To. Forgive. divine

DB Sweeny is terrified.  He is going to die.  They’re all going to die. His hand twitches  as he plots his B 25’s   course over the  North Sea with a red crayon.  He glances out the window.

“That’s the third Reich we’re flying over,” He says ruefully.

Memphis Belle.   World war two melodrama about young flyboys bombing Hitler’s empire.

The cartoon representing  our Airbus 330  has just  entered European  airspace. Somewhere below, the good people of Leiden are buying herring along  the canals,  sipping  coffee, bracing for another day’s onslaught  of euro socialism and legal hashish.

Lufthansa a has done a fine job spiriting us across the  Atlantic.  Some unseen hand drew all the Business Class shades in the middle of the might, letting us sleep an extra hour or so.   Dankeshein  They are an efficient people.  They could have won WWII if they had set less exulted goals than conquering the world and exterminating its Jews. They should have settled on annexing the Sudetenland and  sending  Golda Meir hate mail.

As a child, I remember my dad forbidding us from flying to Germany on Lufthansa. “You know,” He’d say in a tone that forbade contradiction or discussion,   “ the Lufthansa  pilots   flew for the Luftwaffe, during World War Two.”

         That may have been true in 1968, when the  average ex Luftwaffe pilot was probably  married and  raising teenagers.  The average   WW II  Luftwaffe  Pilot  would be  90  this year, so I feel a little less guilt.

Point made. I am appalling old.

         As the continent scrolls by beneath,  I start performing  the ominous math.  I was born 14 years after D Day.  Fourteen years ago I was… well, I was sitting in the same office I now occupy.

         It gets worse, much worse.  I was born in a country with 49 States. When I was born, the last Civil war veteran was still alive. He was 113, true, but alive.

How did I get so  old?
         The answer is easy: I didn’t die.

         On some level, this trip to Munich, with connections to Croatia , is taking me back to my roots.  More specifically, it’s taking me to the source of my stem cells.

         Dankeshein, Deuchland.

          I imagine trying to explain to a German civilian from the 1940s  exactly what I needed from him.

         “I know we are at war, and I know your leader has some misgivings about , you know, Jews, but  it turns out we have identical bone marrow. Would you be a dear and donate a pint of your stem cells to me? Otherwise, I die. “

Which part of this request would he find the most absurd?  That he shared  a bone marrow with an American  Jewish  stranger? Or would he want to know about a procedure that kills leukemia though a technique called “ Graft Versus Host Syndrome?”  In the end, I’m sure I’d tell him it was magic.

         We land in  Dubrovnik, Croatia, to start our bike trip.   Croatia is a lovely country,  evocative of  the Northern California coast with citrus trees, high mountains, and a long, attractive coastline.  An occasional soviet era  building  appears, hinting at an ominous  communist past.

         Dubrovnik is a medieval, walled city.   It’s evocative of Venice, not surprising when one realizes they were founded and built at the same time by the same people. Then you notice things

         You notice most of the  buildings in this  600 year old city have new roofs. The Yugoslavs tried to destroy the city in 1991.  You notice a pockmarked hotel, built by the communists and abandoned after the war because,  let’s face it, you  don’t rebuild  1985 era poured cement hotels.        

         Point made: War is eternal. One can wander past the Egyptian Obelisk along  the Thames in London and see  where the German bombs left pockmarks during World War I.

         The  1991 war was a prelude to the horrors of the  Bosnian conflict ten years later.  In that conflict, the Serbs decided to exterminate the Muslim Bosnians.  Slodidan Milosevic , the Serbian  ex- communist leader, was tried for war crimes and  eventually imprisoned. I asked our Croat  Bus driver about all this. “ Too bad he died so soon,” was his reply.

         The question lingers. How many years until the Serbians and Bosnians start swapping stem cells? Perhaps that time span, between extermination camp and  stem cell donation,  should become a unit of  time. It would represent a wonderful thing, the time it takes to forgive one’s tormentors.  

         I am old, I am old, I wear my modern, biking trousers rolled.  God my legs are thin.  Off for a week  biking across Croatia.