Day 7

7th day: 23 October 2005

We woke up to a new day, after a good night's sleep. We went downstairs to have breakfast, amazed by the view and quietness of the place.

We checked-out and left for the center of town again, we planned to tour for about two hours, but ended up staying longer. We did some shopping and saw all the stores and sites in the area. Zakopane is a small town for summer vacations, similar to the ones in Switzerland. It's very pastoral, beautiful and pleasant. The town is also known as "the winter capital of Poland," lies in the southern part of the Podhale region at the foot of the Tatra Mountains, the only alpine mountain range in the Carpathian region. The view to the mountains was amazing, and reminded me of the view of the Alps. It wasn't snowing when we were there, but we saw a ski site nearby and large slopes. We kept wandering around the market stands and shops, where they sold fruits and vegetables, and also enormous mushrooms of various colors.

At another stand, they sold wooden figurines, and we bought a few souvenirs. The prices were decent. 

In many stands, warm slippers and furry house shoes were sold. We also saw puppies displayed for sale inside designed baskets. 

Avi made friends with a huge Saint Bernard and her puppies that were on sale. He loves animals and has two dogs at home.

Avi and I took the cart to go up the mountain to see the view from the top. Sarah and Tomash decide to stay in the market area and wait for us there. At the top of the mountain there was a nice breeze, not nearly as cold as I expected. Closer to noon the weather warmed up a bit. 

Since we were limited with time, we decided to continue on our journey. As we left the town, I asked Tomash to show us where Holocaust survivor Lena Kichler-Zilberman had housed the orphan children she saved right after WWII. She wrote the book Meah Yeladim Sheli (My 100 Children), and Beit Imi (My Mother's House).

Tomash took us to a building that was now a school. In Poland, during their presidential elections, it is used to house the ballot boxes where people vote.

The guard at the entrance to the building looked at us with interest. He probably assumed that, due to the presidential elections, we came to take pictures (I videotape). It seemed as if the notion of this site, and other Holocaust sites, had not yet sunk into the collective understanding of the Polish people as a Holocaust memorial. It may take a while; but will hopefully sink in in the near future, for their own history's sake.

We left Zakopane and continued south towards the border with Slovakia. When we reached the border, Avi and I exchanged money to Slovak koruna (Translation: Slovak crown), the currency of Slovakia between 8 February 1993 and 31 December 2008, which could also be used for cash payment until the 16 January 2009. Slovakia switched its currency from the koruna to the euro on 1 January 2009.

We converted some money in case we wanted to buy food or souvenirs in Slovakia. This turned out not to be necessary, and we had to convert the money back to Hungarian forint. As a member of the European Union, the long-term aim of the Hungarian government is to replace the forint with the euro sometime between 2012 and 2014.

We had a long way ahead of us, crossing from Poland to Slovakia. Slovakia seemed very different from Poland and Hungary, which we would see later on. Slovakia was poorer. We didn't waste much time there as our mission was to cross Slovakia to get to Hungary and repeat the track Sarah had taken when she was released from the camps.

On our way, we saw that it was autumn and the leaves falling were in various greenish and brown colors. It was amazingly beautiful.

During our journey through Slovakia, we stopped to review our maps and discuss where exactly we needed to cross the border with Hungary. Trying to estimate where Sarah had crossed while she was on her journey back home after WWII was difficult. She had jumped on a supply train from Warsaw back to her homeland, but had to walk part of the way.

According to mom's story, someone had told her while she was on the supply train that the train would be crossing the border with the Soviet Union (USSR) and she should get off before then since it was best if she didn't cross their border. Mom listened to the man and got off the train at the next stop, close to the Hungarian border. She crossed the Tisza River to enter Hungary.

The Tisza River was frozen at that time and Sarah had crossed it by foot. The Tisza is one of the main rivers of Central Europe. It rises in Ukraine, flows along the Romanian border, roughly, and enters Hungary at Tiszabecs; downstream, it marks the Slovak-Hungarian border, passes through Hungary, and falls into the Danube in central Vojvodina, part of Serbia. It has a length of 965 km (600 miles - the 16th longest river in Europe).

This was an amazing and unique story, especially considering Sarah was a young girl, traveling alone in winter, and she didn't know how to swim!

After crossing the river, Sarah met a kind Hungarian with a wagon and a horse that offered to take her to his home and give her food and water. She spent the night there with his family and the next day he took her to the train station where she got on the train (this time a passenger train) that went to Nyírbátor, her home town.

So we had to find the exact location where the Tisza River is close to the Hungarian border in order to trace her tracks. We saw there was a triangle intersection that borders with Slovakia, Ukraine and Hungary, and the Tisza River forms a border line in part of that region.

(The map with the three borders - Slovakia, Ukraine and Hungary)

We debated the route, and decided in the end that the best way to head to Slovakia would be to travel east.

We ended up taking another route, however. Going east would make our drive longer by 3-4 hours, and we would arrive in the river area at night time and wouldn't be able to see much.

We decided to continue on our way and cross the nearest area into Hungary and from there head south to Debrecen as earlier planned. The day after, we would finish our trip to visit Nyírbátor, my mom's hometown, and then return to the border driving south and search for where Sarah had crossed the Tisza River.

In the afternoon hours, we finally arrived at the border between Slovakia and Hungary. Inside the border station, which seemed quite neglected, one of the officers seemed to be mad at us that we were filming and documenting the area. Indeed, a security risk inside a border station that was barely occupied. Light rain had started as well...

We were lucky enough to avoid bad weather during most of our trip. We converted the Slovak money we had left into Hungarian Forint and all of our money had "000" added to it all of a sudden, haha.

Full of excitement, we entered Hungary. In this country, we also had important discoveries to find, sites to see, and ancestry information to trace. We drove towards Debrecen, which is the second largest city in Hungary after Budapest. On our way we drove through the city Miskolc, which has a heavy industrial background. Miskolc is the closest city to the border. We saw many flags in the city. The Hungarian flag had been raised proudly for the day of the revolution that was celebrated the week we were there.

By day's end, we had basically driven through three European countries; a job well done, if you ask me.

When we arrived at Debrecen, we went straight to our hotel, the 'Arnavika Grand Hotel.' It was fancy and impressive, and located in the center of the city. It was also pricey. Unlike the hotels we stayed at in Poland, the hotels in Hungary were more extravagant, not nearly as modest. The room where we stayed was huge and well-equipped; we laughed and named it the palace of Habsburg Emperor Franz Joseph I.

After getting ready in the hotel in Debrecen, we left with Tomash to eat dinner. We were very hungry since we hadn't eaten all day. Tomash didn't know his way around Hungary, though he knew most of Poland like the back of his hand. He recommended we go to a small local restaurant we saw near the gas station not far from the hotel. Even though mom asked the waitress many questions, in Hungarian, about the menu, since the waitress spoke no English, we ended up ordering weird meals we didn't like. We ate oily, fried mushrooms, fried cauliflower, and some french fries that were probably made a few days before. We also had a Greek salad. We joked with Tomash and told him that he needed to work on his instincts.

After dinner, we all returned to the hotel. We had a long day and were tired. Mom went to sleep, she was understandably exhausted. She was enduring more than just long walks for someone her age. She has so much will power! I was very proud of her for going on this trip; I knew it was hard for her to go back to her past and experience these things by tracing her steps.

Once she was asleep, Avi and I went downstairs and exited the hotel. We went out for a night tour, our usual, to search for a nice place to sit and have something to drink. In the square outside the hotel we saw a quaint coffee shop. As we approached we saw that it was closed, along with most other places at that hour. We returned to the hotel and took a seat at the bar for a nightcap. I had the tiramisu cake and a cup of coffee, it was good but nothing compared to the Marakesh I had in Kraków. Yumm!

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