MountainMornings

Tomorrow is our anniversary. It’s been a long, sometimes smooth sometimes rocky road. Most of you know the story – high school sweethearts break up in college and find each other again thirteen years later. What if Grandma Ada didn’t see me in the hospital, and pull me into Bob’s room? 

We wouldn’t be floating down the Danube, that’s what! It’s a first for us. Never did any ocean or river cruising before, in fact our usual thing would be a fancy night out, in a fabulous place. But tonight we’ll be meeting Jayne and Donnie for dinner on the boat and I couldn’t be happier. 

The Chef, as it turns out, is Slovakian. He has a huge herb garden on the top sun deck, right next to the miniature golf and the shuffleboard! Before we disembark for Prague at the end of our Viking Tour, my plan is to corner this guy and get as many recipes as I can. Remember my foster mother Nell was Czechoslovakian and I would like to recreate her holoopkis!

Today we toured the second largest synagogue in the world. Did you know Temple Emmanuel in NYC is the first? The Dohany Street Synagogue was built in 1859 and was the home to around 200,000 Jews in Budapest – 23% of the city’s population. That was before WWII and the Holocaust. Anti-Semitic laws were being passed in Hungary as early as 1920, limiting the number of Jews being allowed to matriculate in the university. 

Today we saw the garden in the center of the synagogue, where corpses were found after the liberation. Over 2,000 victims now have their names on the sacred mounds of earth in this “garden.” It is almost impossible to comprehend the madness, until you walk along the Danube and come across the sixty rusty, steel shoes. 

Here, before the ornate Parliament building, is a memorial to the 20,000 Humgarian Jews who were shot at the bank of this beautiful river, and dumped in the Danube. And when I saw the child’s shoe, finally, that is when I cried. 

There are only sixty shoes there, but I could feel the hopelessness of  that time as we walked in the rain. Today, Hungarians fear Muslims streaming into their country from Syria. God help us, may we learn from Europe’s history.