An Unusual Passover, an Unusual Easter (Holocaust, Part One)

Alright. So I’m leaving Germany today. It looks like I’m going to need more than one blog post to describe things. My post about Flanders didn’t really describe the magic of that trip because I had just gotten to Germany, and events took an immediate downturn upon entering the country that interrupted my ability to capture all of the fun I had there. Pity, since the post about the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo came off as something of a calamity, but compared to what would follow, it was just pure fun.

I still haven’t been to any countries on this trip that I haven’t been to before. However, I had only been to the UK once, when I was twelve, and at that time I only visited London. So going through the southern coast of Britain was a completely new experience for me. Likewise, in 1997, as I was about to finish my Army service in Germany, my dad came to visit, and he rented a car and we drove around Germany and some neighboring countries, including Belgium. However, we only spent a day in Brussels. I never saw the Flemish part of Belgium. So seeing Flanders was a completely new experience.

I concluded that the source of the bliss of that part of the trip came from being able to shed my past and go to a completely new place where I could form my opinions through a positive lens. This lead me to a whole realm of thinking about the value in leaving the past behind. However, in Germany, I was mired constantly in the past, and bogged down with unpleasant details of the present.

I left Germany in 2000 thinking of it as a country that really hated the scriptures to which I have devoted my life. Julius Welhausen and the Documentary Hypothesis. Historicial-Critical Analysis of the development of the scriptures. Form Criticism. Just about every bad idea, unmerited and without scientific rigor, used to damage humanity’s faith in the scriptures, came from this country. When I left, I was glad to have gone. And now I had just come back to that place.

Immediately upon arriving in Aachen on this trip, my first stop in the country, the girl checking me in at the hostel started in on a conversation about how she hated tradwives. Her hair was of course blue and she was covered in tattoos. So not only had I come back to the country of dumb dumb bible ideas, but I got hit in the face with the heathen misandry that had just about destroyed my mind and soul in Venice Beach in California. With this, I was going to have to take particular effort to maintain a positive attitude and have fun. If only I hadn’t been confronted with these horrors from the past that I am trying to move on from.

From Aachen, however, I landed next in Bonn, my primary destination where I hoped to accomplish my mission for this trip: get the German criminal background check that the Jewish Agency was requiring in order to move me to the interview phase in my process of immigrating to Israel.

Bonn was an absolutely lovely city.

I could spend all day looking at the scores of amazing pictures of the place I took while there. Perhaps the most spectacular part of the city that I saw were the avenues of cherry blossoms blooming throughout the city as spring came to fore.

Armed with my newfound commitment to forget the past, I put Aachen and old, bad memories of Germany behind me and began to fall in love with Germany again. It was while I had this attitude that I was able to just walk in and get the Background check I needed in a few minutes.

As expected, no criminal record. Of course, they just run your passport to see if anything comes up, and I was in Germany almost thirty years prior, several passports ago, so nothing was going to come up. All of this was just to satisfy Israeli bureaucracy.

I still can’t help but repeat just how delighted I was with Bonn as a city. But then things were to take a turn for the worse. I had to get an apostille on the German background check, and those came from Brandenburg an der Havel. The lady at the Bundesamt für Justiz in Bonn gave me instructions for how to get the apostille which involved mailing them the background check.

If you remember, I actually rode my bicycle from New Orleans to Bonn in order to get the background check in person because trying to take care of everything through the mail from the US had proven impossible. Or nearly impossible. My mother received the initial background check that I requested in the mail sometime after I had arrived in Germany. About three months after I originally requested it.

But I was in Germany now, and I had a background check in my backpack, so I decided to head to Brandenburg to take care of everything in person. I took a train, as I wanted to get there as quickly as I could. On the train I ran into a German, a Jewish sympathizer who had just been passing out stickers against antisemitism. The encounter, which should have been delightful, was disturbing, however. She looked exactly like a childhood friend of mine who has serious issues with God.

She talked about her mental health problems. And then when the discussion turned to Judaism and religion, she espoused complete nihilism as her philosophy. Again, disturbing connections to the past came up, and I couldn’t wait to get off the train.

When I got to Brandenburg an der Havel, things were not as they were in Bonn. Even the weather turned sour. It was like the dream sequence of the beautiful spring in Bonn had turned to gloom.

And then, at the Bundestamt für Auswärtige Angelegenheiten, the security officer gave me the exact same set of instructions. Mail them my background check, and it will come back with an Apostille in two months, he said. It was absolutely impossible to just walk upstairs and hand them my background check and wait for an apostille. Of course now I did not have an address to have them mail it to. And again, given that my attempts to get the documents through the mail in the US were so frustrating, impossible in some cases, I still did not have any confidence that if I sat around forever, the document with the apostille would ever come.

There seemed to be a kind of confluence of events. The weather, my experience with a secular German who reminded me of unpleasantness of my past, and bureaucratic frustrations all conspired to create a kind of picture of misery that completely contrasted with the spring beauty, bureaucratic progress, and delightful experiences in Bonn.

I took a train back to Bonn deflated, now needing to tackle another problem. While I had come to Germany, my US background check that I had gotten in California had become older than six months. The Jewish Agency required these background checks to be recent. Now I had left the USA just as my US background check was expiring. I could easily demonstrate the impossibility of my committing any crimes in the USA because I had I had been documenting all of my activities on the Strava app, so my exact location was at all times on social media. Everyone could easily see exactly what I was doing and exactly where I was every day.

However, the Jewish Agency wasn’t going to move me to the interview phase until they got another background check. The stress of this is impossible to describe. If background checks are only good for six months, and I don’t fly, and nothing I try to accomplish happens in less than six months, then I am going to be traveling around the world forever getting background checks in the USA while the ones in Germany expire, and getting background checks in Germany while the ones in the USA expire. Never mind that I also lived in Mexico. I was able to grab a background check while I was there in December. So it will be good until about June, I suppose.

I contacted the guy in California who got me the first US background check from the FBI. The fingerprints I had given him last summer were no longer valid. If he was going to get me another background check, he would need more fingerprints. Instead of a joyful trip around Europe on my bicycle, I was going to be riding around Germany getting fingerprints for a background check I needed from the USA! Well, there was a US Consulate not far away in Frankfurt, and there were a lot of US military bases there. So I headed to Frankfurt.

The first day of the two-day ride was to Koblenz. The second was to Frankfurt proper. This is where I would spend Passover and, coincidentally, Holy Week. This year Easter Sunday is a week after Passover Saturday. Passover consists of the week after the Passover meal, and the Christians call the week that precedes Easter Sunday “Holy Week”. So, the two holidays, which have a common origin but are often celebrated on different dates, overlapped. And I’ll tell you, I had a hell of an Easter Sunday. But I’ll explain that in a bit.

The primary thing I will mention is that for the holiday everybody left my world. Israel completely shut down. So while I was desperate to make progress on all this bureaucracy, nobody was going to be answering the phone for at least a week. My online ulpan (Hebrew language school) that I was going to shut down as well. I have some stories to tell about that ulpan. You know from my references to my issues with my daughter Alia that happened in December, as well as the Sky Princess post with yet another episode of misery on account of women, as well as the horrors of the Venice Beach misandrist heathen whores, and the destruction of my life at the hands of female Army officers, that I have women troubles. I have so many that I’d say the laws of probability are being violated. There is a message behind it, however. I call it my “Curse of Jezebel,” identifying closely with the headaches of Elijah the Prophet, one of my most significant icons and role models.

You also know from my Girl with the Dragon Tattoo post that I have made a commitment to having healthy, positive, platonic relationships with women, somewhat as a way to get past aspects of my PTSD and emotional scars. Well, God, in his infinite wisdom, and what I can only call a brutal sense of humor, put me first in a class of all women and only one other man who had no interest in improving his Hebrew at all, and then, for my second time with the school, I was the only man in the class, surrounded by three orthodox religious women, one newlywed, and one teenager. And you know from Noah van Ouwerkerk and Chloe Powell the infinite pain that my care for teenaged girls has caused me.

That whole class was a challenge from start to finish, and I ultimately ended up withdrawing from the ulpan with no plans to return, but I’ll tell the whole story behind that in my next post. Here I will just say that either that ulpan just coincidentally contained a class of women who did not want to learn Hebrew, or they were participating in my mystic curse by not responding to me or interacting with me at all, and as soon as the calendar approached Passover, they all disappeared. So the Israeli government was gone, and the ulpan was gone. At that time as well, Liat, another long time friend of mine, a female in Israel, was also doing everything she could not to respond to me or interacting with me.

So I felt quite detached from everything, alone, frustrated, unable to accomplish anything. For most Jews, Passover is a time of great community with family and friends, and relaxation from labor. A generally joyous time. But in the Torah, the Passover was a release from the effect of the plague of the death of the Egyptian firstborn followed by wandering lost in the desert chased by Egyptians and only able to eat crackers. My Passover was definitely not modern Jewish. It was very ancient biblical.

Now during Passover/Holy Week, I did make a trip to Wiesbaden for fingerprints, but I am going to talk about that in my next post. Here, though, I am going to skip to Easter Sunday.

Now the hostel I was staying at was right in the middle of Frankfurt’s red light district. There were multiple whorehouses, porn theaters, and gambling casinos everywhere.

The hostel itself was great, with a very interesting crew of staff and guests, and I had a number of wild times there. I also had a cool day or two out in town. I can’t say I was really impressed with Frankfurt, but that city is known for its big city feel, concerts and events and all. I am on a bicycle tour, however, looking for sunny days and pictures of castles, so Frankfurt really wasn’t my thing. The Red Light district, though, was definitely something to remember. Especially for me.

At one point I popped into one of the brothels to check it out and found the energy and presentation of the whole place to be just sad, and not something I would be tempted to go into. There were also groups of crack addicts smoking their pipes out on the street completely in the open. It was here that I got into some trouble. On Easter Sunday, the day after Passover ended, of all days.

It was on Easter Sunday morning that I went to give money to one of the crack addicts on the street, and while I had money out in my hand, another of the crack addicts grabbed all the cash I had from my hand. I got into an altercation, and while that was happening, an entire swarm of them fell upon me and stole both of my phones. I don’t know why I had both of my phones on me in the Frankfurt red light district. I suppose I felt fairly safe because of the amount of paranoid security precautions I take as a bicycle tourer.

For instance, I tie my passport and keys to me. This trick I learned in the Army when we used to make the soldiers tie their rifles to them with what we called “dummy cords.”

I use lanyards to keep my phones strapped to me, but these guys just ripped them right off. I started brawling, but once I got punched on the side of the head, I just wandered away in a stupor. Despondent, I found a local curb to sit on, thinking I would just start my life as a Frankfurt street bum now that my entire connection to the electronic universe that passes for the sum total of all reality on planet earth had been completely severed. Some time later, I don’t know how long, one of the crack heads came up to me with my European phone, the iPhone 13 Mini. The Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra would be gone, and with that my US phone number which is tied to all my banks and services from the USA, so two-factor authentication, mandatory these days, would not be possible for me, but at least I had my European phone number.

My daze continued, however. I found myself sitting some hours later on some sidewalk just staring into the distance, I think because I was just unwilling to accept the challenge of going back to life on earth. There was no one around. It was like one of those “last man on earth” movies. It was then that some random dude came up to me and asked me what I was doing sitting there staring at nothing. He ended his inquiry with the statement, “you know it’s Easter Sunday, don’t you?”

I told him that I thought I needed more power than I had to accomplish what I wanted to do. He asked me what I wanted to do. I told him I was on a big trip to go to Israel. He told me that he just went around handing out newspapers, and that his primary ordeal was that nobody wanted to talk to him. I told him that nobody wanted to talk to me either. He started asking me about my trip, and I told him everything had gotten so difficult, I didn’t know if I could, or if I wanted to, do it anymore.

It was at that point that he said, “but you have so many good ideas.” My response was, “how do you know?” I do have a lot of ideas. But I hadn’t told him any. So, do you remember when Abraham was sitting in tyhe heat of the day and had a conversation with three men who weren’t actually three men? Remember when Jacob got into a brawl with a dude who wasn’t actually a dude?

So this guy hands out newspapers that nobody wanted. Nobody wants to talk to him. Nobody wants to talk to God, either. Nobody is interested in what he has to say. And this guy knows about my ideas despite my not having said anything about any ideas.

I asked the guy, “are you an angel?”

He didn’t say yes or no. He just looked me in the eye and said, “you are.”

We stared at each other for a second. And then I told him, “I have to go. I wish I could stay, but I have to go.” I then got up, walked back to the hostel, and passed out.

Hearing him say that gave me the strength to get up, exit the bardo, come back to what we call earth, and continue the mission.