Chapter 18: Mike and Elizaveta’s Excellent Adventure, Part XI

July 6, 1985, Vienna, Austria

We’d arrived in Vienna early Friday evening, and found our hostel near the Westbahnhof station. After checking in and exchanging traveler’s checks for Austrian schillings, we’d had dinner, then wandered around the city near the hostel, finding an ice cream shop where we all bought cones to eat while we walked. We had turned in late, and, rising early on Saturday morning, I’d called my sister. After breakfast, with the others, we took a U-Bahn train headed towards the center of the city where we boarded the Ring Tram at Schwedenplatz for a ride around Vienna.

The ride around Vienna was a nice, quick tour which let us see many of the important sights - the State Opera building, the Parliament building, City Hall, the Burgtheater, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Audio commentary in English from a guide provided the names and importance of the buildings. Thirty minutes after we’d departed, we were back at Schwedenplatz, and after we got off the tram, we walked to the Spanish Riding School.

We were disappointed to discover that during July and August, the famous Lipizzaner stallions were taken to Summer stables, so we wouldn’t be able to see them. We did take the guided tour, but it just wasn’t the same as seeing the horses. When the tour ended, we walked to Saint Stephen’s Cathedral, where Mozart had been married, and his funeral mass had been held. We enjoyed the tour, which included climbing about 350 steps to the top of the South Tower for a wonderful view of the surrounding parts of Vienna.

After the tour, we had lunch at zum schwarze Kameel, which was a five-minute walk from the cathedral. We each ordered something traditional, which for me meant an open-face roast beef sandwich with artichoke hearts on dark bread, and an open-face turkey breast sandwich with zucchini slices on dark bread for Elizaveta. For dessert, we each had what the menu called a ‘fairy cake’, with each of us selecting a different flavor and sharing bites.

After lunch, we made our way to the Hofburg, the Imperial Palace of the Habsburg dynasty, which had ruled Austria until the end of World War I. We had to wait a bit for the tour to start, because it was only conducted once per day. When our English-speaking guide arrived, he took us through the Sisi Museum and the residential apartments and staterooms which had been used by the last Emperor, Franz Joseph I, and his wife, Empress Elisabeth. The buildings were impressive, as was the Emperor’s Crown of the Holy Roman Empire.

“Holy Roman Empire,” I chuckled when our tour ended. “Three lies for one! It wasn’t holy; it was German, not Roman; and it wasn’t so much an empire as a collection of squabbling kingdoms, duchies, principalities, and city-states. Not to mention that during the first half of this alleged ‘Roman’ empire’s existence, the REAL Roman Empire actually still existed!”

“Nice,” Abby laughed.

“And as for Franz Joseph,” I continued, “his no-account nephew was assassinated by a no-account Bosnian Serb in what had to be the world’s worst luck ever. And what amounted to a slapstick event.”

“How so?” Clarissa asked.

“According to Mr. Black, Gavrilo Princip, a self-described Yugoslav nationalist who wanted independence from Austria-Hungary, conspired with five others to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Duchess Sophie, in Sarajevo. Basically, they lined up along the route, with each one supposed to kill the Archduke as he passed by, serving as a series of backups.

The first guy lost his nerve and didn’t do anything. The second guy tossed a hand grenade at the car, but the driver hit the gas, so the grenade missed. It had a delayed fuse, so it didn’t go off for several seconds, meaning the Archduke escaped. The other four, including Princip, lost their nerve and fled. The guy who had thrown the grenade tried to commit suicide by swallowing cyanide and throwing himself in the river, but the cyanide capsule was defective somehow, so he only got sick, and the river was only four inches deep at that point.”

“Seriously?” Clarissa asked, laughing. “Wow.”

“Yeah. Anyway, the police arrested the grenade-throwing guy, but the others had fled because there were too many people around and the car was driving away at high speed. A bit later, the Archduke found out that some of his escorts had been hurt by the grenade, as had some bystanders, so he decided to go visit them in the hospital. The route to the hospital was communicated incorrectly, and the car ended up traveling along the same road where the assassination attempt had been made. When the driver discovered his error, he turned down a side street where Princip happened to be standing.

“Princip was surprised, but drew his gun. The driver saw him and tried to reverse, but stalled the engine and locked up the gears. That let Princip come up to the car and fire at the Archduke and his wife from point-blank range. The Archduke was shot in the throat and his wife in her abdomen. They died soon after. Mr. Black said the moral of the story is that all it takes is one wrong turn to start a war!”

“Is that really true?” a young woman who had been on the tour asked from behind me.

I turned and nodded, “Yes, it is. One of my teachers in High School told us the story and I checked it in a history book. And to complete the story, Princip was jailed, not executed, because he hadn’t turned twenty at the time. He was a month too young.”

“Wow!” she exclaimed. “Where are you from?”

“Southern Ohio. You?”

“Arizona. I’m Carolyn.”

“I’m Mike,” I said. “This is my wife Elizaveta, and these are our friends Clarissa, Abby, Sandy, and Pete.”

“I’m here with my parents and grandparents.”

Everyone exchanged greetings and after another minute of small talk, my friends and I left the Hofburg buildings to walk the Volksgarten, where we saw a replica of the Temple of Hephaestus, which we’d seen when walking in the Agora in Athens, along with two gorgeous fountains - the Triton and Nymph Fountain and the Volksgarten Fountain. From there, we headed to our last stop of the day, the Schönbrunn Palace where we walked the impressive gardens and admired the building from the outside.

After the Schönbrunn Palace, we took the subway back towards the Danube, changing trains at Schwedenplatz to have dinner at a tavern on Donauinsel, a long, narrow island in the Danube. After dinner, we headed to the Wiener Riesenrad - the Vienna Ferris wheel. We had to wait in line for some time, but eventually boarded one of the fifteen gondola cars for our ten-minute ride.

“Waiting over an hour for a ten-minute ride reminds me of Disneyland!” Elizaveta said,.

“Or King’s Island,” I replied. “I remember when they installed The Beast - the wait could be over two hours!”

“Shall we head to Kaffee Alt Wien for dessert?” Sandy asked.

“Got your chocolate craving again?” I asked.

“That little cake at lunch just whetted my appetite!” she exclaimed gleefully.

We made our way to the ‘coffee shop’, which was NOT a «coffeeshop» like in Amsterdam. The thirty-minute walk made sure we were all ready for a large dessert. Elizaveta and I both ordered «Apfelstrudel» and the others selected different pastries, though Sandy ordered a chocolate concoction that would probably have sent a normal person into diabetic shock. The waiter brought our desserts and coffee, as well as glasses of cold water, which was a rarity in Europe. We’d had to ask for water at nearly every place we’d been.

We enjoyed the live piano music, and hung out for nearly ninety minutes before heading back to the hostel.

July 7, 1985, Vienna, Austria

On Sunday morning, after breakfast, we headed to the main train station to board a bus for a tour to the Wachau, a valley along the Danube. From the bus, we saw quite a few medieval castles and a number of Catholic monasteries in the breathtaking landscape that surrounded the Danube. The day’s trip was a modest concession to Sandy who preferred riding to walking, though it was no great sacrifice for the rest of us.

We passed through the village of Krems then stopped at the ruins of Dürnstein Castle, where Richard the Lionheart had once been imprisoned, and which had been almost entirely destroyed in 1645 by the Swedes, who razed it during the Thirty Years’ War. From there, our bus eventually took us to Spitz, where we boarded a boat for a trip on the Danube to Melk. We had lunch in Melk, then toured the Melk Abbey, a Benedictine monastery, which had been damaged in a fire in 1978. Reconstruction efforts were underway, which kept us from seeing everything, but we did get to see quite a bit of the building which had been built in the early 18th century. After the fairly brief tour of the Abbey, we boarded a waiting bus which took us back to Vienna, retracing our route along the Danube.

By agreement, the couples split up for the evening, and Elizaveta and I had a romantic dinner at a restaurant by the Danube, dessert at Kaffee Alt Wien, and then headed back to the hostel where we quickly got into bed.

“Could we have crammed anything more into two days?” Elizaveta asked.

“Well, if the horses had been here, we’d have seen the show last night!”

“That was a total bummer! But there’s really nothing we could do about it because of our itinerary.”

“And I didn’t really check into anything - I just picked the cities and basically drew a circle, then changed it to add Athens, remove Berlin, and make Brussels just a few hours. And other than booking the hostels and a couple of the tours we needed to book in advance, I didn’t do any research.”

“It’s OK, Mike! We’ve done so many other things. I wasn’t complaining. And nobody else complained, either!”

“As long as you aren’t upset.”

“No, of course not! We’ll just add it to our list of things to do on a future trip!”

“We’ll do more research,” I replied. “And we’ll probably be able to stay in nice hotels.”

“The hotel in Paris was awesome, but the hostels have been fine, really. Well, minus having to share.”

“And the kids?”

“I don’t know; maybe a suite?”

“Because THAT won’t cost an arm and a leg! We’ll worry about it when I can actually take a vacation.”

“Know what I want now?”

“I think I can guess,” I chuckled.

“Show me?”

“With pleasure!”

July 9, 1985, Munich, Germany

We’d arrived in Munich in the middle of the afternoon on Monday, and done a brief walking tour and exchanged traveler’s checks for D-marks, before having dinner and then finding a club where we could dance. We’d gone to bed late, but as our tour bus didn’t leave until 9:30am Tuesday morning, we still got plenty of sleep. When we woke on Tuesday morning, we had breakfast at a café not far from our hostel, then walked to the departure point for our bus tour to Dachau, which was near the English Gardens.

The bus stopped outside the main gates to Dachau and we exited, along with about forty-five other people. I’d thought about skipping the guided tour and simply using the guidebook, but after I’d spoken with Elizaveta, we agreed to go with what the others wanted. I knew we could ditch the tour at any point we chose, so long as we were on the bus back to town.

As we crossed the street, I crossed myself, as I felt I was entering a place of pure evil - a little bit of hell which had leaked into the world. The spirits of the 30,000 people who had perished here at the hands of one of the most evil regimes to ever debase the planet cried out in anguish.

As the tour began, we saw many purpose-built memorials, which the guide expounded upon. To me, those memorials were empty, and the true symbolism was found in the remaining original buildings and the ovens used as crematoria. I offered a silent prayer in front of one of the crematoria for all of those souls, asking God to have mercy, and to help them find peace. As faithful as I was, I harbored doubts that there was any possible way those souls could be at peace, and had to trust in God’s infinite power and infinite grace.

“Do you sense demons here, Mike?” Elizaveta asked quietly.

I nodded, “I do. I was thinking as we walked across the street we were walking into a part of hell which had leaked into the world.”

“How could people do this?”

I shrugged, “I have no idea. We have to do whatever we can to make sure it never happens again.”

“You really think it could?”

“I think the capacity of man to do evil is nearly infinite. Fortunately, God’s love IS infinite. Unfortunately, human beings are free moral agents, which allows evil to express itself unchecked by God.”

“Why does God allow it to happen?”

“Remember what we talked about with regard to Angie?”

“About innocence, right?”

“Yes. The world is the way it is because that is what is necessary to perfect our souls and achieve true salvation, where we freely choose to do good and to love God. Beyond that, I can’t explain it.”

“You can’t explain it,” Abby said from behind me, “because there is no god; the Nazis were simply major assholes.”

I turned, “In High School, we read Night and The Trial of God, both by Elie Wiesel, who survived Auschwitz and later Buchenwald. In The Trial of God, Wiesel tells the story of three minstrels, who stand in for rabbis, who put God on trial. The theme is somewhat similar to the Book of Job in the Old Testament, and the setting seems to be during the pogroms in Eastern Europe during the 17th century. That said, Wiesel wrote that he witnessed such a trial when in the concentration camps, so it can obviously be applied to Nazi Germany.

“The trial lasts several nights, and they listen to witnesses, evidence is presented, and there is a debate, after which they came to a unanimous verdict - that God was guilty of what we’d call ‘crimes against humanity’. They sat in silence for a long time after the verdict, then one of the rabbis looked upwards and said ‘It is time for evening prayers’, after which they conducted the Maariv, the evening prayer service, which we have in modified form as Vespers.”

“I think that sort of proves my point, doesn’t it?” Abby asked.

“What? That bad things happen to good people? That’s been a question from the very beginning! The entire Book of Job is about just that - Job’s friends insist that he must have committed some secret sin to be punished, while Job insists he is righteous. Similar to the rabbis Wiesel describes, Job says ‘Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him’. Fundamentally, that’s my attitude as well.

“I tend strongly towards what Irenaeus of Lyon taught, in that we live in the best of all possible worlds when one takes into account the fact that in order to know and do the good, a real choice between good and evil must exist. If we don’t have that real choice, if we’re not free moral agents, then the question of theodicy is moot because God has become what Thomas Jefferson feared - an evil monster, unworthy of worship.”

“But wouldn’t a God who is perfectly good step in to prevent evil?”

“What evils?” I asked. “Hurricanes? Earthquakes? Genocides? What about the abusive parent? Or you stubbing your toe?”

“Oh, come on!” she protested.

“He actually has a point,” Clarissa said quietly. “If you eliminate the worst evils, then what remains will still have a ‘worst’, and that will be the thing which evil is measured against, because you don’t know any other. Let’s say we get rid of the Nazis from history, we still have war, famine, pestilence, and death. Suffering and death caused by cancer or hurricanes or whatever is still suffering and death.”

“Exactly,” I said. “You could, in a sense, argue that all the bad stuff that happens is necessary. That, in the end, the world is how it needs to be to perfect our souls and achieve true salvation, where we freely choose to do good and to love God. That is what I strive to do and it is the Orthodox way.

“Think of it as being a parent and allowing your children to explore and experiment. You guide them and protect them, but it’s still possible for them to be injured or even die. As a nurse, you have to know that no matter how hard you try, there is one thing you can’t prevent, and that’s death.”

“God could prevent it!”

“We need to catch up to our guide,” I said, as the group was moving further away from us.

We started walking after the group.

“In my parish growing up, there was a toddler named Elias,” I continued. “During Holy Week, when the censer is left in the nave at times, he was very curious, and kept wanting to touch it. His mom stopped him a number of times. Eventually, she was engrossed in prayer and he scooted to the censer and put his finger inside, touching the hot coals.”

“What’s your point?”

“That in that toddler is a picture of how human beings behave.”

“What happened?”

I chuckled, “He burned his finger! But his reaction was interesting. Rather than scream or cry, he stuck his finger in his mouth and went back to stand by his mom. She only found out when I went over to her and let her know, because I was concerned he might have been badly burned.”

“Why didn’t YOU stop him?”

“I was across the nave and he moved fast! But you know what? He never did that again!”

“Mike has a point,” Pete said. “I remember touching the stove that way after my parents kept telling me not to. Never did it again!”

“I’m still missing the point?” Abby said.

“Life is a learning experience,” I replied. “One which perfects our souls and helps us achieve true salvation. Sometimes learning involves pain.”

“How is Angie’s illness helping HER achieve salvation?” Abby asked derisively.

“I don’t know, and I’ll probably never know. But what I do know is that it is helping ME become a better Christian.”

“So she suffers so you can be saved?”

“I think I might have heard a story like that somewhere before,” I replied with a grin.

The others except Abby laughed, and we caught up with our guide, ending the theological conversation out of necessity.

When the tour finished, we boarded the bus for the return trip to the city, then took the U-Bahn to the Munich Olympic Park where we went up the Olympiaturm. We had lunch in the revolving restaurant, then walked around the Olympic stadium, going past Father Timofej’s Chapel, a Russian Orthodox chapel which had been built, without a permit, by two Russians, Timofej and Natasha in 1951.

We then walked back across the park to the former Olympic Village, and located Connollystraße 31, where the ‘Munich Massacre’ had occurred during the 1972 Olympics. I said another brief prayer, and then we walked back towards the U-Bahn station.

“Asshole day today?” Abby asked.

I shrugged, “After we visited Anne Frank’s house, I felt compelled to do these two things today. Would you prefer the world forgot and allowed them to happen again?”