One morning early this year, Tom awoke and said, “Let’s go to Europe!” I had pretty much given up the idea of a trip to Europe, so this was a surprise, to put it mildly! Since Tom had never been overseas, I left it up to him to decide where he’d like to go. He chose a river tour that began in Amsterdam, cruised the Rhine, Mosel and Danube Rivers, and ended in Vienna, with the majority of the trip passing through Germany.
We had a glorious 16-day trip, stopping every day to tour a different town or city. Quite honestly, I had never had a big yearning to go to Germany. I’m probably 50% German, but I had long condemned the German people for their acquiescence to Hitler’s Holocaust. This trip was a healing one for me. Most of the Germans we met and talked with were of one mind. They uniformly stated that the era of the Third Reich was their darkest hour in history, and they all agreed that the German people must look at that period and expose it to the world community, and never let it happen again.
Acknowledging that the citizens of the United States (that includes me) had allowed our country to invade the sovereign nation of Iraq, with the resulting deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens, I knew that we are no better than the Germans. Thus, our German tour became for me a time of forgiveness, both of the Germans and of my fellow countrymen.
No comments:
Post a Comment