Bruce and I went to Poland in June, he for work and I for fun. We had decided to take the train there because when we had to make reservations, the Icelandic ashcloud was making all plane travel seem really iffy. So we took the train from High Wycombe to London Marylebone, tube to St. Pancras, Eurostar under the Channel to Brussels, changed trains to get to Koln, Koln to Warsaw on the sleeper train, and finally Warsaw to Krakow. Total hours in transit: 31. This is compared to about an hour and a half by plane.
Here I am getting off the train in Koln (Cologne).
As soon as you come out of the very modern train station, Koln Cathedral blasts into view like a rocket, this ancient thing dwarfing the huge station, absolutely covered with intricate stonework, blackened with the ages of man, and slightly terrifying.
Here I am on the banks of the Rhine. It looks pretty much like the Thames, but it is fun to know it's the Rhine!
We ate a delicious dinner in Koln, at a Tapas restaurant. We had gotten off a French-speaking train, were now in a German-speaking city eating Spanish cuisine, only hours from London. Bruce commented that he had never pictured himself as someone who is comfortable in Europe. But he seems comfortable here!
The sleeper-train was very tight quarters, no restaurant car at all, a night of knees bashing into the bunk above. This picture was taken before I knew the bad night's sleep ahead of me. I kept thinking wistfully of Poirot, how he would throw up his hands with the modern train accomodations. Where are the tablecloths? The polished wood?
By the morning we were crossing Poland. It is very flat up here, punctuated by startling churches in miniature villages.
In Warsaw we had another layover, and had our first Polish food: yummy pierogi, and apple pancakes for dessert (an apple dipped in batter and fried --must try it at home). Beets, carrots, and coleslaw were the staple salad, and very good, too.
We arrive at Krackow station, and within a hundred feet of the station, this beautiful city unfolds before you. I feel a little thrill to be in what I still think of as The Eastern Bloc. Yet the only customs we have been through was in London, boarding the Eurostar. The world has changed fundamentally.
In Krackow one notices the decorativeness of all the old buildings. Windows and the tops of buildings seem to be bubbling with curlicues and bobbles and faces.
The main market square, beautiful buildings and churches, and Chopin concerts advertised. We went to a superb concert in one of these gorgeous buildings. Krackow seems to be awash in music classical music. We also ate at a Ukrainian restaurant, and I went to a market only a block from where non-Poles go and no one spoke English. It is amazing how people try to talk to you in Polish, and the more rustic the person is, the less put off they are by the fact that you can't speak a word in return.
Here I am looking out of our hotel window at the elegant buildings across the street.
This church is a fairly typical Krackow church. Though the outside is very sober,
inside practically everything was burnished gold. I have never seen so much burnished gold. You can see what prompted the Reformation, as gilding was being taken about as far as it could go: at some point, the gold seems to be the point rather than the object gilded.
On the other hand, it's also a way of pouring gold out to a deity, a very old practice. Just recently, in England, a man with a metal detector in a farmer's field found a Roman coin. Once he started digging, they found an earthenware jar full of gold Roman coins: 52,000 of them. They speculate that the jar would have been placed in the ground, and the coins poured in as an offering.
The idea of giving one's wealth to a deity is quite difficult to imagine. I guess we're lucky that the 17th-century monks put the gold on statues for all to see, rather than burying it in a pot in the ground.
KasimierzI took myself on a walking tour of the two historically Jewish sections of Krackow: Kasimeirz, in the southern part of the city, and directly across the river, Podorgorze. Kazimierz was where the Jewish population lived before WWII. There are lots of synagogues.
This is the first time I have ever been in a synogogue. Still a fair amount of gold, but no figures of any kind.
Kasimierz was not very remarkable as an area, visually, but the idea that a huge population of Jews was moved in one day, across a bridge to be crammed into tiny area of the city, was intense to imagine. It was difficult, actually, to imagine that day, because everything looks so ordinary now. Each family was allowed one cartload. I saw some remarkable footage of the day (who was filming, one wonders?) and the carts were loaded with chairs. Some of the children carried one chair. It is interesting that in our culture, chairs are a real symbol of our dignity. In another culture, that might not be the thing people carry with them.
This is an absolutely huge Catholic church in the middle of the Jewish ghetto of Podogorze, dominating the whole neighborhood. How galling it must have been.
This is one of only two remaining sections of the ghetto wall. After a few years of the ghetto, the Nazis separated the ghetto population again into workers and non-workers, section A and section B. The next step was to round up all the people in the non-working section and send them straight to the gas chambers, a pre-sorting process.
I was discomfitted by the utter ordinariness of the street on which this wall stands. One wants horrific events to have somehow made their mark on the landscape. Is that an American attitude? Since living on this side of the Atlantic, I am often struck by how unadvertised terribly important places are in Europe, and England.
This is the bridge over which the Jews were herded on that day in 1941. Just an ordinary bridge.
Back across the Wistula into old Krackow
Here is a manhole cover. Even this is pretty. It depicts the beautiful royal Palace that is on the River Wistula, and is a focal point of the city.
There is a beautiful green belt around the entire old city, connected in a loop, which gives a gentleness to the city.
The streetlamps are lovely, too.
The final night of Bruce's conference was a huge dinner in a salt mine. Very weird place for a dinner. The walls are literally salt. We had to take a creepy lift to go down to the level of the great hall.
There were all sorts of sculptures carved right into the walls.
Weird.
Here is a man carving a hunk of salt.
This is me talking to Bruce's colleague. (Note the walls of solid salt)
I was very interested to hear about growing up in Poland during the period of the Soviet Union, and it made me keenly aware of what a quiet, sheltered life I have led. She said that on May Day, all children were expected to go to school so they could be in the parade. One time she was sick, and the next day, the police came to see if she really was sick or if there was a "problem" with her parents. Parents were always aware that they mustn't talk openly until the children had gone to bed, for fear that the children might say something dangerous in school.
Going back two generations, when her great-grandmother was faced with the Germans advancing on one side and the Russians on the other, she gave these instructions to her elder daughter: "Here is a pistol. If you get caught by the Germans, that will be bad, but if you get caught by the
Russians, first shoot your sister, then shoot yourself."
I tried to imagine having to tell my daughters something like that. War is hell, no mistake. And as bad as we think of the Nazis, the Polish felt there was no comparison with the Russians.
I just happened to be walking along the street on a Friday afternoon and came across this parade. They were headed to the main market square to sing and dance for an hour, which they do regularly on Fridays after school. It was enchanting to see the glorious costumes and cherubic Polish faces.
The Polish guitar is triangle-shaped.
It was wonderful to hear their singing.
Back to architecture: the fun of looking up
Funny things to do with roofs
Funny things to do with windows
Weird stuff coming out of the mouth is a clear theme. The shell, draperies, ribbons are frequent motifs.
Auschwitz
We rented a car and drove west to Oswiecm. I was happy to find out that the name of the town isn't really Auschwitz but Oswiecm, pronounced, more or less,
oz-vee-jim. This made the town seem like a real place before the Nazis made it famous. It's a surprise to see that it is just an ordinary Polish town, with new houses going up literally next door to the concentration camp. ( A note on Polish pronunciation: Greek is easy-peasy compared to Polish. I modestly tried to learn how to say thank you in Polish, but was completely stymied. Even after hearing it ten times in a row,
forget about it; whereas, Greek is melifluous, like Italian, with pure vowels.)
I have been to Dachau in southern Germany, but the sheer scale of Auschwitz was mind-blowing. It is absolutely huge. At first the Nazis thought the work camp was big enough, but soon they had to build an extermination camp that was about eight times the size of the first: Auschwitz-Birchenau. The cattle cars came in loaded with people, to a train stop between the two camps; 75% of them went right, to the extermination camp without any record of their existence, and only 25% went left, to the work camp. Of those, all would die within a few months because of the deprivations, food in particular, which was 1200 calories a day -- in other words, starvation. At first the Nazis took pictures of each person, with date of birth, internment, and death; we saw many of them, lining the walls, their faces looking out, reasonably healthy and strong though with shaved heads, and the date of death was without exception within a few months. Below is a picture of the first camp, where I'm pointing, and above is the second camp. The dotted lines mark the two camps. You can see that the second one dwarfs the first.
It becomes clear that sadism played a huge role in what the Nazis were about; it was so wildly unnecessary to kill people in this way. The work they got out of them can't have been worth anything at all. The mental torture, the humilations, the conditions of harsh winter with no warm clothing, the horrific prisons within the camps. The gas chambers started at Auschwitz, but they quickly needed to be able to get rid of bodies faster, hence the building of Birkenau. At one point they were gassing 20,000 people a day.
Heading to Zakopane, the alps of Poland
We headed south to Zakopane, the very southern-most tip of Poland, where there are mountains. On the way we saw many signs like these, braying Blach! We got so far as to figure out that the word blach has something to do with roofing tiles.
On the way to Zakopane, I thought it would be fun to pop over the border and have lunch in Slovakia. The border post was completely abandoned. Slovakia looked pretty much the same as Poland.
Zakopane Zakopane has beautiful mountains and a special kind of architecture. The houses are made of wood and there are gingerbread details. Horse-drawn carriages are a normal sight, although I think it's increased by tourism. Zakopane was full of tourists, although it is primarily a ski town. This time of year people are there for hiking.
Farming was noticably different from England and the US. Most of the field work seems to be done by hand, and hay is cut both by hand and tractor, and stacked by hand onto these sort of trees, for lack of a better word. We saw people hoeing crops in small family groups, and even saw farmers using horse-drawn wagons. This is not like England at all, where farming is very up-to-date.
This is the beautiful view of the mountains in Zakopane, heading north to Krackow. We have a mad dash to return the car and make the train back to Warsaw. It's so close that we have to leap over train tracks and as we run up to the train it's pulling away, and I push the green button and it stops. Phew.
On the way back, in Koln again, leaving the luggage for another layover. They have ingenious devices for storing luggage. You stuff your bags into a box shape, put in your money, and a ticket spits out. Your luggage then goes to some ethereal zone, not in the locker (which is very small) and then when you put your ticket back in, you hear a
thunk and there's your luggage, precisely as you had stacked it, including the plastic bag of cheeses that was tumbled on top. Very amazing.
Our train journey was a very different way to get to Poland. I'm not sure exactly what we gained, but it was very interesting to see what is between here and there, and to experience to some extent the cultures and languages as you go through them, rather than skipping them when you fly. I really want to get back to Eastern Europe. We were told that Croatia is perfectly fascinating, full of Roman ruins. So we shall see.
We arrive, mouths agape, marveling at the wonders of every European city which we are so fortunate as to visit. Krakow (Poland) in mid-June, was the site of a conference Bruce attended for four days.
We were there wandering around after the conference on a Friday afternoon marking the start of the Festival of St. John -- one of those Christian celebrations which cozies up nicely with a pagan observance (Midsummer's Day, in this case). Groups of local musicians and dancers came to entertain on the square that afternoon at the start of the weekend bash.
In Krakow we were trolling a lovely working-class market square, with stalls of fresh country vegetables, housewares, cheap clothing, exotic foods: you name it. And to my complete surprise, when nature called, a dank tunnel led me to a sight for sore eyes. It was a pleasure to pay two zloty (about sixty-five cents) to enter this well-lit, freshly-mopped and scrubbed temple, complete with hand-towels, hot water, soap -- and a fresh fern. We're not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy!
