In the world’s quiet places, sorrow whispers

It seemed like the loneliest corner of the world. Just a large meadow surrounded by thick fir woods, almost idyllic in the muted September morning light and silent, save for the calls of a few songbirds. These few empty acres might have been ideal for a hike or a picnic. But barely 50 years ago they were neither lonely nor inviting.

On closer inspection they weren’t so empty. Toward the center of the grassy clearing, a stone tower guarded a collection of irregular stones set in the ground like grave markers. Thousands of stones, large and small, many with etched writing that turned out to be the names of cities and towns.

I was in Poland, not far from the rail line that joined Warsaw and Bialystok, at the end of a leisurely drive that took me along bucolic country roads, past blazing autumn foliage I might have expected in Vermont.

This was Treblinka, where 800,000 people were murdered in less than a year. Each stone represented a slaughtered Jewish community -- an entire town. And when the gas chambers had finished their work, the Germans blew up the camp, planted trees and tried to return these few acres to their previous obscurity. But some secrets can’t be kept. The meadow is now a silent memorial, open to anyone willing to leave the beaten path and hike a half a mile into the Polish woods.

Not many do. I had the place to myself for hours. Just as well; it’s the quiet places I remember most.

Indelible impressions

There are two kinds of quiet places. Some are quiet because they are empty or at least they seem so because human activity is abridged. They are usually remote and memorably scenic, the stuff of rhapsody in travel and adventure magazines.

I couldn’t begin to recount all my quiet adventures in such places, but having the top of Yosemite’s Half Dome all to myself was surely one of the best. As was rounding a curve on Highway 163 in Utah and seeing Monument Valley spread out for miles like a salmon-hued canvas. Or the night my son and I got lost in Death Valley, stopped the car and stepped out into a silent, starlit desert void. Or hiking Glacier National Park’s Swiftcurrent Pass Trail in September, knowing we were being watched by grizzlies in the underbrush.

I’ve treasured every moment in these places, but it’s the second sort of quiet place that touches me more, leaving an indelible impression. Sometimes these places aren’t even quiet in the strict sense of the word. Ground zero in New York may bustle with activity, but that’s not why anyone would visit.

No, these places resonate with past events, echoes of life, even while they sit untended and overlooked by passing crowds. You don’t have to believe in ghosts to know these spots are special, though their distinctive quality sometimes resides in the mind of the beholder.

Many seem to have been the settings of death or great suffering. Visits to such places are often pilgrimages, as good a reason to travel as any, and that’s probably why I remember them so clearly.

My first was an accidental pilgrimage more than 30 years ago. My wife, Catherine, and I were driving through Austria when I noticed a familiar name on the map -- Dachau. A 100-mile detour to the suburbs of Munich, Germany, brought us to the gates of the first Nazi concentration camp, now preserved as a museum. We walked the grounds in a state of shock, humbled to contemplate the many who never left there.

Among my most vivid recollections of that afternoon are the graffiti-covered crematorium and two European teenagers running a footrace on the barracks path. Not everyone was so moved by this quiet place.

Since then I’ve visited many other Holocaust sites -- Auschwitz, Birkenau, Belzec, Majdanek, Mauthausen, Stutthof and others. They all have different, if similar, stories to tell. As does the French village of Le-Chambon-sur-Lignon in the Auvergne, a place that collectively hid and saved 5,000 Jewish refugees from Vichy and the Nazis. Its streets told tales that reverberate in my thoughts.

More recently, and closer to home, I stopped on a lonely Montana highway at a place called the Bear Paw, near the Canadian border. If you found yourself on this road, near no big towns, you would probably drive by, unless you knew about it or were curious about the small sign. This was where Chief Joseph, legendary chief of the Nez Perce tribe, surrendered in 1877 after a four-month, 1,500-mile fighting exodus from Oregon to sanctuary in Canada. Though they defeated the pursuing Army troops on many occasions, the Nez Perce could not sustain continued losses and bowed to superior force only 30 miles from safety.

The Bear Paw was deserted when I visited, but the many Native American offerings left there made clear that this was far from cold history.

The Wounded Knee Cemetery in South Dakota and Montana’s Little Bighorn National Battlefield are quiet in the same way, leaving the traveler to contemplate what justified all those losses in the Indian Wars.

Two years ago I visited the little War Museum in Siem Reap, Cambodia, a town only recently freed from the Khmer Rouge. Not far from the infamous killing fields, the museum, more like a shrine, memorialized that small country’s tragedy and pain. A walk through the grounds gave rise to lingering anxiety about land mines and the terrible losses inflicted on the Cambodian people.

Less sanguinary was my walk around Runnymede Meadow near the Thames in Surrey, England, the birthplace in 1215 of much that we consider the rule of law. Other than an understated monument, there isn’t much to suggest that it was here King John conceded limitations on the Divine Right of Monarchs, limitations that would one day give rise to rights for commoners as well. But its plebeian setting -- next to a soccer field -- seemed appropriate.

Also memorable is the American military cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer in Normandy. One cannot walk the perfectly manicured rows of crosses and stars of David, just up the hill from bloody Omaha Beach, and not see that each stone tells its own tale of sacrifice. So many boys and men willingly gave their lives for something that mattered to all of us who survived. You can walk for days and not hear all those stories.

Maybe those places aren’t so quiet after all.

James Dannenberg, a judge in Hawaii, is a frequent contributor to the Travel section.