History's Hard Lessons

Like the prior post, this was written earlier, but can just now be sent.  There was rain in Budapest and Croatia that impacted the photos:

With my limited success with the internet, I  will reserve most details and photos for later and indulge in some philosophical musings. The lands of Eastern Europe that I am visiting  (Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, and Poland) have been sliced and diced, combined and torn apart, formed and dissolved countless times.  They are the conquered and the conquerers; the rulers and the ruled.  Belgrade, Serbia has been destroyed 40 times.  One of our lecturers on the Balkans compared them to a well cooked stew--only this stew  periodically boils over and the ingredients have not all blended after centuries.

The Romans, Huns,  Slavs, Thracians, Germanic tribes, Mongols, Tartars. Ottoman Turks all conquered and settled; religions divided some and united others; other nations claimed them as spoils of war, relocating  or eliminating some groups; and others redrew boundaries for their own purposes. Some hatreds and distrust run deep, yet they desire to be members of the European Union.  As I hear their differing stories,  I wonder: How do we remember and teach the needed lessons of the Holocaust, Communism, and the recent Balkan Wars, while passing on a heritage of healing and not hatred?

I have seen the memorial of shoes in Budapest along the Danube where Nazis shot Jews into the river; stood beneath the communist propaganda statues in Hungary’s Momento Park; visited Vukovar, Croatia were 90% of the town was destroyed by the Serbs; and seen the damage in Belgrad from the 1999 UN bombing.  Yet in each place, I have found friendly and kind people.  At a lunch in the home of a family in the Croatian village of  Aljmas, the young English speaking physics teacher who had had to flee her home in the war simply said, “You just have to learn to move on.”  The young people seem hopeful for their future.  Perhaps they will finally learn the lessons of yesterday.