Oh The Places I've Seen -- Well, At Least Some of the More Memorable Ones

Omaha Beach in Normandy France

In a few weeks the missus and I are going to the United Kingdom. We’ll be spending time in London and going for for our first ever stay in Scotland. It’s got me thinking about some of our recent journeys and the particular sites that have been most meaningful to me. Here’s a look at some.

I was walking from the city of Compiègne, France to the Armistice Memorial where the armistice ending World War I was signed. About half way there I noticed an abandoned railway line. I chanced to look down where there was a plaque noting the fact that from this site thousands of French Jews were boarded on trains for Auschwitz. It was chilling and I couldn’t help but wonder why it was so obscure. Seeing the plaque was as memorable as visiting the museum and memorial. To stand where so many had been transported to horrible deaths is…. Well you can imagine.

Just before we went to Berlin a historian I follow on Instagram had been in the German capital. She recounted finding, with the help of experts in the field, the spot where Hitler’s bunker was. This was where der Führer spent his last days and ultimately committed suicide. As did Eva Braun and Joseph Goebbels and family. Their bodies were burned on the site. There is no plaque there nor anything to memorialize the site less neo-Nazis use it to celebrate the fiend. It is as nondescript a spot as you can imagine between two buildings and near a parking lot. Standing there was, frankly, weird, realizing who and what had taken place there decades previous. 

I once took what was billed as a D-Day tour. This took me and others to the various beaches where allied forces landed on June 6, 1944 as well as to the American cemetery. Most moving was being on Omaha beach where the largest force landed and there was much slaughter. It was incredible to stand there and imagine the carnage that once took place on the very spot I was standing. Having seen Saving Private Ryan and having read extensively about the day I had a sense of what it must have been like but being on the actual site was moving. It was so peaceful and beautiful.

Last year I went to the Charles Dickens home/museum in London. To think of the great writer in those rooms and to see his desk and other personal effects, to know that he had created so much great literature there was extremely moving.

Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam put a lump in my throat and that’s without having had the opportunity to go inside. I was, however, dismayed to see people taking photos outside the house  smiling broadly and making the V sign. Disrespectful.

I found visiting the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. to be a moving experience. The site itself is magnificent and knowing that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream Speech” there was humbling.

Visiting 30 Rockefeller Center in New York is fantastic. Just contemplating the many great performers who have been in thebuilding, from Paul McCartney to Bill Murray to George Carlin to Tina Fey to Robert DeNiro to Martin Short to Gilda Radner and on and on and on.

In Rome  we saw the Roman Forum, an amazing site in the middle of a modern city. Here your transported back not a century but a millennium. Similar to this is Coliseum which also gives one a sense of awe, it having stood there for so very long. But as a cinephile what really struck me was the Trevi Fountain where the famous scene with Marcelo Mastrioni and Anita Ekberg from Fellini’s La Dolce Vita was filmed. Now that’s history.

Living in Berkeley I often venture through Sproul Plaza. Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement began there and it was there that Savio delivered his famous “Put you bodies on the gears and wheels” speech. Dr. King spoke at Sproul once and of course it was the site of numerous demonstrations and police riots in the Sixties, some of which I attended. Occasionally when I walk through Sproul I’ll pause and remember what I saw there and what so many others have experienced on that site.