1: Vienna

"Ziegfried had pleasant memories of his apartment as well as of school.  When he was not very old, the ferris wheel in Prater Park (an amusement park) was opened. “I would walk there with my friends and we would have a great time,” he remembers. On occasion, the Kanfer family would take a train to the mountains and stay at a farm. Ziegfried has some more good memories of all his family and a few good school experiences, but, as I said, only up until he was twelve years old. Then his education was cut short. On November  8th ,  1938, when Ziegfried was almost 13, something terrible happened that affected the rest of his life.  Something bad called Krystallnacht when German armies came and burned the torahs, shattered the windows of temples, and did very horrible things.   During Krystallnacht, Ziegfried’s neighbor, Pashinski, had to hide him under a table, risking his own life for a good friend because the army was close by, and all the Jews were afraid they would be arrested. Luckily, it didn’t happen that night.  But over time, more and more bad things happened. Instead of what the Jews had hoped for, which was for things to get better and better, things got worse; they knew their hope was only in their dreams.  Jews were very scared that they would be obliterated. That effectively started the next chapter of Ziegfried’s life because his non-segregated Jewish high school in Vienna had now closed,as well as his father’s business."

First stop in Vienna, while in Europe already for a family vacation, was finding 2 Odeongasse, the apartment my grandfather had spent the best years of his childhood coming home to every afternoon, and leaving for school from every morning. With full stomachs from a breakfast cafe we'd eaten chocolate croissants at that morning, and directions to the Prater ferris wheel from our server there (which we'd somehow managed to get with my dad's broken German), my dad, mom, brother, and I headed toward our destination. With some help from passing strangers, we were eventually directed in the way of Grandpa's apartment building.

Not only excited about finding the location, but about catching a glimpse of the big memorial plaque which looked to be relating to commemorating the Jews who had lived there, you can imagine our disappointment when we saw it was instead for a composer who was from the general area and died in the 1940s. Only after the initial letdown came the discovery of a small plate drilled into the wall on 2 Odeongasse memorializing "272 Jewish women and children who have been deported from the Odeongasse, only 13 of them having survived." It was nice to see attention to such a fateful event, especially in my family's history, but my attitude, and certainly my brother's (who was 7 at the time), was more reflective of a "We came, we saw, let's leave" feeling.

 Across the street from the building, though, in the complex where the tailor Pashinski had hidden Zigfried and his family during Krystallnacht, now stood an International Kindergarten and it's playground, filled with kids and parents running around during their recess. Grandpa had always believed that people could change, and based many of his life accomplishments on teaching the youth, because, like he would always say, "the youth is our future." I watched my father fall silent and my mother tear up at this seemingly insignificant finding to my 12-year-old self.

It's only now that I realize, while Grandpa would have been undoubtedly happy to see a plaque commemorating him and the people he was close with at 2 Odeongasse, the real memorial for these events was the more intangible joy and happiness so present now in the neighborhood which used to house, for Grandpa Fred, so much fear, hatred, and the corruption of innocence.

In the end, I feel that these intangible memories of experiencing Grandpa Fred's steps in a way that exterminates all these angry feelings from his childhood, are what the whole journey should be about. We weren't finding any tribute for Grandpa Fred, and chances are we weren't going to. The real reason we wanted--we had--to do this, was to learn about the Holocaust, of course, but also to feel at peace with these simple, symbolic occurrences which could mean nothing. Or could mean everything we wanted them to.