Kronach, Germany
We're off this morning bound for Germany to visit Angie in Kronach. No easy task, this journey involves two train changes before the final destination which is a small town in northern Bavaria.
We set our alarms for 3:00am, all three cell phones and a wake-up call, we were taking no chances. Up at the appointed time, showered, out the door and down to the lobby. We checked out and our cab driver arrived right on time and we were off to the train station, the same place we visited yesterday. But this time we approached the staion via the very wide and busy road of yesterday, though it was emply at this time of the morning. The cabbie unloaded us, and then we noticed that the big building in front of us was, by every appearance, deserted and abandoned. What??!!!!
Cautiously we entered the cavernous old building and looked around. Dark, not a light at all except way off to the left near the sign that says 'Police' in the Czech language. Above us the huge dome of the railway station, on our level a big hole in the floor, with a railing, that looks down onto the level below, and ahead of us are the start of the railway tracks. No doubt, the driver dropped us at the door that was used before the new underpass was built. So, its four in the morning, we can't go down, or back on the street, we're loaded with heavy bags on rollers, and out of options other than the tracks ahead of us. So out we go.
We set foot on platform one, unused now by the rusted look of the tracks, we know our train number and time but not our platform, and we can't get across the tracks anyway so we have to get down to the next level. Turn left or right on the platform? To the right nothing but darkness, to the left there is the promise of light. Left it is.
We walk, our footsteps echoing. Past a staircase whose grime and dirt would tell a thousand stories from the Communist era, walking on past a second staircase, then an elevator. Take a chance on a strange-looking elevator, from an unused platform, in Prague? Do we have a choice? Again, fortune favored the brave and Jan and I found ourselves on the main floor of the Prague railway station.
From there, find the train schedule board, watch for our train number and time to Nurnburg, and wait. Posted eventually, track number 16 and out we went, down the corridor, up the elevator at track 16, and we found our train. A moment of fright as we couldn't find our carriage number. Then I walked up and down the length of the train and found that it was put together with the carriages out of order and it was there after all, right behind the engine. We loaded up and found our seats, two window seats across from each other in a compartment of six seats. I loaded our bags up to the overhead racks, taking up all the available luggage space. Damn, the Mercedes with its huge luggage space was sure nice ... As the train rolled out into the morning darkness, it was Jan and I alone in our little compartment, closed off from the train car, very much like 'Murder on the Orient Express', early Agatha Christie, just let your imagination wander.
Just as the light dawned we rolled through the Prague suburbs, factory and row housing districts, dingy and dirty, none of the factories 'working' as far as I could tell. Smokestacks tall and still, bulky square buildings that were dark, no lights to show signs of life. We rolled onward, light in the sky now and the ground features visible, into the rolling hills of the countryside, then the wooded lands and thin forests. Clickety-clack, train sounds now unlike the welded high-speed tracks of the express trains. The conductor punches our tickets, he and us speaking languages the other doesn't understand, but our papers are in order so there are no problems to talk of anyway.
We roll on through the woods on my right, rivers and lakes on my left, and I remember the stories I have read of the war, and what the guide said yesterday. Through these woods the partisans and the Czech resistance moved against the Nazis, and the Russians, ambushing soldiers and blowing up trains. Just like this one. Perhaps right here, on this spot. Why not? It was a common occurance in those days. Then they would fade back into the forest, among the trees like those over there on the left, filtering quietly among them and away from the carnage that they had created below them. Following that, the retribution. Whole villages destroyed, the people shot and the buildings burned. Men and women and children. And still the resistance fought on, the spirit of the people united and magnified rather than broken by the harsh retaliation. It has always been like that, when will we ever learn. England in the blitz, German cities in the holocaust of carpet bombing by the Brits and Americans, Russia's scorched earth policy, Afganistan, Iraq, wherever, people overcome oppression by aggressors. My thoughts on this sleepy morning ride through a former Communist country. We pass through Plzen, the Czech Republic's second city, stopping briefly, then into the countryside again. We see a lot different look by rail than by road, here we see the old and the very old, the underbelly, the slums and the abandoned factories.
Later in the morning we pass into Germany. We sense it in the look of the countryside, there were no announcements. Much more of the land is cleared for farms, there are no 'smokestack factories' although there are assembly plants and warehouses and commercial facilities in or near the small towns, not the case in Czech. Perhaps it is just that the sun is out now, the sky a bright blue, but things seem brighter and more 'prosperous' here. On we roll, this is Bavaria, north of the Alps, north even of the foothills, flat-to-rolling farmland. Here what we see from the train is the same as from the roadways of the countryside, the B20 highways. This smooth and seamless transition across the German border begs the question 'Was it worth the price, all of the death and destruction?' The course of human history is set and the ambitions of the politicians, like the Nazis or George Bush, change things only temporarily. Then nature takes over, like the forest after a fire, and in a couple of generations the natural course is continued. Will we ever learn? No.
We approach Furth-im-Wald and stop at the station. The scene of the crime revisited briefly, we see the hotel we stayed at (the Hohenbogen, or Hoboken as we called it), the shop that the Mercedes visited, the Fellner pub across the tracks, everything remembered like a familiar haunt visited again years later. We roll on after a couple of minutes, the town now just dots on our camera's memory cards.
Nurnburg finally, five hours and ten minutes after leaving Prague. We have half an hour to find the new platform, get to it, and board a train that heads for a little town called Lichtenfels, north of here. The orderly German train station has excellent elevators, well displayed train schedules, and easy access to the platforms, and in no time we are aboard the regional train with our bags stowed, ready for the hour-and-a-half ride. As we roll out of Nurnburg, without the concern in my mind about handling the luggage and embarking the new train, I notice the cityscape as I did when we entered. But this time I see it differently. I see the buildings near the city center of the train station, where one end or the other, or perhaps the middle, is very old. Fourteenth, Fifteenth century, we recognize this construction and design now after many weeks in Europe. But the rest of the building is 'new', the design and materials dating from the 1950's. All around us now are the results of the carpet bombing by the Brits and the precision bombing by the Americans, this city as with ALL other German cities absolutely devastated in the later months of the war. From 1943 onward, a concerted effort to destroy the German cities and the manufactuing base of the Nazis. But people lived in those cities, and the thought was that their morale would be broken as well. But the civilian population never 'broke', they only died. By the hundreds of thousands, in the flames and the explosions and collapsing buildings. People, just like the ones in the train station today, perhaps their relatives, looking just like them, up in flames in the night. How can we do this to each other, the pilots and gunners who look just like me bombing the life from people just like that woman and her child over there. How?
On we rolled, northward, a regional train stopping at all the villages with the strange sounding names. One we are coming to now, Schwinefurt. It means 'Swine Ford' or a place where pigs crossed the river to market. In 1942 is was the largest German ball bearing factory, and the target for many a British and American bomber raid. The factory, and the town, were blasted to bits, of course. The end result on the war? None, as the Germans took the factory equiment underground, dispersed, safe from raids, and production was back to normal after a short hiatus. The people who lived there, and many of the bombers, each with a dozen men aboard, were dead. Not back to normal after a short hiatus. Skeletons of the bombers and their crews are still in these forests and fields, I'm sure, long buried now. The town is rebuilt, without the factory.
On we rolled and at Lichstenfels we had a half hour to transfer to our final train of the day, lots of time. Two stops later we got off at Kronach, our destination, to find Angie running toward us. Hugs later, the three of us grappled the luggage down to the car Angie brought and we were off to the hotel she booked for us within the old walled city of Kronach, Germany.
Into the hotel, checked in, to find our room is on the second floor. Ok, fine, where's the elevator? No elevator, this is a heritage building and they weren't allowed to put one in during the renovation. Oh. And, the second floor is not one floor up, its two. Ground, then one, then two. So Jan and Angie and I haul the bags up there (Damn!! That Mercedes sure had a good big storage area!) and finally we were moved in. Jan and I announced that after this much effort we were never leaving this hotel or this town.
Then off with Angie for lunch and some excellent German beer in a lovely traditional German restaurant, at a perfect sun-lit table. Much chatter and catching up, then Angie off to work and Jan and I off to the hotel to rest for a bit. We will meet Angie later tonight when her last fitness class is done, at 9:00pm.
Dinner tonight was a real treat, traditional Bavarian food. Angie talked with the inn-keeper, it was like a Bavarian pub, and between them they agreed what we should eat. The beer I had chosen was paired to the appropriate food, much like the pairing of food and wine in a French restaurant. Dinner was served, and it was a beauty. The three of us had a wonderful evening, Angie and Jan had a lot of time together in the Gym on the boat, and they know each other well. Many memories were shared.
Jan and I will tour the town and the castle in the morning, and meet Angie at 1:00 for the afternoon and evening. For now, Jan and I are down for the evening in a beautiful four-poster bed that has been draped with lace. In the old style. Sweet dreams after a long day.
