Most of the clothes I’ve worn and carried with me are first treated to a good scrubbing in hot water and the suds of the cheapest soap I could find. Drain the sink. Rinse in cold water. Repeat. Wring them out by hand till there’s almost no water left in them, then lay them out or hang them over the back of any and every available surface in my hotel room.
I am immediately concerned about making sure there’s something dry enough to wear tomorrow. Opening the window to let the breeze in lets in the cold and doesn’t seem to be working, so I crank the radiators up to full blast. I remember from a ninth-grade earth science lesson that warm air can hold more water vapor than cold air.
In the back of my head I am vaguely hoping that nothing catches on fire this evening.
Afterwards, my hands are papery-dry and so wrinkled that my phone doesn’t recognize my fingerprint.
The improvised spritzer-bottle/plastic water bottle with holes punched in the lid worked fine. Higher ratio of H2O2 to water than anticipated – I had to play with it a little to get the balance right. I think my boots are better than they were before, and it’s something, and something is good enough.
I just want to say that I’d never done this before. I am learning to make due with what I have and also recognize that there’s an alternative thing to try when one thing seems overwhelming and too much and I really just need clean clothes in the morning and have been putting it off for long enough.
And now it’s time to sleep, because the time will pass by faster that way, and hopefully the clothes will be dry in the morning.
Follow the link above to watch my YouTube video, in which you can see my face and hear my voice as I talk about: stinky shoes and what to do about them, doing laundry in a hostel sink, and what it’s like when neither of the people having sex in the dorm room you’re sharing is you.
The first time everything had felt unfamiliar. The second time it felt like I was stepping back in time to the previous day, and living it over again.
Except that I got to the bus station early, instead of running for twenty minutes to get to a bus that I knew would leave in twenty-five. And this time, I knew where the bathrooms were, where to store my luggage, where the information desk was, where the shuttle bus was going.
I went to the information desk to ask for help. In a voice that was much clearer and more confident than I was feeling, I said: “I was here yesterday and I saw Auschwitz I. Today I’ve come back because I want to see Auschwitz II. How do I do that?”
The woman on the other side of the glass looked surprised, but she told me what to do.
I would not need a ticket this time. Aside from a few places that are roped off because they are unsafe, Birkenau is completely open to the public during the day.
I took the bus instead of walking. I told my parents where I was going.
When I got to the gate, I started to feel cold and shaky again.
I called in the Grandfathers. I had never done that for myself before. I was clumsy but I did it, and I can confidently say that I felt more supported and less alone. My mind was clear.
You can still smell the ashes. It’s a metallic tang, in the air, in the back of your throat.
Unlike Auschwitz I, Birkenau has been mostly reduced to ruins. It’s rubble, and ashes, and barbed-wire fences, and it is heart-wrenchingly vast.
The first thing I saw when I got through the gates was a faint rainbow in the sky above what used to be the woman’s barracks. It made my heart sing.
I walked a worn dirt road lined with barbed wire fencing, so long and straight that it seemed to go on forever. Those selected for death in the gas chambers were herded along that same road.
All around me, there were the ruins of the men’s camp, the places they used to sleep and eat and hurt on the inside and out. Here, the only remaining corner of a red brick building, there, a free standing chimney. Everywhere rectangular remnants of stone foundations, overgrown with moss and lichen and wildflowers and tall grass. It seemed to stretch on for as far as the eye could see in all directions, all that was left of this place that used to house an industry of dying.
It was so quiet there, so peaceful. I have never been anywhere with as much solemn-ness and reverence as that place. In its own way, it’s strangely beautiful.
I finally got to the end of the road, and stopped walking. I remembered something from a book I’d read about a man who asked his friends to say Kaddish for him after he died, and they’d forgotten.
I tried to say it for all of them. I didn’t know how. It’s a Jewish prayer that is said when someone dies, but is less about death than the greatness of their God. I found the English translation of the words on the first page of google and I don’t know if I did it right, but I tried for them.
I kept walking. I kept expecting someone to come yell at me for walking on the grass, but no one did.
I touched the still barbed wire fencing and found that it was cold. I walked past a pile of broken ceramic, smashed into beyond recognizable shapes.
I stumbled on a memorial to the Roma and Sinai people that were killed here. I overheard a group of visitors praying together and singing, and I stopped to listen. I witnessed a military ceremony, young people standing to attention, bearing flags with blue and white stars of David, listening to a woman singing in a language I did not understand.
I began to think that Birkenau has become almost as full of grief and prayer and loving memory as prejudice and cruelty and dying.
That thought was challenged almost as soon as I’d thought of it. Because that was when I walked alone through the building where the initiations of new arrivals in the camp took place.
These people – people who had been taken from their homes and lives, who had just been ripped away from their loved ones – were stripped naked in the cold among strangers. The pregnant women who had escaped the gas chambers in the first selection because their clothing concealed their condition were particularly vulnerable here. They were sterilized and cleaned. Their hair was shaved, regardless of gender. They were tattooed with numbers that replaced their names. They were stripped of their person-hood, in that building. Anne’s hair was shaven off, possibly so quickly and carelessly as to injure her in the process. In that room. I know, because she lived at Auschwitz, because her mother died at Auschwitz, because she and her sister were spared at Auschwitz, only to die in a typhus outbreak at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where their bodies were thrown into a mass grave.
These people’s worlds were ripped apart and thrown unceremoniously into the bottom of a pond, which is still murky with ashes…
I walked out of Birkenau along the railroad ties at sunset. It occurs to me to wonder whether or not it was built by slaves.
It’s not this place that frightens me.
It’s the fact that it came to be.
Otto Frank believed that it is everyone’s responsibility to fight prejudice.
I stepped outside of the death gate. I found my way back to the edge of the woods where I’d called in the Grandfathers and lit the candle for something to focus on and said “thank you. It’s okay to go now. I’m okay,” and blew the candle out.
And I took a piece of chocolate from the bookstore and threw it into the woods, as an offering…
I walked Auschwitz alone. It took me two days to get through it.
When I left off trying to put this story into words, I think I said that I was crying. I didn’t actually stop crying for that entire day, but eventually I was able to breathe again.
The other visitors to Auschwitz-Birkenau all wore the same face. When they stepped out into the sunlight from the dusty dark interior of the crematorium, when they trudged up the stairs from the basement of Block 11, the look in their eyes was shocked and haunted, horrified and tired.
A sign at the entrance to the crematorium reads, simply:
“You are about to enter a place where thousands of innocent people were killed. Please behave accordingly.”
And it’s dark in there, so dark…
I walked the paths between the blocks in something like a daze. I stumbled upon the simple wooden gallows, saw the cruel black hook from which they hung. It was a little way back from the path, and many kept their distance, and I don’t know why but I marched right up and stood in front of it. I felt like there was something or someone there who wanted something from me, like street people asking for spare change. And I couldn’t do anything for them.
Auschwitz I is the part of the museum that has been preserved in the condition it was in when it was a fully functional concentration and extermination camp. In some places it has been reconstructed to show what it was like in the early 1940’s.
That place is evil.
I saw the barbed wire fences. I saw the memorial on the death wall, the place where the rebellious were shot. I saw the glass display case full of children’s shoes, piled higher than I am tall.
I read about the persecution of many different peoples – the Roma and Sinai, the Greeks, the Poles. I read about the experiments performed on women and women’s reproductive systems without anesthetic and without their consent.
I read about the underground ways that people were good to each other. The secretaries who managed to alter records and help their families and friends. The nurses who saved sick women from the gas chambers at the last minute.
I read about the ways that people sold each other out. One man lost his freedom in exchange for twenty US dollars.
I read about families being separated from each other at the gates. Men to the left, women and children to the right, and people clinging to each other, and mothers forcing their children to let go, telling them to take care of each other.
I got to a point where I physically could not read any more. The signs are written in capital white letters on smooth black wood, in English, Yiddish and Hebrew. I could pick out the words, the letters, but I could not make them make make sense.
I kept trying. I’d step inside a building, look around me, maybe snap a photo, see a few panels of an exhibit, and need to step outside into the sun again, take big, deep gulps if cleaner air and lean against the walls. Once I turned and thought I saw a figure of a man in the corner of my eye, crouched, grinning at me, even laughing. But when I looked back he had gone.
I walked out.
I’d barely seen a third of Auschwitz I, and I couldn’t do it any more.
I walked in the general direction of Birkenau. I didn’t have any idea when the camps would close. The sun was going down behind the death-gate, when I got there, and a woman behind the counter at the bookstore told me they were closed. “You’ll have to come back tomorrow,” she told me, not unkindly.
Until that moment, it had not occurred to me that I could.
I spent my walk back to the train station feeling horrible because I hadn’t been able to make it through.
I’d come all this way, and I’d seen so many things, and I’d learned so much, and I’d loved a child and I’d lost her, and I’d traveled for miles and miles to get to a place she was taken before she died, and I hadn’t been able to do it. I felt like I’d failed.
I somehow made it back to my hostel. I talked to Sara and I talked to Cris. They were the people who knew where I’d been, that day. Cris told me that he didn’t think it was disrespectful to the horrors of what happened to say “I see this, and I need to step back and take a breath,” and that trying to look and physically not being able to is not the same thing and never looking at all. Sara told me that I’m not obligated to anything, and pulled a tarot card for me that said I would be enlightened by this experience and that I would be able to separate from this experience soon.
I slept a little. I woke up at 5AM because the Cheese Guy was snoring in the next bunk. I went downstairs.
I made coffee. I remembered meeting an old Italian grandmother in the hostel kitchen who had just gotten back from visiting the camps and was moving in to elsewhere that night. I told her I was going, too, and we shared a moment of sadness. She gave me a coupon for free coffee in a random place in Kraków that she wasn’t going to be able to use.
I wrote a little, and I thought, and looked at bus schedules. And I thought some more.
And yes yep that is a knitted blanket that I am wearing everything else is gross right now
Self care is fucking important.
It is important to take the time to think of myself before going and doing the things that are hard. It is important to sleep and eat vegetables and remember to plug in my phone.
Calling in the Grandfathers helped me today. (I gave them chocolate afterwards.) So did carrying the stones in my pocket/on my lock screen. Washing my hands. Calling my family and connecting with important people. Writing shit down.
It is important to have a plan that includes not asking myself to do unreasonable things.
I do not need to put myself through a 20+ hour bus ride tomorrow or even the next day or ever. I know where I need to go, but I can take my time getting there.
I do not even need to make myself take a train back to Krakow this evening, I can get myself a room right here.
Such small things. Blankets. A toothbrush. Water pressure. Nice towels. Access to internet. Privacy.
The host at this hostel is unbelievably kind. I sat down in the lobby after a 40 minute walk with a backpack full of dirty laundry 🧺 after having spent an entire day mentally preparing to go back to Auschwitz and then riding a bus To Auschwitz with a horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach and then walking alone around the remains of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps and doing all of the emotional and spiritual and mental work necessary to be there and be present and appropriately honor the tragedy and the bullshit that happened there
not to mention walking for approximately 6 hours
and backpacking all over Europe for a month
and this lovely human being comes over to me in the lobby and asks if I need anything and makes me feel welcome and shows me around the hostel and makes sure I’ve got everything I need and Carries My Bag Up The Stairs For Me and is all like “this kitchen is open to all my guests, the kettle’s on, let me know if you need Anything here is my phone number just call oh and here’s the WiFi password” and you don’t find chivalry like this anywhere anymore. I physically could not stop saying thank you.
Gosh, it appears that I needed that.
I just took what felt like the longest shower of my life, I am Putting Off Doing Chores Until Tomorrow, I am listening to my very own music and wearing only the clothing necessary for my own exclusive company which is basically a blanket with some creative knots and Iiii am going to post this all over the internet and I don’t give any shits right now
and nobody here is snoring!!!! unless it’s me, but if that’s the case then shhhh I don’t need to know
nobody else is coming and going and moving around in the dark at 3 in the morning
nobody’s talking on their phone about how much they hate it here
nobody needs Anything from me.*
*if you do, don’t hesitate to ask. Right now I could do almost anything.**
**I still might say no.
And yes. Yeah. It is so important to appreciate the things you have. 💜🍂
As someone very brave frequently says, it is so, so important to be kind to each other.
When I was waiting in line at Auschwitz, I was confused about the best way to visit the museum, and spoke to the person who was in charge of admission. She was helpful; she seemed tired. But when it was time to scan my ticket, I didn’t have my passport out and ready because I didn’t know, and when she said the words “can I see your ID, please,” the expression on her face looked impatient and frustrated and angry and tired.
When I passed through security, I made a mistake and forgot to take my power bank out of my bag, and the alarm went off, and the security officer’s “What are you doing!” was harsh and it stung, especially in that place. I stepped over that threshold and I think I made it a few steps before starting to cry, and it was kind of crying where breathing feels like kicking yourself to the surface for a lungful of air before being pushed back under the surface again.
That night, after dark, when the camps had closed, I was in the town of Oświęcem, the Polish name of the town that Germany dubbed Auschwitz. I didn’t have a bus ticket back to my hostel and I felt so stupid. I asked the woman behind the desk at a souvenir shop for directions to a train station. When I got there, the place was under heavy construction and I couldn’t find the platform or anywhere to buy a ticket. An English couple asked me for directions to the train to Kraków, but I was as lost as they were. So we banded together to look for the train, and found it within about thirty seconds of meeting.
Sometimes in Germany it is possible to travel long distances on public transportation without one’s ticket being checked. This is illegal, but since I knew that train was leaving soon and didn’t know if there was another one coming, I got on the train without a ticket and sort of prayed. This was a mistake.
About halfway to Kraków a woman in black came down the aisle checking tickets. When she came to me, I told her that I didn’t have one. I didn’t know what was going to happen and I was scared. She didn’t speak my language, but she understood what had happened.
She kept her face carefully blank, wrote something down on her device, and then pulled out a credit card machine. 9zł, she told me. I paid. She scolded me in Polish, and then smiled and walked away.
When I got the the train station, I went looking for a restroom. I was so tired. In Europe it’s not uncommon for bathrooms in public places to require and entrance fee, and I didn’t have the right change. A woman who was walking out saw me standing on the wrong side of the gate, reached into her bag, and put the coin in the slot and walked away without a word.
In the cramped, temporary space of my hostel dorm room, one of my roommates snores very loudly and it makes it hard for me to sleep. He, in turn, complained that the boots I have been walking around Europe in for a month and a half smell really, really bad.
Initially, he thought I was hiding some kind of rotting cheese in my locker. And I – yeah. He also assumed I was lying when I was too embarrassed to tell him about my shoes.
The Cheese Guy felt awkward about talking to me alone, because “you know, young people, women” so he asked an Italian guy who was also sharing the space with us for help confronting me about it.
Because of the brokenness of his English and my German, he still didn’t believe me about the cheese even after I broke down and tried to communicate about the shoes and left them outside on the balcony for the night.
The Italian guy immediately understood, and was like “OH, that makes sense, it happens to me too, here, would you like to borrow this stuff I have, it helps…”
When the Cheese Guy finally understood, he was so embarrassed that he could not look me in the eye.
… I gave the Italian guy permission to tell his girlfriend this story because we both agreed that it’ll be funny in retrospect.
I think for a second there I kind of hated the Cheese Guy. Especially at 5AM when his snoring woke me up from a bad dream, and wouldn’t let me go back to sleep.
But it’s too much work.
In the unexpected, awkward, frustrating intimacy of that space, we had to live with each other’s human-ness and faults. Almost like Anne in the Secret Annex, except nothing like that, because both of us had the freedom to leave.
There is a voice in my head that tells me that I don’t have any of my shit together and I am somehow failing at life because of all of the mistakes I made that day. It’s often very loud.
There is another voice in my head – one that usually sounds like my Dad – that says something like “oh, look, another imperfect human. Never seen one of Those before.”
Everyone is doing their best all the time. I made so many mistakes that day, and every day. I’m human. I’m messy and soo flawed. And so is everyone else.
In a world that is capable of containing so much human cruelty and horror and coldness, it is so important to have empathy for other people.
I’m safely back at my hostel, sitting on the window ledge in the bar. It’s warm here, and there’s WiFi, and there’s a gentle yellow glow from the lights hanging from the ceiling. I can hear strains of familiar pop music on the radio that’s playing at the reception desk in the next room, and it’s strangely grounding.
“…she/is something to behold/elegant and bold…”
Soon I will be able to shower, to take off the boots, to sleep. Almost, but not yet.
I’m still wearing the boots I had on when I walked through the crematorium, through the streets of Auschwitz I.
“I’m burning up again, I’m burning up, and I…”
In Jewish tradition, it is traditional and symbolic to wash one’s hands after a funeral.
Here, I can rest my head against the windowpane, and it’s cold. It isn’t late in the evening, but it’s dark on the other side of the glass.
“I never should have told you/I never should have let you see inside/don’t want it troubling your mind/won’t you let it be…”
I can smell coffee brewing, the beads of sweat drying in the yellow scarf I found in Amsterdam.
Amsterdam. I needed to leave, to get away from all the weed. That’s where I found Anne’s diary.
I remember singing top 40 pop songs with my cousin from Germany and a meteorologist from Morocco in the back streets of Amsterdam in the rain. We came from three different places in the world, but we all knew the same melodies, and even some of the words.
“Just give me a reason, just a little bit’s enough, just a second we’re not broken just bent, and we can learn to love again…”
Top 40 pop songs are universal.
I remember talking to Morocco about calculus. I know where I’m at, with calculus, and she did too. She treated me like a little sister, tried to take me under her wing and tell me everything at once about traveling solo, because the beginning of my journey was the ending of hers. She was way better than me at foosball.
I walked her to the train station, and I held the door for her and I carried her bag, and I hugged her and told her to travel safe, and I will never see her again, and that was the best possible way to say goodbye.
“It’s in the stars/it’s been written in the stars of our hearts…”
The bar again. From far away, my real sister tells me about the five senses grounding exercise. “Brings you back to the present.”
I tried it and it worked.
“There’s only us/there’s only this/forget regret/or life is yours to miss…”
She pulled a Tarot card and told me that it said I would be enlightened by this experience and would be able to separate from this experience soon.
Since leaving home, I’ve noticed that I have the best support system in the world.
There’s the cousin who met me at the airport and found room in her heart and her home and her life for me, when I needed a place to land. She feeds me good food, all the time, and gives excellent hugs. And if I ever need somewhere to go back to, I know I can reach out.
At home, social media and I spent a lot of time together, but we weren’t friends. It sucked away my time. Now, Facebook is the cheapest and most efficient way to let everyone know how I’m doing. And it doesn’t matter how many likes I get, it matters that my aunt appreciated a picture that I took of a cemetery, or that my Dad is able to see the beauty that surrounds me right along with me.
Folks from home have been reaching out to me, telling me that what I’m doing is amazing, yada yada, and that’s nice to hear and everything but the thing that gets me is these are my people, and they’re here, and they’re thinking of me, checking in on me, and I needed that so much.
My mother has been periodically asking me for something called a PIES checkin – how are you doing physically, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. When she asks me that I have to think about it, and often I notice things that are important. She has a habit of messaging me when I’m at my lowest but haven’t told a soul.
I’ve been calling my Dad every few days during his walk in the morning, which is more or less around lunchtime, for me, and because my body still hadn’t adjusted to the time difference, it’s sometimes essentially morning for me too. It is good to hear his voice and hear him say “I love you.”
The pastor at my parent’s church is there if I need to talk about Auschwitz. I hear that they are all praying for me. I can feel them there.
A college English professor – the one I sort of ugly-cried all over at my graduation – is the only other person I know who has ever done anything like this. She says she wishes she could give me a hug, and she loves me. When I get home, we will talk and compare notes, and she will share a poem she wrote after walking Dachau alone.
My aunts are there. All of them. These are the mother-figures-who-aren’t-my-real-mother that I went to for objective advice before leaving, because they’ve known me for my whole life, and I love them, and I know they care for me. Uncles and cousins, too.
The community that I used to sing with in high school, my chorus room people, the people I used to hang out with in practice rooms, the group of shamelessly strange friends who still get together on New Year’s eve and listen to Kanye and Queen and drink sparkling grape juice at midnight and play a game called distraction Mario Cart in which at least half us end up shirtless… they’re gonna be there when I get home, and I miss them, and we send out-of-context memes across the ocean periodically for old-time’s sake.
The families I grew up knowing through homeschooling cooperatives – we used to put on plays we wrote and go sledding down the hills in the city in the winter – tell me in hearts on Instagram that they’re following what I’m doing, that they remember me, like I remember them.
The people that I found in college are there for me. Always. We laugh all the time, and it’s the best, and it is so important.
My sisters are my strongest roots at home. And I miss them.
I have to believe that my cat loves me even though she can’t text. I can close my eyes and picture myself in her room, and she’s there and solid and warm and breathing quietly. And I know.
I’m a young person who thinks it’s important to remember that genocide is wrong.
In Amsterdam, I found a copy of her diary in the train station when I felt anxious and alone and I needed something to read, a physical, tangible book that I could hold in my hands and open and flip through the pages and smell the paper and scribble things in the margins. I needed another world to escape into, and that world was hers.
In Hamburg, I stood at the top of the tower that is most of what remains of the Church of St Nicolai. The rest of it was destroyed by the Allies’ bombs in World War II, as was much of the rest of that city. At the top of that tower, there is a plaque explaining that Germans must remember that those bombings were a justified retaliation to things that Nazi Germany had done first. Things that were unquestionably wrong.
In Potsdam, I saw buildings that were not destroyed in the war. And some of them were older than any man-made thing I’d ever seen, and they were full of stories and personality and life, and they were beautiful.
In Berlin, I walked with children playing in between the rows upon rows of dark monoliths that make up the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The stone floor beneath our feet rolled up and down like waves, and the stones became higher and higher the farther we got from the edge – beginning at waist height, and gradually rising – like water, rising – so slowly we didn’t notice what was happening until it closed above our heads. And yet, the columns and rows of stone were perfectly straight, and so was the space between them, so that no matter how deep inside the maze we found ourselves – ducking in and out from behind the stones, giggling and grinning and crying a little inside – we could always see the way out.
In Prague, I visited the Jewish Museum. I saw a room with walls covered in the names of the dead, written in letters the size of fingerprints. I saw an exhibit of children’s drawings, something that became an important part of their education system in the ghettos – after they were forbidden to attend public schools, and before they were shipped off to concentration camps.
I stood inside of the Old New Synagog, and sat on a wooden bench and leaned my head against a wall that was built before anyone on this side of the ocean knew that America existed. I learned about the intricate nature of Jewish burial rituals, the way that they care for the dying and honor the dead. I walked through the Old Jewish cemetery on All Saint’s day. There was some logistical problem that meant they didn’t have enough space for everyone, so they just started stacking them, twelve layers deep in some places, the crooked tombstones crowded together like teeth, like a dense forest. It looks like it grew.
And I lit a candle and sat for a while, because I’m just kind of like that.
In Krakow, Poland, I went to Kazimierz, the Jewish quarter of the city. There are signs in the buildings in Hebrew, and six-pointed stars. I stepped inside the oldest Synagog in Poland, which has become a museum, and learned about Jewish culture and tradition. About their holidays, and festivals, and memories, and rituals. They are intricate and strict and sweet, and practical and solemn. Speaking as an outsider, it seems like these people value things like light and rest and community, and I can totally get behind all of those things. It’s not my identity, but I can stand here and I can learn about and start to honor yours.
Today in Krakow, I visited a memorial in what used to be a ghetto. There is an organization there that works to return the physical things that were stolen from holocaust victims by the Nazi party to their families. “We are looking for relatives of…” followed by a name, a number, who they were, everything we know about what happened to them. Too often, their fates are unknown.
Tomorrow, I am going to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps.
I did not set out on this journey with any intention of doing this. At home, the holocaust was something distant, horrifying, over, far away. But here, on this side of the ocean, everywhere I’ve been there is a reminder, a memorial, a sacred space. Europe is singing a requiem, and I was close enough to hear it.
I’m not sure what’ll happen to me. I am frightened. I’ve seen the pictures – we all did, in like tenth grade, and I left that classroom shaking even back then. Now it is something that’s real. And for a second there I thought I wasn’t going to be able to do this. I’m sure as hell going to be exhausted afterwards.
But I have to go. Because she did, once. And I want to say goodbye.
I got to the last sentence of that book when I was sitting at the kitchen table in an apartment in Berlin.
I was couch-surfing at a friend of Kathrin’s place. He was a friendly giant of a man who spoke enough English to say to me, “any friend of Kathy’s is a friend of mine” in this thick German accent before sneaking away to play first person shooter games in the next room. We coexisted fine.
The days were getting shorter, darker earlier. I’d made my way back to the apartment building through dark and rainy streets. I’d been walking nonstop for most of three days, exploring the many sights that Berlin has to offer on foot. My right knee was starting to hurt, and my dad and big sister told me to take a rest day. I could almost find my way there without the help of a GPS. Almost. I felt tired and lonely and a little sad.
I rang the doorbell a few times before anyone answered. There were folks gathered in the living room, sitting on the floor and doing each other’s hair and make up and lounging around on their phones and laughing. They were my cousin’s friend’s roommates and friends of roommates, and they were having a great time, and they were speaking German.
I can speak roughly enough German to order a cup of coffee, and I can understand just a little more. I’ve been trying to learn since January, and am slowly making progress. But in that moment, for the first time since leaving home, I felt isolated by that language barrier. I’ve gotten soo much better in the past couple of years, but I have always been shy, and not understanding the words made that shyness harder to overcome. I don’t think I’d ever realized how much listening in on conversations in a room of people talking made me feel a part of things. I felt like I was on the other side of an invisible wall, and couldn’t find a way through.
So I hid in the kitchen and I cooked. I had some vegetables and butter and bread from Aldi’s. I wish that I had tried to step inside that circle – I wanted to. But I was tired.
So that’s where I was at when I was sitting there at the kitchen table, escaping into Anne’s diary to get away from my own world for a moment, and that’s the day I was having when read the line “if only there were no other people in the world,” and that was the last thing she’d written in her diary, possibly the last thing she’d written in her short life.
I’d loved Anne, her story, her people. I loved her careful self-reflection and commentary and honesty and spark. I’d been stepping inside those pages in the evenings as one way to distract myself from how far away from home I am. Knowing that she’d been real, knowing that she wasn’t going to make it, only made that book more important to me. And then she was gone.
There were a lot of people in the apartment who didn’t know my name or where I was from or who I was, so I sort of hid in the bathroom until I could stop crying.
That same day I’d visited the Berlin Wall. I’d watched children playing between the rows and rows of dark monoliths that make up the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. I’d rested my chin on my arms on a stone ledge and peered into the tiny screen that is all Berlin has as a memorial to the gay folks that were persecuted under the same regime. “You are steeping yourself in the Holocaust. Be careful” my dad told me in a text. My sister recommended getting some kind of sage action for myself.
I read Night by Eli Wiesel that night. It’s a harrowing experience, “a slim volume of terrifying power,” and I didn’t mean to do that to myself on top of everything else, but something inside of me wanted to. I read it in one go, like drinking an entire bottle in one swallow. It was the only way that I could.
When I got to the end, I put it down. I felt years older and hollowed out and horrified and sad and my eyes were red and puffy and my head hurt.
There’s an ounce of self preservation inside of me that kicks in at moments like these. I put the book down. I took a shower. I brushed my teeth (I think I left that toothbrush there by accident, because when I got to the next city it was missing.) I made some tea. A couple of people from home reached out to me that night – people who usually make me laugh and smile and feel centered and connected to home – and I didn’t have the energy to write back much. I tried to communicate how I was doing, and just said that I needed to shift focus to self care things for a while.
I felt spiritually whooped.
When it gets too heavy, it’s okay to set it down for a while. It will be there if you want to pick it back up later. And it you don’t, that’s okay, too.
The next day, I got kicked out a coffee shop by a cranky German lady for not having enough cash for the coffee I had ordered, although she grudgingly gave it to me for free. On my way to the station, this older, homeless looking black guy smiled at me and asked if he could have a sip of the coffee. I gave him the whole thing. He grinned at me over his shoulder as we walked away, and called out a “you look good. I love you,” and I smiled.
I said goodbye and thank you to Kathrin’s friend. He gave me a hug and said “always again.” His girlfriend smiled at me, a little awkwardly, and waved goodbye.
On the bus out of Berlin, I read a lot of Terry Pratchett. I also got myself a lot of chocolate and proceeded to eat all of it. The sun was shining. The city was beautiful. The world was still turning.
“Oh, you know. When you’re up someplace high, and you want to jump for no good reason.”
A flash of understanding.
“Or like when you’re standing on a sidewalk and get that urge to step out into oncoming traffic?”
“Yeah. That’s the one.”
“Can’t remember.”
“I know there’s a word for it. Call of the – something.”
“Call of the abyss!”
“That’s the one.”
We were looking down over the edge of a bridge in the old warehouse district in Hamburg, Germany. The three of us together represented three different nationalities – Denmark, Finland, and the United States. We’d met in a twelve-person dorm at the youth hostel. It went like this:
“Where you from?”
“New York.”
“Nice city.”
“Actually I’m not – well, yeah. Yeah, it is.”
“Big.”
“Yeah. Where you from?”
“Denmark. ‘s beautiful there. What brings you here?”
“I-was-studying-and-I-needed-a-break.”
“That’s fair. What were you studying?”
“Math.”
“Come again?”
“Mathematics. I loved it, but I felt tired.”
“I don’t blame you. I never got the hang of numbers.”
We talked about gap years and the United States education system. (She asked.) The woman from Denmark dressed in black, and liked blues music, and, recently, photographing insects. She and another woman from Finland were going to look at cathedrals, and would I like to join them? Everyone else was going on a walking tour.
“Never liked walking tours,” she said. “I’m a bit independent. I like to do things in my own time.”
And so we went.
The warehouse district in Hamburg is made up of old brick buildings built along a canal system, designed for the transportation and storage of goods. Some of them still serve their original purpose, housing spices and carpets and coffee from around the world. Hamburg is a harbor city.
The space itself isn’t pretty in the way that cathedrals are pretty. It’s beautiful, in the way that only brick walls and intricate masonry and bridges over dull brown water under a grey sky can be.
We found a set of old stone steps along the side of the canal, covered in muck and slime and algae, that allowed access down to the water’s edge. Murky water lapped at the bottom steps. The stairs were sealed off from the rest of the word by a single chain between two posts.
Denmark caught me staring, looked around to make sure no one was looking, and unclipped the chain.
“You know you want to.”
And I did.
I did not slip and fall. The steps were narrow, there was no railing between the water and me. The stairs went down further than I’d expected – the last few steps of the staircase were underwater. It was quieter down there. Surreal.
Denmark smiled down at me.
I shook my head, and grinned, and made my way back up into the world.
Denmark had to leave to catch a train – she was meeting up with a friend that she met in a video game. Finland and I exchanged numbers and parted ways. We’d planned to meet up later to go on a boat tour at night – but I got lost, and my phone died, and I almost crashed an electric scooter trying to find my way to the docks, and I accidentally got on the wrong boat, and by the time I got back to the hostel that night I was soaked through with rain and cold and grinning like an idiot because there was good news from home that night and I’d finally figured out how bus schedules worked.
That was the hostel that I walked to at four in the morning, because I’d taken an overnight bus from Holland…
On my second night there, a backpacker from Canada made cookies, despite the lack of measuring spoons in the hostel kitchen. She just kind of improvised, and they came out sweet and warm and exactly what I needed in that moment. I was sitting nearest at the table when she brought them out.
“Would you like a cookie?
Everyone in the room flocked to them, the way that seagulls converge on a scrap of bread in a parking lot.
We sat at that table, and we started asking each other questions. “Where you from? What brings you here?” It went on like that. There were people from all over the place. Finland and Denmark were there, plus Ukraine, the Netherlands, Malaysia, Australia, Canada. The states. Hi, hello, that’s me. Amsterdam had checked in after hours and was trying to get away with staying there for free by sleeping in the loft. His dream is to start a business that will make the world better, but he doesn’t know what it will be yet.
The next night, the whole lot of us sat barefoot on the floor and talked. About the boarders between countries, and shadows, and the luck of the Irish, and marriage, and drugs, and ghosts, and on and on until 2AM when the last of us went to sleep…
I remember trying to explain to a room full of people why some infinities are bigger than other infinities. They listened. Canada got it, for a moment. I could feel it – her breathing changed. And then we both lost it again.
Hamburg was the first city I ever navigated on my own. I found my way there, I found a place to sleep, I found food, I found people, and memories, and beautiful things to do and see and explore. I did all of those things by myself, but I also wasn’t alone, and I will remember…
When I tell people I’m from New York, everyone thinks of the city.
I’m not from the city. I’ve never been.
I’m from a small town in the middle of a cornfield that’s a little bit south of a different city that sits on the edge of a relatively large lake, and that lake is the only thing, geographically speaking, that is between us and Canada. Personally, I’ve always liked the smaller lakes, the ones that are named for the way that they look like the fingers of a hand.
I keep trying to explain this place to people I meet on the road. It’s hard to put home into words.
I have very deep roots, there. I’ve never lived anywhere else. I’d hardly ever visited anywhere else in my life – a few places, here and there, but rarely.
My mother remembers that I fully intended to never leave home, to stay in my childhood house and take care of my parents until – well, forever. It’s an old, rambling country farm house on the top of the hill, surrounded by miles of corn fields and soy beans and purple clover.
I love that house. It is perpetually cluttered – entire rooms and drawers and cupboards are filled with stuff that only ever sits there accumulating dust. The living room has south-facing windows to let the light in, and a threadbare couch, and a big black dog. The kitchen smells like coffee in the mornings, and sounds like National Public Radio.
Since my little sister and I have been old enough to have separate rooms, I’ve slept in the attic, with a cat who hates everyone but me. The stairs from the upstairs to the downstairs are painted pink. The kitchen floor has a peeling, checkered pattern of squares that I can almost see if I can close my eyes.
Outside, there are overgrown gardens and fruit trees and pines and a wooden swing and a treehouse and a trampoline, and an Austrian pine tree several stories taller than the house and so big around that my little sister and I together still can’t get our arms around it. In the winter there used to be these drifts of snow as tall as me, and we would dig tunnels through them – my little sister and I, and then go inside for the hot chocolate that we used to make on the stove.
I never wanted to grow up, back then. I never wanted to leave…
There’s a bittersweet saying that you don’t know what you have until it’s gone.
But it isn’t gone. It’s still there. I dream about it all the time. I have been afraid of leaving all my life, and now I am thousands of miles away, and it’s still a part of me.
It will always be a part of me.
And it’s strange, but now that I have left, I am full of a feeling of not being ready to go home yet. I keep having dreams where I wake up at home before I meant to come back, and I miss Europe, I didn’t get to say goodbye to Europe, to this backpacking lifestyle I’ve found, and I want to go back…
And so I’m beginning to think that this will always be a part of me, too.
My mother always grows too much zucchini in the summer.
She’s not alone. There are small towns in the north-eastern part of America where people only lock their cars at night during zucchini season, for fear of opening them in the morning to find a small mountain of zucchini in the backseat. People are that desperate to get rid of them. For some reason, this is something that happens every summer without fail, as if no one remembers what’s inevitably going to happen from the previous year. Maybe it’s similar to the way that women forget the pain of childbirth.
And folks get so very creative with finding uses for the darned things. One of the better ones is zucchini bread, which is more of a loaf-shaped cake than anything else. It’s yellow and sweet with green flecks throughout, best served cold with cream cheese or grilled in butter on the stove.
Somehow my mother convinced me to take some zucchini bread with me, on the plane, in my carry on. For my cousin. I’d already flatly refused to bring a box of pears from the tree in the side yard, just on general principles. I didn’t want to carry them.
But she had stayed up until 5AM baking them on one of the last nights before I left, and it really was an excellent batch, and I imagined that if I somehow survived a plane crash on a deserted island, at least I would have zucchini bread from home. So I agreed.
Flash forward several hours later, and I am trying to pass through security at the Boston airport. It’s always a little scary, letting go of my stuff. I’m standing there on the safe side of the TSA checkpoint, barefoot in my socks, clutching my jacket and shoulder bag under one arm and my boots in the other, and I hear the alarm go off. My backpack has not made it through the checkpoint. At this point, I am getting worried.
And officer beckons me over.
“Is this your bag?”
I nod, frozen.
“Okay,” he says, smugly, walks away. I hear him say something to his buddies about going to get lunch.
Shit.
Was there something I missed? Are they going to take me away for questioning? I hadn’t done anything Wrong, I’d double and triple checked everything the night before…
After a few minutes that felt like forever, another TSA officer, a big, dark-skinned woman with her hair tied back in a ponytail, came to my rescue. She unzipped my backpack, lifted out the paper bag containing my mother’s zucchini bread, and gingerly opened the bag as though it was going to explode.
It was so dense that it has showed up as suspicious looking on the scan.
“Bread,” she said, flatly.
I nodded again, tried to smile. I probably failed.
She returned the zucchini bread to the backpack, zipped the backpack shut, handed it to me, and turned away.
Shaking a little, I carried my stuff to a bench somewhere as far away as possible and put my shoes back on.
What I eventually came to think of as “that f***ing zucchini bread” is the reason they stopped me at every TSA checkpoint from America to Germany. It arrived at my cousin’s apartment a little squashed, the paper bag rumpled. We shared it with her roommates, all of whom liked the story just as much as they liked the cake.
It was early in the morning, and still dark out. I’d taken the compost out to the pile in the back yard, and my boots were wet from the dew in the grass. My dad joked that the compost bin was going to be full to bursting when I got home.
I’d also stopped at Jewel’s grave and said a goodbye and an I love you.
I piled into the back of my dad’s bright red midlife-crisis SUV, with my backpack balanced on the seat beside me. Everything I was taking with me was inside that backpack. No way in hell was I letting it out of my sight for that entire journey.
My parents sat in the front seat. Dad was driving. The sky was getting lighter as we took the expressway north into the city. My stomach was fluttering and my hands shook a little. I was knitting. Tying off the last row of something large and blue that covered my lap, something that had started out as a sweater but hadn’t ended up as one. I hadn’t touched the thing in ages, but the night before I had realized I was ready. I had started it at around the same time that I had decided I wanted to go to Germany, and now, through a strange combination of events, I was going. It was time.
We stood at that gate for a long time, my mom and my dad and I. Three of us in a group hug, and we none of us was about to let go.
As we pulled away, my dad remembered something important. He pulled out his phone, opened his compass app, and turned to face the east. Then he grabbed my hand and centered himself for a moment.
We’re not a religious family, but my parents are both spiritual people. My mother, for example, focused her energy on creating a bubble of white light around the plane for the whole time it was in the air, and I know she was doing that without having to ask.
My dad only calls in the Grandfathers at times when he believes we need them, and this was one of those times.
He turns to face each of the directions in turn, and summons them. It’s a simple prayer, with a different meaning and imagery and kind of support associated with each direction.
“Grandfathers of the east, the direction of new beginnings…” he began, and he asked them to be with me and support me on my journey.
I will never remember all of the words.
“…the animal of this direction of the song sparrow, singing in the new day,” he concluded, and his voice broke just a little. We both started to cry. And then we faced the south, and asked for strength. The west for intelligence. The north for wisdom. And so on.
Until it was over, and it was time. I pulled away because if I didn’t do it then I wasn’t going to be able to. And I made it through security. There was almost no line.
I waved goodbye to them, through the glass. I was crying. They were crying. You are crying. We are all crying. And that was okay.
My parents have a vague idea of what country I’m in, most of the time.
The story that I tell people is that I was studying for a while and then I got tired and needed a break, so I ran away from home.
I’m traveling solo around Europe, taking buses and trains from hostel to hostel, staying with strangers, living out of a single backpack, learning how to order coffee in languages I don’t understand.
Right now, I’m in Poland. About a week ago, I wasn’t. About a week ago, I had no idea that I would be going to Poland. About a week from now, I probably won’t be in Poland. But I’m not entirely sure.
I don’t have a plan. I can wake up in the morning and decide where I want to go, what I want to do, how I want to get there. I don’t have to answer to anyone.* And for the first time in a long time, I’m feeling something very close to free.
*Except for my little sister, who wants me back home by Thanksgiving.
I like being able to make mistakes with nobody watching. Which makes it hard when a stranger yells at me in German for biking on the wrong side of the street, or in Polish for walking in the wrong grass in courtyard of a castle, or in Czech for looking at my phone and not watching where I’m going and almost bumping into them. But it’s just a lesson, even if it stings just a little, and I learn.
Traveling is an education in how to operate in this world. How to wash your dishes after cooking, and clean up the kitchen for the next person. What to do if you get on the wrong train. How to ask for help from strangers. How to cope when you get lost in a strange place when your phone is dead and the street signs are written in somebody else’s language and you are completely by yourself. How to worry a little for other people, when you’re sleeping in a room with eight or ten bunks and it’s 8AM and you’re the first one up and the floor creaks like something else, but your mouth feels like something died in there are you desperately want a toothbrush and a toilet and a sink.
Self care becomes a necessity, not an option. For me.
Like, look. You’ve got to sleep, because you’re going to need the energy for tomorrow. You need to eat good food, or your belly will be uncomfortable. You need that fuel so you can walk, so you can think. Same goes for water.
This is why, every time I land somewhere new, I immediately hit up a grocery store. I didn’t plan on this. It was a rhythm I fell into without thinking. It’s like a game, learning to navigate a new currency and a new language, where the end goal is a bar of chocolate and some onions/peppers/mushrooms/something that is hopefully butter, it looks like it’s probably butter, we’re going with that.
The basics. Where are you going to sleep for the next three nights? How are you getting there? Where does the bus leave from? Where is the free WiFi so that you can find out/make sure of all those things?
I’ve memorized my credit card number, my social, my passport ID.
You learn how to trust people, and how to be careful. Triple checking that you’ve got your passport and your debit card and your keys and charger and phone, on you person or somewhere safe. But at some point, you leave your backpack somewhere unattended in a dorm for a couple of minutes and you just sort of pray that no one will steal anything on the inside of it, and you know they won’t because it’s just clothes and deodorant and shampoo and a toothbrush and the tulips you bought for your mother in Holland anyway, and they all brought their own and are all secretly hoping the same thing about their own stuff.
When you are carrying everything you need with you in a backpack, you very quickly learn exactly what you actually need. And over time, the things you don’t need phase out to make room for the things you do need, but didn’t realize you were going to, when you start to wish you had them.
I don’t need more than like two pairs of pants, but a pair of flip flops for questionable bathroom floors at some of the hostels would be lovely.
It isn’t all about the sightseeing, or where I go, or even the history and culture that surrounds me, even though those things are educational and awe inspiring in their own rite. For me, I think I am traveling alone because of what this lifestyle does for me on a personal level. There’s something new and challenging and frustrating and scary and sad and beautiful around every corner. It’s pushing me outside my comfort zone, requiring me to grow, and I am constantly seeking out the things that do that for me.
