started out as something entirely different: an exploration of how Dominik's family—with its Nazi past—and I came to terms with, and then came to love, one another. But the idea of that book was only possible because I understood Naziism as an aberration in history, and my research quickly lead me to realize it was just a particularly horrific peak in a cycle that’s repeated for centuries.

After that, it became a book about teaching myself a history that has largely been hidden from me, though for the most loving reasons. Why would Lake or his brothers dwell on the horrors of European antisemitism when they’d brought them safely to America, the land where everyone was welcome and anything was possible? But we can’t protect ourselves from what we don’t know to look out for.

And so we’ll go to Mauthausen and Berchtesgaden, but also to the Jewish museums in Vienna and Vilnius to read about the cycles of “tolerance” and expulsion, and to towns that are now just memorial sites with every murdered town member's name on a plaque, and other places we don’t yet know we need to visit.

Thank you for joining me on this journey.