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Travel Advisor
Sleeping in Seattle
Our travel expert directs readers to accommodation and fun in the rainy city, plus advice on trips to Manhattan and Apostle Island.
By Donald D. Groff
[10/21/99]

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Once upon a time in Greece
A tale of ruins and revelers and Aegean nights -- and the way things fit together in time and space.
By Don George
[10/20/99]

Out of the Blue
Confessions of a onetime ramp rat
Two months as an airport baggage-handler almost cost me my life.
By Elliott Neal Hester
[10/19/99]

Searching for Mr. Watson
Two frat brothers make a healing pilgrimage to a legendary renegade's retreat in the heart of the Everglades.
By Bill Belleville
[10/16/99]

Wanderlust
Love letters in the sand
I was his English teacher, 14 years older. But on the beach in Mazatlan, love is love.
By Susan McKinney de Ortega
[10/15/99]

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By Lauren Fox

Oct. 22, 1999 | I was thinking mostly about love. Throughout the entire long flight, whether I was reading or talking to the woman next to me or resting, I was thinking mostly of love, of 10 long months apart and the sweet specifics of our coming reunion. Hands and arms and shoulders and lips, fingertips like feathers. Steamy kisses in the airport. The delicious heat of summer after a long, long winter. By the time I got off the plane, I was practically swooning. Only marginally was I thinking about Nazis.

The subjects had been sharing space in my mind for some time. This trip was, after all, more than a visit to a long-distance lover. It was a homecoming, of sorts, except I had to catch myself every time I wanted to say that: You can't return to a place you have never been. Still, there it was. Peter had been studying in Germany for the year, and I, daughter and granddaughter of German Jews, was, as an acquaintance put it, "returning to the motherland."

They left in May 1938, when my mother was almost 2. If they had waited six months more, they wouldn't have been able to get out. My grandmother's brother and parents stayed behind. Her brother, my great uncle Hans, was arrested and taken to Dachau, and released a half-year later.

The woman who sat next to me on the airplane was originally from Germany, returning for a while to look after her sick mother. She took good care of me: got me an extra blanket, told me to drink lots of water on the plane. She offered me her dessert and patted my hand when we hit turbulence. And she told me what to expect on my first trip to Germany: too many foreigners. And not, if you know what I mean, the good kind. She had nothing against them, of course, it's just that they don't work, only sit in cafes all day. Germany, she confided, is becoming a melting pot. Full of dark-skinned people, speaking strange languages.

As we flew over the ocean I worried that I wouldn't recognize Peter. What if he were as foreign to me and as frightening as the place he'd been living? What if I scanned the crowd (the impossibly blond crowd, I imagined) for his face and he was nowhere, until the stranger in front of me touched my arm and said, "Lauren, it's me! I'm right here!" And what if I still didn't recognize him?

Of course, I spotted him immediately, recognized in a blink the shape of his body, the way he raked his fingers through his hair. It was the reunion itself that I couldn't have predicted: the way we should have moved together like magnets and instead smiled awkwardly, hugged like there was someone standing between us. The minute I saw him I felt as if he'd betrayed me by being here, by being happy here, and a cold sadness burrowed into my body. In the airport in Frankfurt, where I looked around and felt immediately like making unfunny jokes about German efficiency, it was my own foreignness that took me by surprise.

Next page | Don't shout at me, Nazi-boy!