Postcards: Austro-Hungary

Imagine you lived in a 600-year-old kingdom, Austria-Hungary, which ruled a vast swath of central Europe, its own world of high culture, literature, art, and music. And then one day at the end of the Great War, you awoke to see your grand imperial city, Vienna, reduced to the capital of a small, powerless state.

This is the story of Austria in the last century. It would have been a bitter moment that nourished the dreams of at least one Austrian, Adolf Hitler, to ally with another great people and reclaim past glory.

Located at a crossroads of Europe, Russia, and the Middle East, Vienna is now a UN center - where peoples of every culture come to debate, decide, mingle, and shop. Its brand-names and boulevards draw legions of Islamic women in an array of hijab from black veils and gloves to chic turbans, tunics, and leggings. Men in cargo shorts cross paths with ones in lederhosen. And everyone eats gelato.

The great Kunst Historisches Museum offers a sampling of the fabulous Hapsburg treasures in a sumptuous palace of Western art built only twenty years before their fall. The richness of the building almost overshadows the art, but Vermeer, Brueghel, Rubens and Rembrandt manage to hold their own.

I discover the 16C Italian Mannerist painter, Arcimboldo, whose work has a bit of a psychedelic quality. This is Flora. After she was impregnated by the wind god, Zephyr, the world burst into blossom. When you look closely at the portrait, you will see that she is composed of all flowers.

In contrast with the museum's baroque splendor, the city's modern aesthetic is simple and elegant, from her markets' pristine food arrays to our stylish small hotel, Holmann Beletage, where we feel like house guests of a witty host.

One evening, we enjoy a screening of The Third Man, set in post-WW2 Vienna.

From our Old Town base, our wanderings take us from the Danube canal through streets that all meet at St. Stephan's...

To Albertina Museum, featuring an exhibit on Antoniono's classic film, Blowup.

To more personal displays of street art...

To winding back lanes where I love to lose myself.

Then once again, we have a train to catch.

Next stop: Venice. http://dianarchambers.blogspot.com/2014/08/europe-by-train-9-venice-through-her.html

Merre va Margit Hid? Where is Margaret Bridge?

No offense, only affection for both: Prague is the cool, chic, with-it sister while Budapest is the wry intellectual in arty vintage clothing.

During our six-hour train ride to Budapest, we chatted with an Aussie couple bound for a Danube cruise and two young Scots sampling the local bar culture. Travel creates sudden intimacy and then you never see them again. Yet somehow they stick with you.

Located on the Pest side of the Danube, the Keleti railway station is vast and old, witness to the sweep of history, armies of many nations, peoples on the move.

The city wears her age with pride, her buildings gray and brown, in need of an update, but who cares?

Across the river, Buda is even older, dominated by Castle Hill, a citadel against the 13C Mongol hordes.

The most recent invaders were booted out twenty-five years ago and Russians come now only as tourists. "We don't like them," our Czech taxi driver had said. "They are arrogant." In Prague and Budapest, museums mark their Communist past, a source of mockery in both countries.

The Nazi regime is another story, still evoking shivers of fear and hate. We had come to Budapest to ask "Merre va Margit Bridge?" Where is Margaret Bridge? And "Merre va Deak Ferencz utca 21?"— a bridge and a street, landmarks of my family's life. My nieces’ grandmother, Annie, and younger sister, Vali, had lived with their widowed mother, Rose Gabor, at Deak Ferencz utca 21 in the center of Pest. Then in 1944, the first Jewish deportees were sent to Auschwitz—in freight trains that may have left from Keleti Station. The family was torn apart, forced to hide in three Christian homes on the Buda hillsides. On the day of their road not taken, a bitter reunion took place when they were arrested by Hungarian Arrow Cross fascists and marched toward Margit Bridge.

Rose, seeing a work unit walking along the river, pulled her girls into that line—in the blink of an eye changing their fates, and that of my family itself. Without her quick thinking, my two wonderful nieces would have never been born.

We stood on that bridge corner imagining those horrific days, the soldiers, the fear. Unable to return to their home, Rose turned to a Christian friend, Lily, who sheltered them through the war. Despite heavy bombing, the old stone building at Deak Ferencz utca 21 endured. Here is its courtyard.

Ann's mother ran her couture business below their central Pest apartment, its front balcony now overlooking a busy pedestrian mall.

The apartment is not far from the Parliament, with Margit Bridge in the distance.

Just south of the Parliament is the memorial to Jews shot into the Danube by fascist Arrow Cross militiamen.

It is like a punch in the gut to see the bronzed shoes lined up along the quay.

The cruel scene evoked in mute simplicity...the shoes old and worn, a child's beside his mother's...

Delicate button-ups and high-heels, workboots, all facing the river. The cold black water below...the silence...and then the bullets, and cries as family and friends fall into the river. Shot in the back.

This was late in the war when the railroads were busy, I was told later by a traveler on the Vienna-bound train. They were in a hurry. It was easy. Practical.

It is impossible to walk the streets of Europe without the visceral experience of history. The passage of time, regimes, lives, deaths. The statue or plaque of a famous person now unknown.

The ordinary street corner where a mother made a quick, life-changing decision.

Each building has a story to tell. Stories. Our Gerloczy Hotel was once a private residence. Who bathed in our blue claw foot tub? Whose photos are on the wall?