Perhaps you noticed that it’s been two weeks since I last posted? I am slowly catching up  with things including some of the blogs I follow, but we just got home Monday night after 12 days away in Berlin and Paris.

We were motivated to visit Berlin because our daughter Maddy was going there to run her tenth marathon! And her fifth of the six “major” marathons: Boston, New York, London, Chicago, and now Berlin. How could we miss this?

We arrived in Berlin two days before the marathon in the late afternoon and went to dinner with Maddy and her friend and running buddy Jaime.

The following morning Maddy and Jaime went off to do a “shake out” run—a 5K to warm them up for Sunday’s big event. Harvey and I went on a history tour of Berlin with Seth of WithLocals. We saw most of the major buildings and monuments as well as the Anhalter Bahnhof where thousands of Berlin Jews were sent for deportation, remnants of the Wall, Checkpoint Charlie, the chilling and imposing Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the memorial at the site where Nazis burned thousands of books, and other historic sites. Seth did a great job of blending pre-war and post-war Berlin.

Then in the afternoon we did a self-guided walk through what was once Berlin’s Jewish neighborhood. There are only a few signs left that Jews one lived there. Stolpersteine throughout the quarter marking where Jews once lived, a gorgeous synagogue that is now just a museum, and a Jewish cemetery that was vandalized by the Nazis with just a few headstones remaining.

Berlin’s past is darkened by so much ugliness and yet it is a beautiful city. The cognitive dissonance of that was striking: a beautiful building scarred with bullet holes, broken sculptures, and buildings with facades that were all that survived the war. It was hard to feel much joy as the ugly history of the city kept surfacing over and over.

Sunday was marathon day, and we crossed Berlin to catch Maddy and Jaime at the 13K marker (but somehow missed seeing Jaime), and then we crossed back to get to the 38K marker to catch Maddy (but not Jaime) approaching the last 4K of the race. They both finished and were thrilled to have completed another marathon.

We celebrated that night not only with Maddy and Jaime, but also with my cousin Wolfgang Seligmann and his daughter (also my cousin) Milena. This was our third time getting together—first in Germany in 2017, then in Boston in 2022, and now in Berlin in 2026. We had a delightful time with them, and even though we’ve only met those three times, it was as if we’d always known each other. Family is family. We spent more time with Wolfgang and Milena over the next two days.

Unfortunately Monday morning I woke up with a fever and felt awful so I stayed back at the hotel and rested. By that evening I felt well enough to join everyone for dinner, and on Tuesday I was feeling mostly okay. Maddy and Jaime left that morning for Lisbon, and we met up with Wolfgang and Milena at the Berlin Jewish Museum, which is a wonderful museum that both explains many Jewish practices and customs while also telling the tragic story of the Jews of Germany over the centuries. The security surrounding the museum was both haunting and reassuring. What a sad world we live in.

After one more dinner on Tuesday evening, we said a sad farewell to Wolfgang and Milena and packed up for our train ride to Paris the next morning.

Paris was a time just for us, to honor our 50th anniversary and to recall our last visit to Paris in 1978 when we had no money and stayed in a little pension that charged as much for the two of us to take a shower as the cost of the room. Now we were coming to see the city with fresh (and older eyes). It is a magnificent city, and I now better understand why people find it so enchanting. The architecture is really astounding.

We stayed in a small hotel in the Marais district, which was a perfect location. On Thursday we walked across the bridge to the Ile de la Cite and saw Sainte Chappelle and Notre Dame. I didn’t realize that seeing the upper chapel of the Sainte Chappelle required going up and down a rather dark and steep spiral staircase. Going up wasn’t too bad, but going down I needed Harvey in front of me so that I didn’t look straight down. In any event it was worth that challenge as the stained glass windows are gorgeous.

Notre Dame was equally beautiful, and knowing that just seven years ago it was severely damaged by fire made it even more magical.

In the afternoon we just wandered around the Latin Quarter, walking the winding streets, stopping for lunch near the Pantheon and the Sorbonne. It was fun to see all the students hanging around like students do everywhere. We stopped to relax in the Luxembourg Gardens nearby.

 

The next morning we met up with Emma, the tour guide for Sight Seekers Paris, who was going to be teaching us about the history of the Jews in France and Paris and the Marais district where most of them lived at one time. She did an incredible job of telling the three thousand year history of oppression, exile, return, success, and then deportations during the Nazi era. We stopped for lunch at a kosher restaurant, which was great, and at a “secret” synagogue that still operates where we were invited to sit in their sukkah. I highly recommend this tour if you come to Paris.

That afternoon we went to the Picasso Museum and then collapsed with exhaustion before dinner. All those days of being on the move, walking over 12,000 steps at least, and absorbing new information was beginning to wear me down, as was my lingering cold.

But onward we went. Saturday we went to two art museums, the Orsay and the Orangerie. Both had spectacular collections of impressionist art—lots of Monet and Van Gogh, Gaugin, Seurat, etc.

Heading back to our hotel we ran into an incredible traffic jam, and it took over an hour to get there. When we realized that traffic was from a huge Pride parade, we felt better about being stuck in traffic. I could not believe how many people were marching in the parade.

Unfortunately the traffic situation meant we cancelled our dinner near the Eiffel Tower and instead we had a wonderful Italian dinner in the Marais near our hotel.

Sunday, our last day, was a more relaxed day. After a tour of the Palais Garnier or the French opera house, we wandered into the covered arcades of shops and picked up some little gifts to take home for our family.

We arrived home on Monday late afternoon, and now we are recovering from jetlag and colds. But looking back, we saw so much—maybe too much?—and had a truly wonderful time. We are still processing it all and have tons more photos than I am sharing here, but this will give you a taste of what our trip was like! We are so grateful to Maddy and Jaime for inspiring us and to Wolfgang and Milena for traveling all the way from Undenheim in southwestern Germany to be with us. It was a trip we will cherish for years to come!

Danke, Berlin, and merci, Paris.