(8/10/12) The sweet and the sour

Oh my Sacher Torte. Seriously, though. Wow. I’ve been totally nervous about gaining weight on this trip, but when I had that Sacher Torte, I stopped caring. Hemingway talks about how love is when you can be with someone who makes time feel infinite. I felt that way about the torte. I should have known it was going to be really good, because Anthony Bourdain (who doesn’t really like sweets in the first place) admitted to how good it was when he tried it in Vienna at the Hotel Sacher. I trust Anthony Bourdain, and he was completely right. We all really want to try making the torte (even though we won’t come close to making it as well as the hotel does), but this dream was deferred by the fact that we don’t have an oven! So that means we need to make some Austrian pals and borrow their oven for a few hours. 

I'm surprised I stopped eating the torte to pose for this picture.

Unfortunately, the 10th wasn’t completely saturated in delicious, sweet torte and happy memories. We had Thomas Frankl, a holocaust survivor, come to our class and speak to us. The room was packed, with our class and other students and instructors from the Austro-American Institute. Mr. Frankl was a well-dressed man, and seemed to have a very good sense of humor. I have seen holocaust survivors speak before, and all of them maintain a good sense of humor. As someone who is deeply passionate about comedy and humor, I find that it is the only way to really get through anything shitty. 

Frankl and his immediate family survived the holocaust, something I’ve unfortunately encountered less often. Many of his more distant family members did perish, however. I noticed that he and his family were caught and sent to camps later in the scheme of the war, as if I recall correctly, he said they were taken September 1944. Out of most of the survival stories I have heard, most survivors were taken to concentration camps late, which probably has some correlation with their survival. 

In addition to his well-developed sense of humor, Frankl had a remarkable sense of authentic emotion and the ability to recall salient detail. This is especially poignant, as we later were told that he is in the beginning stages of Alzheimer's. He’d have to stop himself when things were too sad or too happy, choking up. I too would choke up, getting teary eyed several times during his presentation. I’m Jewish, and holocaust education is extremely prevalent in synagogues, so I do know a ton of information about the holocaust. I’ve read books and heard stories and visited museums. However, I believe there is nothing more authentic than having the chance to someone who encountered the horror firsthand and lived to tell about it.