Life, breath by breath (May 2017)

Day 8 - Cusco, Peru
7:30 a.m. 

We booked it through the automatic doors — panting breaths serving a musical backdrop to our dramatic arrival at the Cusco airport.

Nathan and I skidded to a stop at the airline gate. 

“Checking in,” I said. The agent eyed my confirmation email. She adjusted her gaze, scrutinizing the two of us before jabbing her finger at the departures display.

Cusco to Lima. Takeoff: 8:30 a.m.

“It's 7.30 a.m. Sorry,” she said. Her tone suggested all but an apology. “The gate has closed.”

I should preface, I’ve got a portfolio of travel mishaps. 

I’ve been a day late for a flight. I’ve gotten on a train bound to the wrong city. But this, I swear, was neither my nor Nathan’s doing. We’d arrived at the airport an hour before the flight was scheduled to leave. The Cusco airport mandating presence a good 90 minutes pre-departure fell way beyond our purview. 

My mind kicked into full gear. Credit card out, we could just pay for another flight.

Smile, we could sweet talk our way through. 

Cancel all plans, we could stay in Cusco, forever.

“What do you suggest?” I said, Nathan interjecting, “Are you sure?” he asked the agent.

Her fingernails clinked ferociously onto her keyboard. A drumbeat of uncertainty.

“Ok,” she said.

Ok?

“We’ll make an exception—reservation number please.”

In the history of anticlimactic successes, this was it. It took Nathan simply asking again for our access to the gate to swap from a hard no to a simple, yes.

The adventure of getting to the airport had begun with an Uber that never showed, which led us to a stranger who guided us to his friend who shuffled us into a car that appeared around the bend to take us to the airport. We broke all the cardinal traveler safety rules to make it to our flight.

But we made it to the airport and onto our plane. I’ll credit it all to pure, sheer luck.

****

Days 1 - 8 

Nathan, one of my oldest and closest sleepaway camp friends, and I had talked up an international adventure for years. 

Our timing never aligned, until 2017.

The two of us spent a week canvassing the Cusco to Machu Picchu circuit (Lima > Cusco > Sacred Valley > Cusco > Sacred Valley > Ollantaytambo > Aguas Calientes > Machu Pichhu > Cusco > Lima) - recruiting friends at every stop.

There were “the Lindas”—the mother of two American guys we sat across from on the train from Cusco to Aguas Calientes, the town closest to Machu Picchu. Mom was named Linda, as were her two, new girlfriends on their group trip. 

There were Michelle and Garrit, another couple of friends we met while hiking Machu Picchu and then had dinner with our last night in Cusco. She was a model-singer-actress, he a tech developer in the midst of a nasty lawsuit with an ex-girlfriend.

And there was my 11-year-old comrade, whom I sat next to during the collectivo ride from the Ollantaytambo train stop back to Cusco at the tail end of Nathan’s and my week away.

Linda, her sons and us at the top of Montana Machu Picchu.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. Nathan and I curled up on the floor- and later the chairs- of the Lima airport while waiting for our early morning flight to Cusco.

Dinner in Cusco with Michelle and Garrit, another couple of friends we met on our hike up Machu Picchu's Montana.

****

Day 6 - Ollantaytambo to Cusco, Peru 
5 p.m. 

We were cramped.

Four passengers per row, an inch—if that—available by our feet for bags in our collectivo, or shared minivan.

I sat in the front, my 11-year-old new friend sandwiched between me and the driver.

Smushed in our collectivo headed back to Cusco.

He was a chipper boy, a youthful energy that blended a boyish dynamism with a tinge of shyness. We chatted about the struggles of learning a foreign language and the intricacies of who he was related to in the second row of the minivan we shared. 

In his broken English and my relatively non-existent Spanish, I understood that he had just closed out the three-day Inca trail hike, the quintessential trek between Cusco to Machu Picchu. He’d befriended tourists from Spain. Spain was now top of his travel bucket list.

The van hummed as it mazed through the winding roads linking Ollantaytambo to Cusco. I traced the mounds of earth clumped across the terrain. 

Veins ridged down the mountainscape, the indented grooves creating sharp color changes between kaki slopes and darkened shadowed in-betweens. The mountains towered over the villages we passed, the colors extraordinary against the piercing blue sky speckled by the cotton wisps of clouds hugging the mountaintops. 

The driver turned the knob on the radio, gentle Peruvian music filling the quiet interlude. My new friend’s head bopped against my arm. He’d fallen fast asleep.

****

Day 6 - Cusco, Peru 
7 p.m.

I pointed to the address for our evening’s Airbnb. 

“Seis soles,” the taxi driver said, eyeing the collectivo that had just dropped us off in Cusco’s central square.

Cusco's central plaza

“Cuatro soles,” I said firmly. Nathan said I’m good at negotiating.

“Seis,” the taxi driver responded resolutely.

Then again, perhaps not.

The movement of the city slowed as the taxi chugged away from the hub of Cusco’s tourist center and into the city’s residential pockets. It was our last night in Cusco before flying out to Lima the following morning.

In all, the car stopped three times.

Once as I scurried out for a photo with two alpacas and their three owners waiting for me, my camera and my donation.

The second time at what we thought was our Airbnb. I, trusting the driver to know best, gathered my belongings. Nathan, the savvier traveler among us, paused. This, he said, looked like a hostel, not the home the Airbnb owner had described. I left Nathan to figure it out, stepping out from the car to meander to the road’s edge for a view of Cusco below. The lights looked like feather dust, twinkling across the otherwise stillness of the city.

Beautiful Cusco, from the Airbnb... that we eventually made it to.

I inhaled deeply, feeling the air constrict at the top of my lungs. We were back in Cusco—back in the city where the week vacation had begun. Where the altitude sickness of our first few days had forced us to pause, to let go and give in to Pacha Mama’s plan for us.

There’s no predicting how Cusco’s altitude will impact you. For us, it drained us of all energy, leaving us out of breath merely walking down the cobbled stones from our hotel. 

The breath is a powerful force, as precious as it is innate. The breath centers, the breath fires and, at times, the breath mandates acceptance of life’s inevitable pauses. But it’s in those pauses do we step back, do we adjust our footing and renew our approach to life in the moment.

And the breath did acclimate over the week as we eased our way toward Machu Picchu and through our hikes up Montana and Huayna Picchu. I’d instituted a routine of setting daily intentions. The practice helped focus us on presence in the present, of appreciation for the slithers of goodness that came no matter where the breath would take us that day.

I could hear Nathan in the background thanking the hostel owner. The hostel, I gathered, was not our final destination. 

I tore myself from the view, settling back into the taxi as we continued onward, eventually stopping at a home. Our taxi driver watched us knock tentatively on the door. I breathed in. A breath of hope that this, indeed, would be the right destination. A breath of uncertainty: neither of us knew in that moment the scurry that would ensue the following morning in our haste to catch a flight that we would almost miss.

The lock clicked; a woman in an oversized flowery dress opened the door.

“Nathan and Emma?” she beamed. “You made it!”

The Pursuit of Liberation

Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh

October 8, 2015

Umbrellas dot the rows like colorful dimes, angled on slopes of stairwells spread across the River Ganges. Streaks of sunrise’s pastel sheen glaze over empty chairs set under the parasols. By mid-morning, hordes of pilgrims will crowd priests stationed along the river ghats. But for now, and from my view aboard this canoe, all remains calm as dawn breaks over Varanasi.

I lean back onto the boat’s edge, eyeing the banks in front. Young boys cluster in groups, dousing scrunched clothing into the water before slapping it dry onto the pavement. A man stands laughing in the center of a step, waving his hands vibrantly in half circular motions. He undulates with an energy that seems to meld into the stream as our boat drifts idly by. “Laughing yoga,” our tour leader motions. “He welcomes the rising sun.”

For Hindus, the River Ganges elevates every procession leading to life’s culmination. Cremation at the riverbanks is said to bring the soul to moksha, liberation from nature’s cycle of life and death. Yogic meditation finds home alongside devotees submerging in the holy water as a Hindu cleansing ritual. Dust sprinkles trash mounds spilling over the steps. Flickers of the cremation flames dance in the distance.

They say India will pick at your every grain of patience in a confrontation with elements otherwise separate from our Western daily view. Death is an honor and cremation a public ritual, bodily ashes seeping into the same stream Hindus view as a sacred bathing pool and universal laundromat. India blurs the Western divide of public and private in a mergence of the highest honors within each of our holy beings. And in doing so, we, the tourist, are left to grasp the differences in traditions that define our worlds—and the parallels in values we share simply in being human. 

****                          

Our group had left Orchha the night prior, bearing the discomfort of a 12-hour overnight train to Varanasi. We’d been warned of the rats that slept amid the bunks, the squat toilets that would undoubtedly reek and the unwarranted gaze Indian men oft plant on the white female traveler. Only one in our group awoke to a cockroach in her hair. The train’s security officer stared at me for a solid hour while Caitlan and I sat the early morning hours out on the stiffness of a 90-degree cardboard seat. 

Varanasi marked the last stop in our two-week circuit of northern India. The trip commenced in Delhi, followed by hours-long bus rides to Jaipur (India’s “pink city”), Agra (the mandatory Taj Majal visit), Tordi Sagar, Alipura, Orchha and finally, Varanasi.

In India, food and language and saris change for every 30 miles you travel. Our two weeks in the North merely scraped the surface of the medley of culture flavoring the veins of the country in its entirety.

India is home to the majestic memorials and historic mosques, the grandiose pilgrimages and sacrosanct Hindu rites. Curries dosed in spices submerge the senses, all amidst the backdrop of an unspoiled landscape touched so marginally by the norms of Western living. Goats nibble at lettuce leaves dangling from market stalls, hurried along by the hundreds moving in and out amid the cars and cows and rickshaws sharing the same strip. Our bus rides through India’s countryside passed men and women working in the fields, women’s saris rich with color as the material swayed so softly in the wind. I’d watch them finger the fabric, modestly drawing the loose hanging pallav to cover their mouths.

India’s ever-present honking is the pulsating nerve of the country’s soul: cars, trucks, rickshaws (and cows, if they could) jam the “blow horn” unremittingly. In every village and city, at every juncture of each unpaved road, “here I am,” the honk signals. Indeed, in a country of 1.2 billion people, here they are. 

India is a stark disparity of grand wealth surrounded by intense and widespread poverty. Children walk barefoot along streets caked with gravel, garbage and cow manure. Oddly, it did not strike me as out of the norm. This is simply their way of life.

Scenes from Delhi, Tordi Sagar and Alipura. Cows, viewed by Hindus as sacred, roam cities freely. During our stay, newspapers reported on a Hindu man who killed his Muslim neighbor for allegedly slaughtering a cow. The bottom picture shows child beggars asleep on the Jhansi train station floor.

****

Orchha, Madhya Pradesh

October 5, 2015

“Orchha,” our tour leader explained, navigating us briskly through the throngs spilling from the town's central square, “is the site of the famed Ram Raja temple. You will see thousands of pilgrims here from all across Northern India.” We trailed at his heel, maneuvering past block print sheets coloring designs onto the concrete floor. Children dozed on the blankets in oblivion to the cows meandering among the few open spaces. Our group paused as a magnificent thud prompted a stampede of men battling for entrance beyond the temple doors. From where stood, women conversed as if it were an ordinary day, unfazed by the palette of movement consuming Orchha's temple grounds.

Caitlan nudged me. A half curve of men had begun to form around us, peering as intently at our group as we were at the scene. We must have appeared to them what the pilgrimage site looked to us: extraordinarily different.

At first glance, the Indian existence seems so far removed from the daily of our American lives. Cows idle by village homes, the interiors largely barren save dangling wires hooked to a tube TV. We entered a potter’s courtyard in Alipura, captured by the swiftness at which he spun the clay mold into cups and vases. His wife crouched on their doorstep as she cooked over a portable mud stove. 

Female pilgrims in Orchha trekked without shoes, their posture upright as they hiked up their saris, balancing luggage on the surface of their heads. Our hotel in the village of Tordi Sagar brought in a young woman likely no more than 14 to apply the traditional henna to our arms and feet. She bore the red dye on her scalp: a Hindu symbol denoting a woman as married.

I found myself contemplating the similarities between my religious customs and those of the Hindu practice. Cows do not grace my synagogue’s aisles, yet, like the pilgrimage at Orchha, like the rituals at the banks of the River Ganges, our High Holy Days do draw out devotees en masse. Hindu, Jewish—Christian, Buddhist, are the basic intentions set by our various traditions not the same? 

I thought of the jitters the henna artist in Tordi Sagar may have felt on her wedding day, if she too had experienced the anxiety of life transitions. I reflected on my own personal challenges I had spent the months prior attempting to resolve. And through this rabbit hole of never-ending thoughts, I wondered just how different, really, is my reach for fulfillment from the experiences of those we came across in our two weeks in India?

Our worlds, at face value, resemble so little of each other’s. But when you strip aside the structures that define how we live, the core of our innate desires must frame around resounding similarities. The hope we seek as answers to life’s complexities; the sense of belonging so critical to the fulfillment we crave: this, I believe, is what we share as humans. 

Our cultures dictate the application of our pursuits. But no matter the form, our journeys to fulfillment, to liberation, find common ground in the human connections that bypass our cultural differences. The beauty in traveling enables a certain appreciation for how we—the universal we— come to the varied traditions that instill hope and honor life.

India has left me starkly aware that it is not the things we live with that grant the fulfillment we desire. But rather, it's through the depth of our relationships that we forge our own paths, uncovering the richness of life in this pursuit of liberation.

*******

We ate at this farmer's home in the rural village of Tordi Sagar. He's a father of 9, wraps his head turban in about 10 seconds, and cooks up a mean dhal and chapati. According to our tour guide, 75% of Indians live as this farmer does. The picture below captures men bathing in the River Ganges.

Berlin: A lofted bed in the studio we almost didn't get the key for

October 2-6, 2014
Berlin, Germany

Berlin's iconic Brandenburger Tor.

“There’s no key,” the shopkeeper grumbled, sifting through the plastic bin on the register counter. She sighed, heaving every lodged particle of air into a forceful stream that, if she could, would whisk me out of her line of sight and, preferably, I sensed, out of her boutique.

My AirBnB contact had specified this jewelry store, located just off Berlin's Alexanderplatz, to collect her studio key. She, the apartment owner, was out of the country and I, watching the exasperated associate, was stuck.

“No,” the shopkeeper repeated, half to me, half to the container. “She does this every time. As if we're charged with delivering her key to her guests." She stared me intently, willing me to understand the gravity of the situation. "But can I tell you?" The associate was my gatekeeper between homeless for the night and access to the studio apartment Mariene and I had reserved for the next four days. I sensed I’d do better keeping my mouth shut. “Antje doesn't work here anymore. She shouldn't have sent you."

My exhaustion might well have been a separate suitcase parked at the boutique storefront. I had left Kayli’s early that morning after a late evening at Oktoberfest the night prior. Thick fog veiled the S-bahn platform, a brisk chill piercing the early hours as I awaited a train to the Munich airport and onto Berlin. I frankly did not have the energy to argue over this key. All I knew was that I wanted it.

The associate punched numbers into the store phone, a stream of English and German exchanged sharply with who I assumed to be Antje. The vocal tone escalated before abruptly, however thankfully, simmering. She knelt under the register, lodging the phone between shoulder and ear as she pulled out a separate bin. The hidden key lay at the very top. We exchanged no words, but I offered a smile: universal symbol for thank you.

****

Yom Kippur fell on a Friday. It’s the Jewish Day of Atonement, obligating a 25-hour fast intended to harden focus to prayer: redemption from a year’s build up of any less than holy behavior.

Mariene had arrived that morning, Kayli the night prior-- all of us regrouping to attend services that evening. The synagogue required neither ticket nor donation to enter. A High Holy day ticket in the States could well be my grocery budget for the week.

Certainly, the experience might have resonated more deeply had we planned differently. But the services, the Siddur and the rabbi's sermon were in German, losing total understanding to the obvious language barrier. Instead, the nuances of Yom Kippur day took shape around our own self-guided walking tour of the city: through the Holocaust memorial, past the Brandenburger Tor, dipping briefly into an egalitarian service in Berlin's largest synagogue and walking in and around the nooks of Berlin's stunning residential areas.

If anything, 25-hours spent atoning for our sins reinforced just how much you can do on an empty stomach.

T: The East Side Gallery: the longest stretch of a preserved part of the Berlin Wall.

B: Berlin's Holocaust Memorial: The city disappears as you walk individually through the blocks. It's a full body and truly incredible experience. 

Where Munich’s Nazi history is ingrained in the fabric of the city's transformation, Berlin’s Cold War scars are far more raw than the atrocities of its Holocaust past. Plaques across Berlin's streets denote where the former Berlin Wall once stood; portions of the wall remain, with the longest stretch of the East Side Gallery adorned by artists worldwide.

Redefining a country takes time: time to build the history of new era, acknowledging the past's guilt in accepting the future's potential. Hitler had documented Berlin's architectural structure before storing stone sculptures into bunkers underground. The buildings destroyed in World War II are still being rebuilt, and the sculptures reinstated. They’re discolored from the buildings they’re attached to—some of the city’s few original artifacts representing, in their own right, the critical years they lay hidden away.

West Berlin reportedly has brighter lights; the street symbols differ from East to West, as does the coloring of the remaining architecture. But in our four days, I didn’t sense a stark divide. Cranes dot modern Berlin’s skyline. They're monuments onto their own: a powerful symbol of Germany's continuous motion to rebuild and redefine, to find its own redemption in letting go and embracing a fresh slate of the future ahead.


****

The metal bar felt jarringly cool under my toes, still warmed from the duvet moments prior to the shrill of my morning alarm. I gripped the ladder intently, maneuvering tentatively down from the lofted bed to the studio floor. It was neat in theory, a bed lodged over the kitchen. Still, the question beckoned: how’d you get down if, say, you broke your leg in the middle of the night?

The bed, in my own strange way, represented so much of the year lead up to my Germany trip. I’d spent the past 12-months navigating the unsettled motions life post-grad naturally throws. An August low had folded into a September high. I'd received the full time offer at a company I'd begun as a fellow, finally returned home to Florida after two years away, and had been given this: a week escape to travel abroad.

I loosened my iron grip on the ladder’s railing, pleased to see the ground floor firm beneath my frigid toes. My key ring rested on the kitchen ledge, securing the key that shopkeeper had so reluctantly handed over upon my arrival in Berlin. I reeled it off from its silver clasp, placing it back down onto the surface. It lay alone, an independent soul awaiting its rightful owner's return.

That boutique associate could have withheld the key. Our AirBnB contact could have missed her call. The studio door may never have opened. But as the great sages say (passed down by way of my wise acupuncturist), the stone that hits you could never have missed you. It all eventually works out as it should.

My blue shoes have tested the hoops of ladders leading to lofted beds, following through periods of growth, of doubt, and, at points, of unbelievable fulfillment. Life grants us tremendous opportunities. We're tasked with accepting when appropriate, redefining when applicable, and, as I gazed at the ridges of the key motionless on the kitchen counter, ultimately moving forward no matter the prospects in store.

T: Memorial representing the books, written by Jewish authors, that were burned by the Nazis.
B: East Side Gallery.

Munich: The Culture of Memory

September 27, 2014
New York City - JFK Airport

The carry-on’s clutch shook as he clenched the handle’s grip, impatience fueling frustration. “This line,” he muttered, a mopped shag twisting to the exasperated shake of his head. 

The man leaned over, surveying the curved JFK security line in front. Passengers and baggage snaked long ahead from where he stood, I watching from behind. The line mandated commitment. Commitment spiked with a generous pinch of patience.

In the security line of an international airport, worlds so easily collide despite check in signs for countries where cultures divide. But here in the queue itself, we’re all one and the same. A parade of ants trudging forward: the gift of speed handed over for the power of patience.

“Passport,” the gruffness of the officer’s tone connoted one of a man rooted in his seat far longer than the hour I’d stood waiting. The officer nodded sharply, maneuvering me robotically along the motions of the stringent U.S. airport process. My orange case-- the same that's followed my travels from Thailand onward-- slid through the mouth of the security reel.  I tugged the clutch upward and suitcase forward.

50 minutes left until takeoff.

**** 

September 28- October 2, 2014

Munich, Germany

Marienplatz, Munich's central plaza

It's always the trees, scattered like seeds across a cityscape that I notice first. And then the cars, how toy like they seem, moving but a hairline along weaved strips of roadway below. The minutiae of daily life among the history and culture embedded within a city plays no role in that initial observation. It’s a carte blanche of sorts as the plane submits to gravity, diving onto the smooth stretch of the Munich runway. 

My jet lag would cloak over by 8 p.m., hours after Kayli, one of my oldest camp friends, had picked me up at the airport. She guided us onto Munich’s S-bahn commuter train and on toward Feldafing, where Kayli lived with the family whom she au paired for.

By 9 p.m., we met up with Kayli’s friends at Oktoberfest, the ambience thick with the thrill of the festival’s miles long stretch of rides and tents, vomit-strewn floors, women in dirndls and men in lederhosens. 

There must have been thousands crowded inside the beer halls, bodies loose with energy as we joined in, stepping up onto a picnic tabletop. The live band energized the night, positioned in the center of the hall amid ribbons and frills adorning the interior from the top down.

I’d learn on a Munich walking tour that some 70,000 visitors flock to Oktoberfest over the course of the weeklong celebration. Picture it as the Mardi Gras of Germany’s south. The celebration feeds the culture of the city where-- be you a local or visitor-- the beer glass transcends country lines: international appreciation for the Bavarian national pastime.

The craze of an Oktoberfest beer hall.

**** 

"Germany?" my grandparents emailed back, a response charged with the familiar tone of those who grew up in the shadows of the Second World War. My grandfather lived in London, my grandmother evacuated to Wales. Their World War II stories are ones of sirens sounded and shelters sought during the German bombing blitz of the early 1940s. For my grandparents, Germany was a threat to their country, not just to the Jewish people. 

My grandfather visited Germany in 1952 as a student, returning with my grandmother in the 60s to explore, as they explain, "new Germany." Yet among the majority of Jewish grandparents, the reluctance to visit and resistance to purchase German goods remains strong. The history, after all, is personal, the scars lasting. It's our generation-- three generations since-- that is among the first to shake the reservation, removed enough so not to let Germany’s past bar us from exploring the country it’s progressed to today.

The pitter-patter of rain slows as the S-bahn approaches Stranburg, the serene stretch of a translucent lake coming into view. Contours of the dewy mountainous distance add only slight gradation to the gray-blue scheme. From here, we're about 40 minutes to Marienplatz, Munich’s main square bearing the city’s central landmarks.

My decision to visit Germany had not developed at random, as my travels never, however last minute planning, are. It was three years ago in Paris that I’d befriended Natalia and Sergej, two Germans who, despite not being Jewish, joined me my last evening in Paris for Shabbat at Chabad.

New Town Hall in Marienplatz

My Shabbats at the Champs Elysees Chabad shaped so much of the experience I took away from those six months in Paris. The people I met, the friends I made—you never know how parts of your life trickle through as the years unfold. I used to always take visitors I’d meet to Trocadero after Shabbat. It's Paris’s best view to watch the Eiffel Tower’s light show, on the hour every hour once the veil of night cloaks the city.

That last evening Natalia and Sergej gave me the company I'd offered so many others-- as we raced from Shabbat dinner to Trocadero, the two of them sitting through the blur of my tears as the flicker of the tower’s dancing bulbs twisted my torn heart. 

It seems so small in retrospect, but Natalia and Sergej’s selflessness served one of the early catalysts that would set me in motion to consider Germans today away from my preconceptions defined from a war seven decades ago.

Choosing to visit Germany challenged me to consider a world that has made steps toward accepting, with structure in place to never forget. No one asks us to forgive. But we can choose to push aside and enter proud—proud of the Jewish heritage that persists today decades since any plan to once rid it from existence.  

The lake at Stranburg. From here, it's about 40 minutes to Munich's city center.

****

I spent my first two days in Munich exploring the travel book’s recommendations: stifling the giggles as I assessed a scene of sunbathing nude elders at the Englischer Garten; delving into World War I history at the Jewish Museum; and paying respects to Olympia Stadion’s memorial to the Israeli athletes kidnapped and killed by Palestinian terrorists.

Day one, however, began as I love to start first days in any new city:

Simply, walking around.

****

When in Europe, fashion flare over utilitarian comfort holds. Until your back gives out, and your shoulders hurt and holes form under your shoes. And whatever notion of looking semi a-la-mode in white flats with gold tips so quickly dissipates in lieu of the tourist in sneakers appeal.

Our group’s footsteps slowed as we—a group of 23 on a three-hour walking tour— approached the alleyway. I peered down, trailing the scaled rings curved around a thick weave of golden stones. The beveled pavement felt smooth under the soles of my worn flats. 

Germans, our guide explained, would sneak down this very path in World War II's early days to avoid saluting the SS stop around the corner. But as SS officers caught wind of the cut through, they shifted their efforts to patrol of the passageway. Those with neither adequate reason to enter nor proof of identity were publicly beaten or shot.

“These golden steps here honor the courage of those Nazi resistors," our guide said. He was a husky man, his blue rugged jeans sagging clumsily over beaten sneakers. “Think of life under Nazi rule. Of the Germans with a family to support, children to raise, a life to protect," he urged. "Were you guilty if you didn’t resist the Nazis?"

My gaze traced the golden design, spokes of moss spotting ridges between stones.  I’m quick to consider the Jewish plight under Nazi rule. But how often do I remember those who risked their lives to protect others from threat? The culture of memory pervades the very essence of how we understand history, framing the heroes and villains within. But what-- or better yet, who-- defines the one who did wrong? Were you guilty if you didn’t defy Nazi oppression? 

It's hard to imagine Munich once patrolled by Nazi officers, of swastikas blazed onto blood red flags draping building exteriors. What did it mean to be guilty? And what relevance does it hold, seventy years later? 

There’s no simple answer, in the way the Holocaust is not a black and white story. Yet, no one asks us to forgive, and no one mandates that we answer. The scars of Germany’s past undoubtedly shape the framework of the country’s character, an ever reminder of the evil of man unto the framework of society. But the brutality of their Nazi history, the persecution of Jews before, and the country’s split following is not a story Germans shy away from.  And so we can choose to push aside-- to bear to witness the memory of the Holocaust's victims, and take a moment to consider the courage of those who resisted Nazi rule.

"Were you guilty?" our guide repeated, eyeing us carefully. "And if so, how guilty?" He sighed deeply, the breath compressing into his chest. 

My gaze swept along the curved design, the golden color contrasting beautifully against the rich purple of the paved walkway. It’s the golden lining of a lesson for us all—of our potential to meet valor and courage, bravery and perseverance in the face of cruelty and horror.  

I didn't come to an answer that morning, and haven't in the weeks since. For perhaps seventy years after a war that scarred and shaped Germany as it stands today, perhaps it's ok not to have an answer.

S-bahn stop at Feldafing, where Kayli lived and I stayed.
Photo taken in the early hours of the morning, as I took the train to the airport-- leaving Munich and en route to Berlin.