Summing up Poland

Photo: Just one of many fascinating moments from the bus ride home.

We arrived back in Berlin yesterday after a ten-hour bus journey from Krakow a little tired but otherwise in good condition. (Fortunately no vomiting this time.) It was a little tricky figuring out which bus was ours at the station; there were lots of signs suggesting which bus was going where, but in the end the only way to find out was to ask the driver. So, that was the end of the trip; I could write a few detailed impressions of the Polish-dubbed, French language comedy Le Raid that was played for our entertainment on the way back (in one word: shitty), but here are a few general thoughts about Poland instead:

Food: It took us a little while to figure out what the most interesting items were, but I think my two favorite food items were zapiekanki and zurek. (Not that I knew what they were first before consulting the guidebook.) Zapiekanki is essentially Frenchbread pizza; it’s a half-baguette with melted cheese, mushrooms and onions, topped with some sort of spicy ketchup. We got ours at a street-side kiosk in Krakow for 4 zloty (about one Euro). Zurek is a rye soup with sour cream, filled with hard boiled eggs and sausage. I got a bowl of it at a small restaurant in Warsaw for 10 zloty, and we ended up going back there the next day for more.

Beer: I can’t say I was crazy about any of the beer varieties I had here; the last two bottles I sampled here in Krakow were Zywiec and Warka. Of those the first was better; Warka was a little more bitter although apparently made by the same brewery. Throughout Poland I could not seem to find a Polish beer that came in a variety other than lager, which to be was somewhat disappointing. I suppose it might have been fun to try some Polish vodka, but I think that’ll have to wait for a time when I’m not travelling with a pregnant wife.

Language: I came here without any previous language preparation, and indeed, I didn’t understand much of anything that wasn’t completely obvious or translated into English or German for me. (At one point, plundering my memory for the Polish „thank you,“ I inexplicably and most puzzlingly produced the Russian word for „four,“ which certainly says something about my improvisational language skills.) That said, it didn’t appear as though the written language would be all that difficult to understand once the basics were mastered; it seems to have many of the same consonant clusters as Russian, but without the challenging Cyrillic alphabet. Listening, on the other hand, struck me as more difficult; even though I thought I knew the words for „thank you,“ it seemed as though I was never pronouncing them properly and as though no two Poles pronounced them the same way. And there’s also the Polish letter „L with a line through it,“ which if I understand correctly, is supposedly sounds like the English „W,“ although when listening closely to Poles speaking, I could never hear it. (Perhaps I was actually hearing Russians speak what I thought was Polish.)

Considering Auschwitz; Visiting Wawel

Photo: Part of the Wawel Castle complex.

I went to sleep last night pondering some of the issues I wrote about yesterday, namely the local treatment of the Holocaust, and how it pertains to tourism in this region. I worried that this would give me bad or strange dreams, and indeed this anxiety kept me from falling asleep promptly. In my head I debated an irksome problem: whether or not I ought to break away from my wife for the day in order to visit the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Something in particular caused me to debate this question in my head: specifically, either the authors or those who compiled our guide book (many sections of which I read quite attentively either before or during our visit here) described a visit to Auschwitz as a sight that „should be compulsory viewing.“ (Lonely Planet Poland, 5th edition, p. 261) I can’t say I agree with this statement, although I certainly understand where such sentiments come from. However, as I attempted to write in my entry yesterday, it seems as though there are two distinct ways to handle the deep and painful emotions brought about by the Holocaust. First, there is the thinking that by publicizing the attrocities, by learning as much about them as possible and by visiting the sights at which they occured and by encouraging others to do so, the memories of those murdered will never be forgotten and the horrors will not be repeated. Secondly though – and I think this is the way that most people choose to deal with the Holocaust – one can also consider the atrocities of the Holocaust as too horrible to mention, as too disturbing to fully consider. Having already visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. and having previously viewed documentary footage taken from concentration camps, such as that in Night and Fog,, while it may be naive or presumptuous to assume so, I feel as though I have a fairly clear grasp of what happened during the Holocaust. The minutia of how exactly this gruesome process was carried out strikes me as an experience I cannot expect to understand, or to appreciate in whatever way those who would consider Auschwitz compulsory viewing.

From what I already know of this topic, for myself at least, at this moment, I deem Auschwitz an experience too awful to fully consider. That is not to say that I would never visit Auschwitz or another concentration camp, but for this particular journey, I did not feel the moment to be appropriate. Without a personal connection to the history of that place, I felt as though my visiting the camp – while it would have certainly produced sadness within me – it would have been a empty sadness, one that could not expect to be resolved by a visit there. And therefore, what purpose would it have served? And with this question lingering in my head, I tabled a visit to Auschwitz for another time before getting ready for sleep. It’s not a personal issue I consider resolved, but an ethical one that I’m sure a lot of people deal with.

At anyrate, by the time we’d finished breakfast this morning, we’d made a plan for our last full day in Poland. First we headed to Wawel Castle, the huge complex of royal quarters and fortifications at the southern tip of Krakow’s Old Town. This place was more or less inundated by tourists, but understandably so; the site was home to the Polish monarchs for centuries (before they moved to Warsaw) and accordingly, the palace (which survived World War II in good condition) houses a huge collection of antique paintings, furniture, carvings, weaponry, armor, and a number of other treasures we opted not to see on this trip due to time and financial restraints. (The royal tapestry collection, with which King Zygmunt August was apparently obsessed, will have to be saved for another visit, although we did see a fair share of his fancy rugs as part of the basic royal tour.) While the royal apartments that we saw were interesting and highly ornate, I must say the armoury was more impressive; I cannot remember having seen such a massive collection of decorative weapons or armour; particularly interesting was the szczerbiec, the sword used „in all Polish coronations from 1320 onwards“ (LP Poland, 135), which was a long sword with the Polish crest encrusted upon it.

Speaking of the length of swords and the like, it was rather astonishing – even amusing at times -- to see the enormity of some of the weapons and personal armor that some of the royalty received as gifts or kept for ceremonial purposes or for display. In an age where the average size of a man was considerably smaller than today, these men still owned swords that I can hardly imagine lifting – I’m talking about five foot long swords, 50 pound suits of armor, and ceremonial wear that would have been tagged XXXXL had it been made in India instead of given as a gift from the Pope. I’m not sure whether or not such items would have been left on display in the castle (much in the way they are today) in order to intimidate court visitors who would have little, if any actual contact with the royals. But what I indeed can imagine would be the potential embarassment and Monty Python-esqe snickers that the the royal must have had to endure on any occasion where he might have actually had to lift such a monstrous weapon. Also within the Wawel complex lies another of Poland’s most important cathedrals, which houses a number of relics sacred to Catholics as well as the remains of the Polish royalty and other famous Poles, such as writer Adam Mickiewicz and national heroes Jozef Pilsudski and Tadeusz Kosciuszko.

Of course this place is also stuffed to the gills with fantastic artistry. The sides of the cathedral are made up of seperate chapels, each of which has distinct and remarkable alterpieces and other adornments. From the outside one can see several of the chapels, and how they were probably added to the main building in different stages. The result is a somewhat eclectic but entirely unique and impressive facade. Another interesting aspect of the cathedral was the Sigismund Bell, which I managed to climb my way up to after overcoming a brief but intimidating spell of claustro- and acro-phobia. The passageway up to the bell – a simply huge instrument, as oversized as any of the king’s fancy outfits or swords at 11 metric tons – was fortunately not too high. While I honestly wasn’t that impressed by the bell itself, it was an interesting oddity. But the construction of the wooden staircase and the bell’s support structure was more memorable to me due to its creepy interior that one sees in movies or television at times. I always assumed that such places, with creaking, thick wooden floors and shadowy corners, no longer existed; that they were only recreations of stories or drawings. But indeed they’re still here in Europe and in fact I’ve encountered a number of them here, in Amsterdam, in Hamburg, in Prague, and now here in Krakow as well. Really, that was about the end of the day. We cut it a bit shorter than some of our previous days on the trip, mostly because our legs were pretty worn out from all the walking we’ve done the past six days.

First Impressions of Krakow

Photo: Gravestones at a Jewish cemetery in Kazimierz.

Today we said goodbye to Poland’s capital after three short days and nights, riding a non-stop train from Warsawa Centralna to Krakowa Glowny, a journey of just over two and a half hours. Although we left several parts of Warsaw unexplored, including the suburbs across the Vistula and the park areas to the south and distant west of the city. We’ll have to get to them on another occasion, I suppose.

After the less than ideal circumstances surrounding our previous train voyages – those that brought us from Gdansk to Malbork and then to Warsaw – I wasn’t exactly relishing the trip to Krakow. But these worries proved to be completely unfounded; the second class car was up to modern international standards, with only six seat compartment instead of the eight we’d seen elsewhere in Poland. The cars were also equipped with electric outlets for laptop use or whathaveyou, although I didn’t partake, prefering to nap between stints of viewing the countryside rather than trying to write. We had two traveling companions in our compartment (although of course we never talked to one another), one seemingly a German in his early twenties; the other a young professional that I assumed to be Polish. The German toted perhaps the most enormous suitcase I have ever seen used for train travelling; just over half of it fit atop the luggage rack above our heads, and it sat there so precariously I was half expecting it to slip off and smash us. (It didn’t.) The Pole kept himself entertained for the better part of the voyage reading what looked to be the Polish version of „Playboy,“ which of course illicited a few disapproving glances from my wife. Outside we sped through depot after small-town depot, past rows of pine trees, and between hills and over valleys. The ride, in my opinion, was actually somewhat less scenic than the trip to Warsaw, although after six days of travel it could also be that I’m simply becoming accustomed to the scenery and to travel again. Upon arrival in Krakow, we made our way from the train station to our lodging, a youth hostel on the city’s north side called the „Dizzy Daisy.“ I suppose it’s a sign that we’re starting to get older, but my wife and I don’t fit as well into such places as we once did, although perhaps we never fit all that well into them in the first place. The receptionists were two friendly if somewhat less than attentive Polish girls of perhaps 22 to 25 years old that seem to work here pretty consistantly, and perhaps live here as well, probably quite affordably. The double room we were given for just under 122 Zloty per night (about $40) is not exactly well decorated or highly equipped, but is clean and adequate. The room is situated on the fourth floor, comes with two basic single beds, nothing that could be called electronic, and shares a bathroom with the room adjecent to ours, which is apparently occupied although we haven’t seen our suitemates. (We never met them but on the final night we stayed there, one of them performed an extremely loud, drunken, and mostly incomprehensable rendition of "Paid in Full" by the 1980s rap duo Eric B. and Rakim. Further proof that this wasn't quite our crowd.)

The room is painted in a strange combination of green and yellow pastels, tones that would seemingly fit better in coastal Florida than in southern Poland. By Western standards it’s pretty drab, and compared to the place we stayed at in Warsaw, incredibly simple. But still, I like these sort of places; even if they aren’t that great of a bargain considering the very basic services available, one still gets the sensation of thrift and can focus on the experiences offered by the city itself, which is usually the reason one travels to begin with.

And many parts of the city were appealing at first glance; as soon as we stepped off the train, it was pretty obvious from the number of hostelling offers and tourist information booths that more visitors come here than Warsaw, for example. In the center of town we immediately headed to the market square, upon which St. Mary’s cathedral lays across like a square of color on some modernist painting. The effect is very unique, and the church itself was incredibly ornate; gold coloring completely covered the main alterpiece, which depicted the various trials and tribulations of the building’s namesake. The altar was set in front of an enormous stained-glass window, each section of which illustrating an aspect of the Bible. Other sections of the church featured huge crucifixes such as those we saw at the national museum in Warsaw yesterday.

Seeing this church was a pretty amazing experience because finally after seeing so many pieces in Poland that had been transplanted or reconstructed, here was an authentic Gothic church, intact, displaying its various treasures in the original form. After pausing to hear the hourly bugle call from the church’s towers, we stopped to buy what appeared to be a bagel for 1 zloty (others were selling for .90 zloty or 1.10 zloty, but isn’t 1 the perfect price? Certainly some street vendors are misreading the market) we battled through some dense pedestrian and tram traffic in a southerly direction toward Kazimierz, an adjoining district that served as home to a decent-sized Jewish community before World War II.

Here we visited a number of Synagogues that somehow survived the war, although the status of most of these buildings was unimpressive, particularly when compared to the Catholic buildings in the center of town. It seems pretty clear that many of these places have been more or less abandoned – and when one considers the sick truth, which is that they’re abandoned because the communities these places served were either viciously exterminated or scattered in order to escape this terror – it makes depressing sense. The Jewish cemetary adjoining the Remuh Synagogue – a burial place that was wrecked by the Nazis during their occupation of the city – has apparently been restored to some degree, but clearly this work was carried out years ago and my feeling was that the city does not do much, if anything, to keep such sites in good condition. In my mind this lends to some sense of conflict between the Polish need for developing a strong national character – a national character in which Catholicism clearly plays an important role – and the plight of the Jewish community that once lived in these cities as a sizable minority. My gut feeling is that it seems that the needs of the former Jewish community are rather overlooked in Poland – although again, this is a nation that through no real fault of its own no longer houses a sizable Jewish minority. Still, the needs of this former community are palpable, as was displayed by a photo exhibit at the Higher Synagogue that featured hundreds of photos – from both before the war and recently -- of the people and their descendants that once made up the Jewish community there.

There is this experience, then contrasted with the aspects of the Holocaust as popular culture and/or tourist attraction. Leaflets in our youth hostel (and in other places around town) advertise tours of Auschwitz using exclamation points and as if it were some kind of amusement park. In the Higher Synagogue itself, a bookshop sold books and other media specifically related to the Holocaust; while I found this uncomfortable if not somehow inappropriate, it is understandable, assuming the proceeds of such sales go to the improvement of the facilities there. But I do not quite understand the marketing of the sites of the former concentration camps or the need to provide bus tours there. There is clearly a need to deal with those issues with both sensativity and with practicality; obviously those are not a easy messages to convey, and furthermore, the topic itself is so emotional and difficult to grasp, it is perhaps no wonder that I find myself somewhat torn when trying to make sense of it.

Warsaw: Day II

Photo: Artwork for sale at the Old Town Square.

After a night of sleep where I dreamt of GRE math problems (I think I can safely attribute this to having fallen asleep while calculating Zloty-Euro conversions in my head), I awoke to find my legs and knees somewhat sore from the previous day’s walks. Nonetheless, I felt compelled to further explore this city by foot, although we planned to stay closer to the center of town and eventually made use of public transit to some degree.

The first stop for my wife and I was the Saxon Gardens, a nice tree-filled area just to the north of our hotel. While the gardens were ostensibilly devoid of greenery due to the winter weather, we still enjoyed examining the numerous sculptures, fooling around in the playground (my wife’s spin on the merry-go-round was a somewhat late-in-life first-time experience) and admiring the sizeable population of ducks in the pond there. (Ducks happen to be one of my favorite waterfowl.) After an hour or so of these amusements we stopped at the Polish version of the tomb of the unknown soldier, a seemingly understated monument, that was located at the north end of the gardens. The surroundings, however, were fairly stirring. The monument faced a large, almost entirely empty plaza, paved over flat with squares of concrete. However, on two sides of the monument, excavations had revealed what appeared to be the cellars of pre-war housing; the shells of these underground sites extended in each direction on both the east and west sides of the plaza probably around 100 meters, and then of course there were the undisturbed sections of the plaza which surely conceal similar ruins beneath the concrete surface. (Note: after further review, I've found that the ruins may actually have been associated with the Saxon Palace that occupied these grounds before the war but was never rebuilt.)

Afterwards, we headed back to the Old Town again for a final look at that plaza and the surrounding streets. The area was much more lively today, probably due in part to the fact that all the shops and restaurants were open for business, but also because the weather was fairly clear, although crisp. The additional tourist traffic brought a tangible „open for business“ atmosphere with it; horse-drawn carriages toted visitors around the square, and entrepeneurs offered a range of wares such as wood carvings, paintings, stamp collections and souvenier trinkets – some working the crowd with discretion, others with tremendous panache. The guy who politely approached my wife and I with his stamp collection but who refused to leave until we said „no“ a third time sticks in my head. Nonetheless, I preferred the atmosphere today over yesterday, when a drunk guy (albeit a tri-lingual drunk guy) approached us and asked for a zloty so that he could buy a beer. I appreciated the honesty, but it’s not easy to give out money – even such a triffling amount -- for such reasons when you’re on a limited budget yourself, and in the end, it’s just an uncomfortable situation. Still, I wish that guy the best of luck, and will have to think of him tonight when I crack open my own bottle of suds. But I digress.

After snapping off a few more photos in the low but pleasent winter sun, we walked toward the New Town for a lunch of borscht and pierogis filled with seasoned meat. We shared the rather smokey restaurant with a couple groups of Austrian and British tourists – the Poles apparently preferred to sit at the bar rather than in the larger lounge area. From there we hiked over to the subway, where unlike in several European cities, you must buy tickets in advance and feed them through a kind of an admission machine, similar to the turnstiles in the Washington DC or New York City metros. We only took the subway two stops (an incredibily clean system, but also a rather small one) to the „Centrum“ station, where we got off and headed to the national museum, stopping on the way to buy an apple danish and the most enormous rum and raisin ball I have ever attempted to eat.

While from the outside, the national museum didn’t look all that impressive, I was actually quite pleased with the interior. Seeing as how Poland rivals Italy for Europe’s most devout Catholic nation, perhaps it shouldn’t have surprised me much that the musuem’s collections are made up primarily of artwork pertaining to this branch of Christianity. From the numerous gruesome crucefixes (some of them disturbingly realistic), wooden alterpieces (carved and assembled with obvious mastery) and religious statues on display there, many of them dating to the 15th century, one quickly gets a fuller understanding of the significance that religion has for the national character. And I must say that while originally I had hoped to do more exploring of the city on foot – at first I considered spending time in a museum to be a waste of the precious few daylight hours Poland gets this time of year – in the end I felt quite pleased and enlightened to a degree to have visited; once I made the realization that a good number of the works on display had been saved or salvaged from World War II destruction, I appreciated them more as legitimate pieces of Polish national treasure. One huge and intricate wooden alterpiece, for example, came from one of the Gdansk churches that we had visited a couple of days before – a church that was still undergoing reconstruction.

Anyway, we stayed at the museum from about 2:00 until closing time at 4:00 (apparently many Poles arrive to and leave work earlier in order to maximize sunlight hours), and after that we bought some groceries and made our way back to our hotel by foot along Nowy Swiat, one of the trendier commercial streets in Warsaw, which is lined with shops and restaurants before it turns into Krakowskie Przedmiescie, the street that heads to the castle and Old Town.

Hangover, Moldovan Style; Seeing the Ghetto

Photo: A fellow visitor takes in the memorial to the Ghetto Uprising in Warsaw.

2007 threatened to start poorly for my wife and I, as she awoke with a stuffy nose (perhaps too much windy, chilly winter weather) and I awoke with a bit of a hangover (perhaps too much Moldovan champagne.) Fortunately, the staff at our (overpriced) hotel did not seem to have awoken with either, and managed to procure for us a respectable breakfast buffet of comparable quality to what we’d had in Gdansk. (Various mayonnaise-based salads, sausages, breads, and the normals array of meats, cheeses, and vegetables). I think my first good laugh of the day came when I saw one of my fellow hotel patrons – clearly more hungover than myself – pouring himself glass after puny glass of watery juice into the comically undersized cups provided by our dear hotel staff.

Aside from that, however, there were few laughs today, as we spent the better part of our free time on a walking tour that took us primarily to monuments related to the various World War Two atrocities that occurred in Warsaw. Among them: A monument dedicated to the Poles who perished in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, a monument to those who were killed or took their own lives in the 1943 Ghetto Uprising, a memorial to the leader of the Ghetto Uprising and the Umschlagplatz, or the place where Jews were rounded up and forced into wagons headed to Treblinka. All but the first of these memorials were situated within the grounds of the former Ghetto, traces of which have completely vanished to the eyes of the unfamiliar. In place of the Ghetto are dozens of "modern," post-war, Soviet-style block houses, separated by wide boulevards and often excessive greenspace. This in itself is eerie, because it’s obvious that these buildings would not be here had Warsaw – its inhabitants and the physical place itself – not been savagely demolished between the years 1939 and 1945. I found myself at a loss – to say anything when visiting these places seems to almost mimic the grave and tragic events that occurred there, but to say nothing feels insensitive and, of course, massively depressing. As a tourist it’s hard to imagine what it must be like for those who actually work and live in and around these places. The degree to which these important – but highly disturbing – memorials and monuments dominate the cityscape and the aesthetic is considerable, although one assumes that after repeated contact with such landmarks, the effect diminishes. However, that can’t really be what the creators intended. How can the effect of such ethical and humanitarian mistakes ever really be diminished?

At any rate, we broke up our visits to these places with long stretches of walking – not on purpose, but out of convenience really – which had the effect both of enhancing the experience (giving us a feel for the dimensions of the Ghetto as well as a period of time to reflect while walking between the sites) and of wearing us out (we walked about 15 km in five hours or so.) At night we came back to the hotel for a simple meal of bread, cheese and yogurt (as well as a Zubr or „Bison“ beer for me) and for some much-needed rest.