01 The Last Jihad by Joel C. Rosenberg

Author:Joel C. Rosenberg [Rosenberg, Joel C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International relations, Political fiction, Political, General, Middle East, Thrillers, Fiction, Religious, Suspense, Suspense fiction, Terrorism, Terrorism - Prevention, Prevention, Espionage, Petroleum industry and trade
ISBN: 9781414312729
Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers
Published: 2006-08-05T15:00:00+00:00

NINE

The train ride from Vienna to Moscow normally takes about fifty-two hours.

But it is more than merely a slow, plodding, and quiet journey through snow-covered fields and hamlets and villages and the Carpathian Mountains. It is a journey back through the heart of darkness.

With a glass mug of hot Russian chai in your cold hands and some warm black bread and a plate of steaming kashka-varnishka, you can sit at the small table in your sleeping car and play cards and smoke cigarettes, or get lost in a novel, or just stare up at the ceiling and think about nothing or everything or a little bit of both. But if you care to peek out through the smudgy, filthy windows of your claustrophobic compartment, you will find a sad and war-weary land, scarred by German occupation and Soviet suffocation.

You will snake your way through Bratislava, the poor but proud capital of Slovakia, a city of trade and learning and history, born of Romans and Celts and eventually settled by Slavs in the eighth century and now almost half a million people strong.

It was here that a good peace was once found when Napoleon and Francis II signed the Treaty of Pressburg in 1805, following the Battle of Austerlitz.

Yet it was here, too, that a great rescue was once narrowly and tragically lost. In 1942, the Nazis-perhaps cynically, perhaps not- offered a rabbi named Weissmandl and a woman named Gisi Fleischmann a deal to trade one million imprisoned Jews headed for the gas chambers for two million dollars. But the rabbi and Fleischmann and their colleagues couldn't persuade anyone in the West to come up with the cash. It may have been the West's callous indifference. It may have been the fear that the Germans would renege on the deal and use the money to help defeat the Allies. It may have been something else entirely. But the money never came in, and a million souls never came out.

Along your journey to Moscow, you will also wind your way through Lviv, the largest city in Western Ukraine. With its sprawling open-air market and crumbling Russian Orthodox churches that barely survived the age of atheism, Lviv can seem like a city somehow trapped in a time gone by.

In warmer weather, in genuinely lovely, tree-lined parks, babushkas play with their grandchildren. Young mothers stroll their infants. Old men play chess and dominoes. There is a sense of family and faith that have been the glue holding this seven-century-old society together.

But the fashions are drab and colorless and seem right out of the American '30s. The cars and trucks are old and styleless, like a black-and-white scene from Mayberry. The storefronts are simple and unattractive-no neon, little advertising, few brand names, just signs like "Bakery" and

"Drugstore" and "Butcher," though the racks are sparse and the cupboards nearly bare.

Somehow, the whole city has the feel of a Hollywood back lot amidst the filming of a Depression-era period piece. And Lviv, too, like most cities and towns in the region, has a sad story and a wounded spirit.

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