Poland 2012: Part 4: Nowa Huta and Emailia

Greetings!

A big week for me coming up as I’m off on my annual backpacking adventure! On Wednesday I’m flying to Kiev where I’ll be visiting Chernobyl before then heading south for Odessa and journeying through the weird and wonderful country of Moldova to Romania where I hope to explore parts of Moldavia and Maramures. I can’t wait!.

What all of that means however, is that for the next few weeks Uncle Travelling Matt is going to be a bit different as I can’t go on posting my finished works stored here on my home computer. So instead I’ll be posting updates of where I am with, if I can work out how to do it, photos downloaded from my camera. That way, when I get kidnapped by Transdniestran terrorists, you’ll be the first to know!

All well and good, but that then leaves us with another problem, namely the fact that we’ve not finished the Poland travelogue and it is proving to be very popular with readers. So what I’ve decided to do is start posting an installment every day or every other day until it’s all up, (3 more I think…) and along those lines, here’s Part IV in which Mike and I explore more of Krakow’s tumultuous past including a communist model city, a church inspired by Noah’s Ark and an enamelware factory once owned by a certain gentleman named Oskar Schindler.

Keep travelling!

Uncle Travelling Matt

Links to all parts of the travelogue:

Poland 2012: Part 1: Krakow

Poland 2012: Part 2: Czestochowa

Poland 2012: Part 3: Auschwitz

Poland 2012: Part 4: Nowa Huta and Emailia

Poland 2012: Part 5: Wieliczka and the (not-so) Beautiful Game

Flickr album of this trip

  

FRIDAY

We had a late morning and then headed to the railway station to try and work out Kraków’s complex tram system. In Poland it’s not just a case of jumping on, buying a ticket and going where you want. Oh no, instead one must first buy a ticket, but alas tickets are only sold from kiosks but, crucially, not all kiosks and there is no clue to the uninitiated as to which the correct ones might be. We tried about three before we found one that had tram tickets to sell to us but then, first task done, we had to cope with the second, namely finding the correct tram to get on. There are route maps next to the stops and from one of these I’d worked out that the tram we needed passed by the railway station, but in which direction and from which stand? Eventually, after trying no less than four tram stops, we found the one that we needed and when our tram eventually arrived we had to wander out into the middle of the road, dodging traffic, to get on it. Hardly a Health and Safety Rep’s dream but we survived and managed to board our carriage. That done, it was then onto task three, namely finding the machine that verifies our tickets and inserting them into it in the correct way. Then and only then could we finally sit down and enjoy the ride.

Our destination that morning was Nowa Huta, a suburb of Kraków with a population of around a quarter of a million. After the war when the communists came to power they embarked upon the modernisation and industrialisation of the country and the construction of Nowa Huta was a key plank in their strategy. In true Stalinist tradition, it was decreed that steel production needed to increase dramatically and so a vast new steelworks was planned and beside it a new city to house the workers, (the name ‘Nowa Huta’ literally means ‘new steelworks’). A decision was made that this new city would be a model city, a bold declaration to the world of the new, socialist Poland.[1] As such it was to be built on a grand, monumental scale in the officially approved Socialist Realist style and with plentiful amenities for the workers. Those who had previously been ignored and trampled upon were now the masters and would be treated accordingly. They would have access to theatres and green spaces and would live in buildings that resembled the palaces of the old nobility. Significantly though, in this new city of the future, in the Brave New Poland, there would be no room for the ‘superstition’ and ‘backwardness’ that I had witnessed two days before in Czestochowa. Nowa Huta was to be a beacon of atheism with not a church in sight.

Our tram dropped us off in the magnificent Plac Centralny[2], the centre of the new workers’ paradise. Grand avenues stretched off in all directions whilst three sides of the square were flanked by impressive classical buildings. It reminded me strongly of Ceausescu’s Bucharest but then it should do for both were mammoth projects inspired by the same ideal.

Plac Centralny

We walked down the grand Aleja Roz to the Ratuszowy Park. Nowa Huta was never completely finished and this was originally planned as a vast ceremonial square with a magnificent city hall in the centre. That never got built and newer buildings betray where the original plans were modified to something less spectacular. It is a shame for if built to the original vision, it would have been incredible.

Original plan for the city hall

Just beyond the park is the small Nowa Huta Museum. We entered and checked out the exhibits which detailed not only the grand vision behind and the construction of the city, but also many subsequent events, in particular the building of the Arka Pana – the first church eventually allowed in the city by the communist authorities – and Nowa Huta’s starring role in the anti-communist Solidarity movement during the 1980s. Ironically, the workers who were so extolled by the regime that purported to represent them during the 1950s were the very people who brought it down in the eighties and their model city was one of the main focal points of resistance.

We walked on through the damp streets of that model city towards the Arka Pana and I thought about the whole Nowa Huta project. On the one hand, I must confess to liking it; architecture and town planning have long interested me and planning on such a grand scale – the ‘mega-project’ – is always exciting to witness, and I was sad that this one – like so many mega-projects – was never completed. I was attracted too to the idealism, the goal of building a better world, a world where the worker is valued, the poor man is king. It is a noble dream and that nobility is what gave communism its appeal and sustained it for so long. Who cannot applaud the efforts of men who believed that those at the very bottom of society should have access to theatres, libraries, decent living conditions and proper schools for their children so that they could escape the poverty trap that ensnared their parents, green spaces in which to run and play, and all the other amenities which give life its purpose and quality. The style too is rather to my tastes. I like architecture with a nod to the past and Socialist Realism, although much decried by many critics, has just that, both to classical architecture and the vernacular Polish styles. Furthermore, it is an architectural style that states something clearly and that is a statement of hope in the future, of progress, of victory, of belief in a better world to come. Modern and Post-Modern architecture is so often, by its very definition, purposeless, drifting, driven more by cost factors than aught else. Socialist Realism on the other hand implies that the poor are worth spending a little extra on and that to me is refreshing to see.

Nowa Huta: the vision

However, despite all these factors, at Nowa Huta something was wrong. I can’t place my finger on it exactly, but definitely something wasn’t there. Perhaps it was the grey? The formerly socialist world always seems to appear overwhelmingly grey and dark and Nowa Huta is no exception. To be fair, on a dark, rainy afternoon in February most places ever appear at their most colourful, but nonetheless, this was still was a dour place. More than that though, it was the scale. Nowa Huta is grand, big, stupendous in its vision. The streets are wide and the buildings high yet in amongst all that the humans that live there are almost lost, overwhelmed by the scale of the built environment that surrounds them. In his book A Vision of Britain HRH Prince Charles argues that the human being should be central to the scale of all buildings since that is who they are built for yet at Nowa Huta this maxim seems to have been ignored. Perhaps this is because, whilst the ideals behind it are laudable, Nowa Huta, like so many communist initiatives was imposed on the people, with pressure from above, not below. People were being told what was good for them, not consulted, but without that consultation those people somehow got forgotten on the way.

On our way to the Arka Pana, just past the Teatr Ludowy we stopped at a market. Mike is an avid browser of such places and had been told to explore them by his Polish neighbours. This one however, held little of interest, mainly cheap tat and vegetables. At one stall some old women were selling goat’s cheese and, feeling pity for them, we thought about buying some but when they gave us a taster it was bland, watery and vaguely unpleasant so, much to their disappointment, we passed on.

The Arka Pana (Lord’s Ark) Church is remarkable not only for its architecture – bold and modern, the architect Wojciech Pietrzyk was inspired by Le Corbusier’s Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp – but also the story behind its construction. As I have already said, Nowa Huta was conceived as an atheist city and there was to be no church within its boundaries, but as early as 1960 residents were agitating for one to be built. Construction finally began in 1967 and built entirely through donations and voluntary labour, it rose brick by brick. The Arka Pana was finally consecrated by Cardinal Karol Wojtyla – later to become Pope John Paul II – in 1977 and during the years of martial law (1981-3) Masses for the Fatherland were held every Friday followed by anti-government demonstrations after the services had finished.

Arka Pana

Not being a particular fan of modern architecture, I must admit to being rather nonplussed by the exterior but inside it was altogether more appealing. There was a Marian grotto underneath the main altar but what caught my eye most were the Stations of the Cross, fourteen grand paintings depicting Christ’s Passion in a traditional rural Polish setting. I’m a firm believer in the principle that religion should interact with and become part of the local cultural tapestry and this was a perfect demonstration of this. They were marvellous to behold.

Detail from one of the Stations of the Cross, Arka Pana

We walked back to Plac Centralny and ate a traditional communist restaurant named Stylowa where we enjoyed soup, a meat main with cabbage and mash and fruit juice for a very reasonable 14zł. Then we jumped onto a tram and headed out to our next stop on our tour of Kraków’s outer districts.

On the 3^rd March, 1941 the Germans ordered that all the Jews from Kraków and the surrounding districts be collected together in a ghetto in the working class district of Podgórze on the far side of the River Vistula. Conditions were appalling. Some fifteen thousand people were crammed into an area containing some three hundred and twenty buildings, or, to put it another way, there were over four families in every apartment. On top of that, food rations were minimal and unless you had a job – unpaid – Jewish wages went straight to the SS – starvation was a real danger. Even so, most Jews still did not realise just what the Nazi masterplan was. “At least we are still alive”; “This is the bottom, things cannot get worse”; “They won’t get rid of us, we are useful to them” were the kind of comments that were banded about by Jews still in a state of shock at the degradations they had already been made to suffer. They were wrong. On the 30^th May, 1942 all residents without work cards were rounded up and sent to Belzec Concentration Camp. Few survived the war. Then on the 28^th October, 1942 all the ‘excessive’ residents – the elderly, infirm, children – were also rounded up and taken to Belzec. Few survived. Then in December 1942 the ghetto was divided into two zones – Zone A for the workers and Zone B for the others. Finally, on the 13^th March, 1943 all the inhabitants of Zone A were moved to the nearby Płasów Concentration Camp. The very next day everyone left in Zone B was massacred. In retrospect the German plan was clear: concentrate the Jews so that they could be controlled more easily, squeeze them slowly, use the useful and dispose of the excess and then finally kill those that remained. They were all doomed from the moment that the German tanks first rolled into Poland.

Little remains in Podgórze today to remind the visitor of the horrors that once occurred there. The most interesting building that Mike and I came across was a fantastically ornate church but that had lain outside of the ghetto walls. All that we saw to remind us was a short section of the ghetto wall that had been preserved and in Plac Bohaterow Getta (Heroes of the Ghetto Square) a memorial to those who had been killed. It was a series of empty chairs, meant to symbolise the shock and the hurry in which the residents had been forced to leave.

Just outside the former ghetto though, stands Oskar Schindler’s Emailia enamelware factory where many of the ghetto’s Jews once worked and which was to become the ark that saved over a thousand of them.

Schindler’s factory is now a museum and a very good one at that. It details the history of Kraków during the years immediately preceding the war and with a particular emphasis on the Jews and Schindler. Mike, who once designed museum sets for a living, was particularly impressed by how it was set out and I had to agree. It was fascinating and we were both glad to have spent a couple of hours there, giving more depth and understanding to what we had seen at Auschwitz the day before.

Inside the Schindler Factory Museum

That evening we returned to Chłopskie Jadło where I enjoyed one of the finest soups that I have ever tasted. It was made from bacon and sour cream and called zurek. It was followed up by some ribs in honey sauce which were also rather moreish. After than neither of us fancied drinking so we retired to the hotel and Mike fired up the computer and started bidding for antique watches on eBay, (he’s a bit of a buyer and seller). Such things are addictive though, particularly to one with a penchant for buying old banknotes and very soon I was bidding two and by midnight we’d both spent all that we would have spent on drink and more with naught but some inter-war German currency and Soviet timepieces to show for it. Hmm… Money-saving strategy fail.

Next part: Poland 2012: Part 5: Wieliczka and the (not-so) Beautiful Game

Flickr album of this trip

Technorati Tags: travel,blog,poland,matt pointon,krakow,nowa huta,communist,communism,schindlers list,oskar schindler,holocaust,nazi,emailia,ghetto,jews,jewish,arka pana,catholicism,solidarity,tram

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[1] One reason why this new city was built adjacent to Kraków was because in a referendum on establishing the People’s Republic in 1945, the predominantly middle-class and conservative citizens of Kraków had voted firmly against it – a major source of embarrassment for the communists. Consequently, a new satellite city was planned to attract people from lower socio-economic backgrounds and thus “correct the class imbalance”.

[2] Actually, it has been renamed in honour of Ronald Reagan since democracy although this was controversial, unpopular and no one uses the official designation. Good.

Poland 2012: Part 3: Auschwitz

Greetings!

Still in Poland, this week I talk about my visit to one of the most affecting places on earth; certainly one of the most affecting that I’ve ever visited. In this episode, Mike and I visit Auschwitz where over a million souls perished during the Second World War. Not happy reading but essential in my opinion.

Keep travelling!

Uncle Travelling Matt

Links to all parts of the travelogue:

Poland 2012: Part 1: Krakow

Poland 2012: Part 2: Czestochowa

Poland 2012: Part 3: Auschwitz

Poland 2012: Part 4: Nowa Huta and Emailia

Poland 2012: Part 5: Wieliczka and the (not-so) Beautiful Game

Flickr album of this trip

THURSDAY

There was one place that I knew I had to see on this trip and that was Auschwitz. I’m not a big believer in ‘must sees’ but Auschwitz is an exception. I need not explain why.

Yet at the same time I had apprehensions about my visit. Most people have apprehensions about visiting a concentration camp where thousands were murdered I would imagine, but mine were different. Over the years I have read so much about and visited so many places connected with mass slaughter in general and the Holocaust in particular that I was afraid of being numbed somehow to what had taken place there, unable to fully feel the horror that such a place warrants.

I can’t remember when I was first told about the Holocaust. It was probably in a primary school History or RE lesson. My first memory of being aware of the horror was watching Escape from Sobibor, an eighties film about the breakout of prisoners that took place from that camp in 1943.I never watched the entire film – it was rated 18 and my parents were always very strict about film ratings – but an image stuck in my mind of a cattle truck with dozens of human hands thrust out of the tiny ventilation holes accompanied by a barrage of screams and groans.

In the first year of high school we visited the Jewish Museum in Manchester. There was an exhibition on there on the Holocaust which included some photos showing emaciated bodies being thrown into a furnace. These images shocked me profoundly. Since then though, the feelings that I encountered at Yad Vashem, the Berlin Jewish Museum, Hiroshima, Tuol Sleng and other sites of great horror that I have visited have been more akin to an empty numbness.

Auschwitz – or ‘Oświęcim’ to give it ts Polish name – can be visited either independently or as part of a group. My initial inclination had been to do it independently but prior to leaving Britain I rang up Paul, an old family friend and leading light in the North Staffordshire Hebrew Congregation. He’d been to Auschwitz on Holocaust memorial and educational trips and I wanted his advice. “Go on the group tour,” he implored. “Seriously, go on the group tour. I know it’s a little bit more expensive but you’ll miss so much out if you don’t. For starters, Auschwitz is on two sites and they’re a couple of miles apart and getting from one to other can be a real pain.”

Thus it was that we were sat on a minibus rolling through the grey, sleet-covered Polish countryside. It felt like an ordinary group tour; in front of us were a young Liverpudlian couple who were waxing lyrical on what a fashionable city Liverpool is, (“Although the fake tans and false eyelashes can be a bit much like…”), whilst the guide warned us about the perils of not straying too far from the group. Only the catalogue of horrors that I was reading in my novel reminded me that this was no jaunt to a beauty spot.

It was cold and grey when we arrived at Auschwitz. We were assigned a guide with excellent – if curiously accented – English whom we listened to through a set of headphones. Then we stepped out of the entrance hall and into the camp itself.

Auschwitz was not how I’d imagined it to be. I’d expected a bleak collection of wooden dorms surrounded by a high fence punctuated by the infamous gate with the words ‘ARBEIT MACHT FREI’ written across the top.[1] Instead what I found was somewhere far more civilised. The dorms and other buildings were all built solidly out of brick and the site compact and tidy. “Plant some flowers and it might even look nice,” I said to myself. This looked more like the prison where Mike and I work than the jerry-built hell-hole of my imaginings.

At the Gates to Auschwitz

Our guide explained to us why this was. “This was a Polish Army barracks before the Nazis[2] took over and made it a prison. And Auschwitz I was never a death camp; Auschwitz I was a concentration camp, mainly for political prisoners.”

Extermination

We went into an exhibition cheerfully called ‘Extermination’ in one of the old dorm blocks. The interior had been stripped and instead were a series of displays that attempted to explain just what had gone on during the war. The first gave a number – 1.6 million approximately – that had been murdered at Auschwitz. No bodies were left; the vast majority had been cremated and the ash spread on the fields as fertiliser. The only memorial was a large jar full of human ash. It could just as easily have been taken from our old coal fire at home. All that was left from 1.6 million, the equivalent of the populations of Liverpool and Birmingham combined, was a jar of grey dust.

The remains of over a million souls…

One room had been left as it was, a dorm where the inmates had slept on straw like animals. It didn’t look that bad, not as bad as I’d expected it to be, but it was. The corridor was lined with photographs of some of the earlier inmates, (after a year or so, the Germans gave up bothering to record their victims – there were simply too many), with names, arrival and death dates. The average stay was three months.

Other rooms detailed just how the mass slaughter was carried out. It was explained that gassing people with Zyklon B did not happen immediately. Auschwitz had originally been a prison camp for political prisoners who, like those in the photographs downstairs, had been mostly Polish and had been worked and starved to death rather than murdered outright. It was only later on, largely after the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Problem’ had been decided upon[3] that methods for wholesale mass murder were explored due to several factors, such as worries about how shooting huge numbers might affect the German troops psychologically, economic factors, (the bullets were needed at the front), but primarily the sheer numbers involved. Early ideas involved carbon monoxide – a variation on the suicide tactic of putting a tube from a car exhaust into the car itself, shutting the windows and turning on the ignition – and indeed this system was used at Treblinka until the end of the war, but at Auschwitz experiments were done using Zyklon B and that was found to be more effective. Later on, when we visited the punishment block, we came across a cell in the basement with a plaque on the wall in remembrance of the 600 Russian POWs and 250 Poles who had died in the first experiments with the gas on the 3^rd September, 1941. In the Extermination exhibition we saw a large-scale model of one of the gas chambers at Birkenau and a huge pile of empty Zyklon B canisters, enough to kill several thousand. What surprised me though is that it wasn’t a gas that was piped in but instead small pellets that only turned to gas in the humid atmosphere of the chamber, warmed up by the heat of hundreds of bodies pressed close to each other. It took an excruciating twenty minutes to die.[4]

Canisters of Zyklon B

There were other rooms of horror after that. A room full of suitcases, all from a single train, a ‘delivery’ of Jews from Holland; rooms full of glasses, shoes, cooking utensils and, most stomach-churning of all, human hair. Even this though, did not affect me like the room full of children’s clothing, many of the garments the same size as those my four-year old son wears. To murder adults is one thing; to slaughter innocent children is something else entirely.

Shoes of the dead

Suitcases from a Holland ‘delivery’

In the punishment block we saw cells were eight people were forced to stand in a space barely big enough for two; cells where inmates were starved to death including the one where St. Maximillian Kolbe died. He was a Polish priest who, in July 1941, offered to take the place of a condemned man because that man had a wife and children who needed him. The Germans accepted and the condemned man survived the war. Kolbe died in his place but for his Christ-like act is revered throughout Poland and beyond as a great Christian martyr.[5]

We saw also the wall against which thousands of inmates were shot, the ‘hospital’ block where the infamous Dr. Mengele conducted his hideous experiments and then the spot where, after the war, the former camp commandant Rudolf Höß was hanged. Near there our guide pointed out Höß’s former residence, a large house that is not part of the museum because it is lived in by a Polish family who have refused to sell it despite many offers. Why anyone would want to live in such a place though is beyond me.

Then last of all came the gas chamber itself, a non-descript brick bunker in which around three hundred and forty people could be herded and killed in one go.[6] Walking through the changing rooms into the chamber itself, it was chilling to think that these were the last scenes that sixty thousand fellow human beings ever saw of life on earth. As our guide explained things though, strangely, perhaps because the human mind cannot cope with so much suffering and death, more practical issues came to mind. It took around twenty minutes for all the people in the chamber, but the ovens next door had a much lower capacity – if worked constantly, it took around twenty-four hours to burn the corpses – and so emptying the chamber could take days. The biggest limiting factor for the Nazi operations was not the killing but instead the disposing of the bodies and for some reason that I can’t quite understand, that really shocked me.

Mike at Auschwitz

What most people do not realise unless they have visited for themselves is that what is referred to as ‘Auschwitz’ was not actually a single camp but instead a whole colony of them that got its name from that of the nearby town, the German rendering of which is Auschwitz but for the Poles it is Oświęcim. The institution that Mike and I had visited first was Auschwitz I, the oldest of the camps but that was not the biggest nor the place where most died. After the Final Solution was decided upon, Auschwitz II – Birkenau – was constructed, ten times the size of the original and unlike Auschwitz I its primary purpose was not as a labour or prison camp but instead extermination pure and simple. Auschwitz I was the concentration camp where inmates were worked to death, but Birkenau was a death camp where over a million, mainly Jews, met their deaths in the gas chambers. Most inmates of Birkenau went straight to their deaths from the trains; they were not there for long. In addition to these, there was also an Auschwitz III – Monolitz – which was primarily a labour camp for supplying the various industrial complexes in the town with slave labour and forty-five sub-camps mostly situated in or near to the factories where their inmates were put to work.

We now got on the bus and made our way the two kilometres across from Auschwitz I to Auschwitz II – Birkenau. If Auschwitz I had been a prison – not the most shocking of places to two people who spend their working lives within a similar institution – Birkenau was something else entirely. On a cold, windswept plain, huge, surrounded by a high fence and watchtowers, with row after row of wooden huts and a railway line leading through the brick gatehouse and into its dark heart, the railway line along which the doomed of Europe were transported to their deaths, this was the very realisation of one’s nightmares about the Holocaust.

It was freezing cold. An arctic wind blew from the grey sky and chilled our bones. On the platform where the incoming trains were once unloaded of their human cargo – and where today stands a single cattle truck as a reminder – our guide told us of what once happened there. “The train would arrive and an SS doctor would stand here. He would look at the prisoners quickly. If they were fit and healthy they went to that side and they would live. This side was for the gas chambers. However, if they had enough workers already, then the train would just continue straight past here to the chambers and they would all die.

Birkenau – where the prisoners were unloaded from the trains

We walked up to the place where the railway tracks ended and where today a memorial now stands under which are a series of plaques which read, in many languages:

FOR EVER LET THIS PLACE BE

A CRY OF DESPAIR

AND A WARNING TO HUMANITY,

WHERE THE NAZIS MURDERED

ABOUT ONE AND A HALF

MILLION

MEN, WOMEN AND CHILDREN,

MAINLY JEWS

FROM VARIOUS COUNTRIES

OF EUROPE

AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU

1940-1945

Next to the memorial are the remains of Crematorium IV which were blown up on the 7^th October, 1944 in a revolt of the Jewish Sonderkommandos – inmates kept separate from the rest to work in the crematoria disposing of the bodies – who attacked their SS guards with makeshift weapons and blew up the crematorium with explosives smuggled in from a weapons factory by female inmates who worked there. This was also the crematorium depicted in the model we’d seen at Auschwitz I and so recreating it in our minds was easy if horrific.

We finished our tour off by visiting some of the barracks, firstly one in the women’s camp and then a toilet block which inmates were allowed to visit twice a day only and then for only a minute at a time. These were depressing places, originally designed as stables. To live in them would have been hell and to live in them on a cup of ersatz coffee, watery soup and slice of bread a day even worse. But at Birkenau few ever lived long. Well over a million passed through its gates. Upon liberation by the Red Army on the 27^th January, 1945, only around fourteen thousand remained.

Our guide though, did finish on a positive note. Stood in the toilet block, he told us the story of Jerzy Bielecki, a Polish inmate who fell in love with a Jewess, Cyla Cybulska. He managed to acquire an SS uniform and escaped with his love by walking out of the gates with her in tow, telling the sleepy guard that he was taking a prisoner to be interrogated. After the escape they hid in different places and lost contact with another, he returning to Kraków and she, after the end of the war, moving to the USA. Then, in the 1980s, after a chance conversation with her Polish cleaner – Cyla had told her that she’s been at Auschwitz and had escaped with Bielecki and the cleaner recognised the name since he had been on Polish TV – they were reunited thirty-nine years later. In 1983 she arrived at Kraków Airport where he stood waiting with thirty-nine red roses, one for each year they had spent apart.

On the way back to Kraków I read Schindler’s List. I felt numb. On the one hand I felt guilty for not having been more horrified; on the other hand I knew that what we had seen was beyond the human capacity to understand. That evening we went out to a bar to do what we had originally booked our holiday to do, watch Stoke City do battle in Valencia. The football took our minds away from what we had seen that day and for ninety minutes we were engrossed in the Beautiful Game, as Stoke fought pluckily but went down a goal to nil and ended their European adventure. In the next room crowds were watching the local boys, Wisła Kraków as they travelled to Belgium, needing a win to progress. They drew and so we all ended up disappointed.

After that we moved on but despite the fact that the beer was fine, we were on holiday and the company good, Auschwitz remained with us for long afterwards. It was almost like a delayed reaction to the shock. “I can’t get that place out of my head,” I told Mike. He nodded. “The second one, Birkenau, it was horrific,” he agreed. After that, we had no more to say.

Next part: Poland 2012: Part 4: Nowa Huta and Emailia

Flickr album of this trip 

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[1] Literally ‘Work Makes You Free’. One of the many lies – or cold jokes – used by the Nazis at Auschwitz. I’d read about the gate before and so expected it. Mike on the other hand, hadn’t heard of it and found it a shock. He later told me that for him it was one of the most affecting parts of the visit.

[2] Interestingly, he always used the term ‘Nazis’ and not once ‘Germans’. At the end of the tour I asked him why and he replied that it was “not politically correct” to use ‘Germans’.

[3] Agreed at Wannsee Villa, Berlin, January 20^th, 1942.

[4] Actually the time that it took to die depended largely on how near the vents you were. For those lucky enough to be directly under a vent, death was virtually instantaneous.

[5] The man in question was one Franciszek Gajowniczek. An inmate had escaped and the Germans selected some prisoners at random to be starved to death as a punishment. Upon hearing that he had been chosen, Gajowniczek cried out, “My poor wife! My poor children! What will they do?” Upon hearing this Fr. Kolbe offered to take his place and the Germans permitted it. Kolbe was starved for fourteen days and during each day he celebrated Mass and sang hymns. At the end of this time all the other condemned men had died but Kolbe was still alive. He was then injected with a fatal dose of carbolic acid. Gajowniczek survived the war and was reunited with his wife but sadly not his sons who were killed in a Soviet bombing raid in 1945.

[6] This was tiny compared with the four chambers at Birkenau which had a combined capacity of 4,420, with two accommodating over a thousand each.

Technorati Tags: travel,blog,matt pointon,poland,auschwitz,oswiecim,birkenau,gas chamber,holocaust,krakow,schindlers list,escape from sobibor,extermination,hair,nazi,german,jews,maxmillian kolbe

Poland 2012: Part 2: Częstochowa

Greetings!

Here’s the next part of my Polish feast, a trip to Częstochowa , the spiritual heart of the country where the Eternal Queen of Poland resides…

Keep travelling!

Uncle Travelling Matt

Links to all parts of the travelogue:

Poland 2012: Part 1: Krakow

Poland 2012: Part 2: Czestochowa

Poland 2012: Part 3: Auschwitz

Poland 2012: Part 4: Nowa Huta and Emailia

Poland 2012: Part 5: Wieliczka and the (not-so) Beautiful Game

Flickr album of this trip

WEDNESDAY

It was Wednesday and more than that, it was Ash Wednesday; one of the most important days in the Christian calendar, for Ash Wednesday marks the start of the Lenten fast which stretches all the way until Easter. Since 2004 I have adhered to the fast but this year I was being a bit naughty and postponing it until I returned from Poland – after all, what’s the point in visiting a country and not indulging in the local cuisine and besides, I seem to recall something about there being exemptions for people who are travelling – promising to make up for the lost days later in the year. I could not abandon faith altogether however, particularly when in one of the most religious countries in all of Europe, so that day I headed off to Częstochowa, the spiritual heart of Poland. Mike, who is an atheist, stayed in Kraków.

The city of Częstochowa is holy to the Poles because it is dominated by the Jasna Gora (Bright Hill) Monastery inside of which is housed the famous Black Madonna of Częstochowa. This is a 122cm by 82cm painting of the Virgin Mary and Christ Child that was reputedly painted by St. Luke the Evangelist on a table of the Holy House in Nazareth. It is believed to have been brought to Częstochowa from Jerusalem via Constantinople arriving in 1382. In 1420 it was attacked by the Hussites who slashed it, the face of the Virgin still bearing the scars, but in 1655 when the Swedes attacked the city and in 1920 when the Russians came, legends say that the painting helped to save Częstochowa in particular and Poland in general. A cult of healing akin to that at Lourdes and other Marian shrines has grown up around the painting which was crowned Queen of Poland in 1717 and is revered by the entire nation, the former Pope John Paul II being particularly devoted to the image. I wanted to visit because this is the spiritual heart of Poland so it is apt for an Ash Wednesday, but also because I wanted to understand a little of this new country, see into her soul as it were, and where better to do so than by meeting the nation’s eternal queen?

I’d been told by the guy on the hotel reception desk that there was a train at 08:00 but it transpired that there wasn’t one until 08:55 so I mooched around the station, bought some postcards for friends and read a little of Schindler’s List, my new read of choice having decided to save the second half of the exploits of Tom Chesshyre and the delightful ‘E’ for the return flight. Schindler’s List was a conscious choice: it is about the Holocaust and we would be visiting Auschwitz the following day, but upon starting it I discovered that it was an even better choice than I’d realised for it was set primarily in Kraków which is where the Jews that Schindler saved came from and the factory in which they worked was situated. Even more than that, when the film was made in 1993, it was shot largely in Kazimierz where we had gone drinking the previous evening.[1]

The train to Częstochowa was of the type found all over Eastern Europe: slow, warm, sparsely populated and divided into compartments. In short, the very best type of train there is. I got a compartment to myself and wiled away the two and a half hours journey time by reading, writing letters and postcards to friends, gazing out of the window and dozing. Beyond the glass there wasn’t a lot to see; the impression I got of Poland from that trip was of an empty land of rolling fields punctuated by vast forests of birch trees and small villages. Of all the places that I’ve visited, it reminded me most of Latvia. The overall impression was of a desolate, under-populated land, rather drab and dreary, but to be fair to Poland, most countries fit that description in mid-February when the weather is cold, the skies grey and the land partially-covered by melting snow, and even more so when one is reading a catalogue and maltreatment and mass murder of that country’s citizens but a half a century ago.

First impressions of Częstochowa when arriving by train are of a drab, colourless, down-at-heel city. The station is a vast, soulless concrete cavern of a place and beyond it are streets lined with grey buildings in which purveyors of tat and other low-cost goods occupy the ground floors whilst in the distance huge industrial complexes belch out smoke. It is the very stereotype of Eastern Europe.

And all of this is partly deliberate. After the war the communists attempted to water down the city’s religious spirit with a bout of intense industrialisation and the area around the railway station is in the heartland of that post-war attack on tradition. Beyond it though, things differ and it is clear that Częstochowa is no ordinary city.

Częstochowa is no ordinary city because it is totally dominated by a single road. The Aleja Najświętszej Panny Marii – the Holy Virgin Mary Avenue – stretches the length of the town, starting at the Plac Daszyńskiego with the Church of St. Zygmunta in the centre and leading, four lanes wide with a garden in the centre, ramrod straight, due east. It is clearly a road that lead somewhere important and that destination is clear to all for at its far end is a hill and atop that hill, shrouded in mist when I visited, is the looming hulk of the Monastery of Jasna Gora crowned by its 106m high bell tower, the tallest church tower in all Poland and a beacon for the faithful.

The Aleja Najświętszej Panny Marii

I trudged up that road, moving towards my goal. I was hungry but it was only eleven and nowhere was open, (eventually I had to settle for a kebab). Crossing the vast Plac Biegarískiego where the City Hall (now the museum) and an interesting looking Orthodox-style church flanked the sides and I vowed to check both out later, but for now I had a different goal.

The Monastery of Jasna Gora appears like a fortress. On a hill, surrounded by a ditch and set of walls, one enters through a gate that separates the sacred from the divine. Through that gate the atmosphere was different, quiet and hushed, the people respectful and reverent. I entered the Basilica but, like the churches of Kraków, it was an orgy of baroque, which, whilst sumptuous, was not really to my taste. I exited through a side-door into another chapel and immediately I knew that I was in a special, holy place.

The Chapel of Our Lady was dark and intimate. Although the shrine around the image itself was decorated, the rest was understated. The walls however, were not bare, but instead covered with the offerings of thousands of grateful pilgrims whose prayers Our Lady had granted. The atmosphere was powerful although silently so; there was an aura of great holiness. I sat and contemplated. The holy image itself was covered by a golden screen but the faithful still knelt and prayed or circumnavigated it on their knees. Here I knew, dwelt the soul of the Polish nation.

I left the chapel and by the door came across two large boards with photographs displayed on them. I scanned them and saw that one, larger than the others, was of Lech Kaczynski, the former President of Poland, and his wife. Then I realised that this was a memorial to all those who had died in the tragic air crash in April the year before in Smolensk which had killed Kaczynski and all the others pictured before me. I scanned the faces and names; they were young and old, male and female, mostly Polish but a few Russians as well. Yes indeed, this was more than a monastery, more than a home for a holy image; Jasna Gora is Poland’s national shrine.

That became more and more evident the further I explored the complex. I visited museums of relics including possessions of the Polish Pope and rosary beads made out of bread by concentration camp inmates,[2] an oil painting of John Paul II conquering communism – or maybe it is fascism? – with a cross and aided by the Madonna, items belonging to St. Maximillian Kolbe, the Polish priest who died at Auschwitz and countless banners of the Solidarity movement. There was also an enormous model of the monastery under siege by the Swedes during the 17^th century – when it was saved by the Madonna – and weapons from that famous battle. More common than such beacons of hope however, were images of despair. Every era and facet of Polish suffering was commemorated here and they were all most powerfully symbolised for me by a huge oil painting that occupied an entire wall in the former arsenal. The painting depicted Our Lady of Częstochowa bathed in light on a dark blue background whilst emanating – or being drawn to her – in all directions were thousands of little lights, each of those being a cross or a heart and bearing the name of a battle, massacre or other tragedy in Polish history. A scan of these names was a sweeping survey of some of the most terrible crimes and abject misery committed in recent European history: Treblinka 1942-3, Sobibor 1942-3, Katyn 1939, Warsawa 1944, Gdansk 1981, Oświęcim 1940-5 as well as some famous dates from further back: Austerlitz 1805, Wien 1683. All this needless suffering, all those lives wasted and yet at the heart of it all was a simple woman, no stranger to suffering and loss herself, offering hope and support, wiping tears, understanding their plight since her own, innocent, son was murdered too, as a criminal, unjustly, and she too had her own fair face slashed, disfigured by mindless vandals.[3]

W środku nocy

I still had a little time so I explored the room above the Chapel of Our Lady where there were some paintings depicting the Stations of the Cross by the famous Polish cartoonist Jerzy Duda Gracz. These were a remarkable series of contemporary images that really brought Christ’s Passion to life for a modern Polish audience. They depicted Our Lord mocked and persecuted by rotund politicians, smug churchmen, beer-swilling louts and starving African children. On the Cross where His Mother stands watching, there was no figure of Mary but instead the image of the Madonna of Częstochowa. They were some of the most powerful pieces of religious art I have seen in a long while.

One of the Stations of the Cross by Jerzy Duda Gracz

I returned to the chapel for the daily unveiling of the image. The crowds were gathering as I knelt in prayer and fingered my rosary. Then, with a bugle fanfare at 1:30 precisely, the cover was drawn back and Our Lady of Częstochowa revealed in all her glory. On a trite and superficial level it was all very ridiculous, laughable even, a room full of grown adults kneeling and praying before a damaged and aged oil painting of dubious artistic value, yet to all those present there was nothing ridiculous, nothing at all. I gazed into the face of that aged lady, the eternal Queen of Poland, and tried to understand. And in her sad eyes, in her slashed cheek, in her mournful expression, I think I did, or at least, I caught a glimpse of it all. The Poles as a nation, perhaps more than any other, had suffered. For century after century they have endured invasions, indignities, exploitation, massacre and much more and that has, it must have an effect on their psyche. So much misery, so much pain, so much torment. Yet in Our Lady of Częstochowa they have something else: hope. Here they have one who understands, one who has suffered the same, one who still suffers daily and yet still provides a limitless supply of love and compassion to bestow upon mankind. As an Englishman I did not find her as powerful or moving or as relevant to my needs as I do Our Lady of Walsingham, but that is as it should be for this was her message to the Poles, not the English. As a spectator though, I felt honoured to be present, for seeing the faithful knelt before her I began to understand so much of what had first confused me. The baroque, all that excessive finery… why? In such a bleak land with so many woes, perhaps the churches need a bit more ostentation to help their people visualise Heaven. But most of all, at the end of that long, long catalogue of woe and suffering, there is her smile and the promise voiced by a great saint from my own country, hundreds of years ago when plague swept the continent.

“All shall be well.”

Back in the city, I called in at the museum on the square that is housed in the former city hall. It offered a potted history in Polish and some mildly interesting visual displays which were opened up and shown to me by a very serious guide who looked as if librarianship was her calling in life. Despite her seriousness, she spoke English with an incredibly sexy accent which made the guided tour somewhat more engaging and to keep her talking I asked about the Orthodox-looking church on the far side of the square. She informed me that it was a Roman Catholic church these days but had been built originally as an Orthodox house of worship back in the days when Częstochowa was part of the Russian Empire.[4] I was surprised that a city so far west and south had once been Russian – I’d assumed that this part of Poland had been occupied by the Austrians in those days – and after viewing the dubious delights of the museum I popped across to get a closer look. A board outside reiterated what the velvet-tongued curator had told me, but added that when the church had been taken over by the Catholics it had been refurbished in the style of an early Roman Christian church. I tried to take a look inside but it was locked so a glance through the window was all that I could manage. What I saw inside was something ancient yet modern, Eastern yet also Western. It was a joy to behold after the constant barrage of baroque and was easily the most aesthetically-satisfying church interior that I’d viewed in Poland.

The Church of St. Jakub: Orthodox yet Catholic

On the railway station I came across something that I have encountered nowhere else on earth. On the footbridge, in a converted waiting room, there was a chapel with a Mass in full progress. I entered and found it packed to the rafters with both young and old. With an hour to wait, I joined them, listening to the Liturgy in Polish whilst arrivals and departures were announced on tannoys outside and trains rumbled in and out of the platforms below us. It was a strange juxtaposition: an ancient and timeless ritual, the chants calling to mind images of Polish peasants eking out a living from the black soil over the centuries, taking place in a thoroughly modern and bustling setting, and yet I liked it. A church should go out to the people, not wait for them to come to it and here, where hundreds come and go every hour, it was doing just that. I received the traditional ashes of Ash Wednesday on my forehead from the young priest but unfortunately had to depart before the Host was distributed.

The chapel on the railway station, Częstochowa

That evening we were out dining and drinking again. We ate in a restaurant recommended to us by the tourist information centre named Chłopski Jadko, (literally ‘Peasant Eating’), where I had a delicious variety of traditional soups – sour cabbage, mushroom, tomato and beetroot – and some perogi, a staple Polish dish consisting of little pastry packages with cheese or meat inside them. Mike told me about his day spent around the city and then we moved onto other matters, returning to Kazimierz to sample more of the bars there. Having read most of Schindler’s List on the train to and from Częstochowa, the streets came even more to life now and it took little to imagine this quiet and fashionable district as a hive of Jewish activity, Yiddish mixing with Polish and perhaps even German in the air. Now though, it was silent. We selected a fine little bar in a basement with Wisła Kraków shirts and scarves on the walls and some locals sat quietly sipping beers. It was a pleasant, low-key place and a fine spot for wiling away an hour or two whilst lamenting the woes inflicted on us poor men by both work and women.

Next part: Poland 2012: Part 3: Auschwitz

Flickr album of this trip

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[1] I had seen the film but it was years ago and I’d forgotten a lot of the details. However, Oskar Schindler’s apartment was just below the Wawel, his workers had mainly lived in Kazimierz before being moved to the ghetto just across the Vistula in Podgórze which was also where Schindler’s Emailia factory was situated. After the ghetto was ‘liquidated’ they were moved to the concentration camp at Płaszow, just to the south of Podgórze and when that was closed down most of the Jews that Schindler didn’t manage to save – and his female workers for one very unhappy transit stop of three weeks – ended up in the hell of Birkenau itself. There are few more powerful Kraków reads than Thomas Keneally’s moving Schindler’s List.

[2] Incidentally, a Russian student in my class did the same a few months ago. A tradition surviving from the days of the gulags perhaps?

[3] The painting in question is W środku nocy (In the Middle of the Night) by Alexander Markowski.

[4] Actually, this was not strictly true. Częstochowa was part of the Kingdom of Poland which was set up in 1815 after the defeat of Napoleon and was theoretically independent although in practice the state was merely a puppet of Russia. During this period Częstochowa grew dramatically and it was then that the Aleja Najświętszej Panny Marii was mapped out and constructed.

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Poland 2012: Part 1: Krakow

 
Greetings!
A little change from Japan for this week and the rest of the month as I publish, in stages, my fresh off the press account of my trip to Krakow earlier in the year with Mike. The year is 2012, and the European Championships are in Poland and the Ukraine. I’m off to Kiev in a few weeks time so the Ukraine will have to wait, but whilst it does, here’s Poland…

Keep Travelling!

Uncle Travelling Matt

Links to all parts of the travelogue:

Poland 2012: Part 1: Krakow

Poland 2012: Part 2: Czestochowa

Poland 2012: Part 3: Auschwitz

Poland 2012: Part 4: Nowa Huta and Emailia

Poland 2012: Part 5: Wieliczka and the (not-so) Beautiful Game

Flickr album of this trip

Like this? Also check out the account of my travels in nearby Slovakia

 

INTRODUCTION

Stoke City were playing their biggest ever European game in Valencia.

So I went to Kraków.

Make sense? Well, it did to me…

The moment that the Valencia fixture was announced I knew that I wanted to go. Mike, the Art teacher where I work also wanted to go and he had a mate with an apartment just down the road. Sounded perfect so we checked the flights. £100 there and back, yep, that would do. All I needed to do was book the days off work and…

… and grrr! We had a new boss and she’d put a hold on all leave being booked until she could “assess business needs”.[1] But following a football club comes under extenuating circumstances like funerals of close relatives or babysitting, surely? Strangely, she didn’t buy that argument. Obviously not a football fan or, worse still, a gloryhunting ‘supporter’ of Man Utd/Chelsea/Arsenal/ Man City/Liverpool (delete as appropriate). We were left waiting for nearly three weeks before she finally decided that an away day to Spain could be accommodated in her business strategy, but by then the flight prices had risen to over £200 each and I’m sorry, but I ain’t paying two hundred quid to go to bloody Spain! “We’ve a week of holiday that we don’t really want!” I complained to Mike in the pub. “What shall we do with it?”

“I’ll have a look for some cheap deals,” he replied. The next day he came back to me. “There’s Kraków for forty quid each way,” he announced. Kraków, Poland. I had never been to Poland before; it was a big empty box in my checklist of European countries to visit. And besides, isn’t Kraków near to both Auschwitz and Częstochowa, places that I’d long wished to visit, as well as being a nice place in its own right? And isn’t Eastern Europe cheap and am not I fascinated by anywhere east of the Berlin Wall? “Count me in,” I said firmly. “Besides, they’re bound to be showing the Stoke game in a bar there.”

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[1] For Heaven’s sake, a prison is a service, not a business! Or maybe I’m just too left-wing for these franchised out days…?

TUESDAY

I put down my book and looked out of the window. The book was one I had started as we took off with high hopes of a good read but these had been dashed as it turned out to be a rather annoying one instead. It had been bought for me by my mother as a Christmas present and was entitled Tales from the Fast Trains. It was by a journalist named Tom Chesshyre from London who takes a series of weekend breaks with his girlfriend on the Eurostar to see if this is a viable eco-friendly alternative to short breaks on the aeroplanes of the budget airlines such as the one I was sat in. The book managed to annoy me on several levels. The concept was good – I’m all for promoting green travel – but the execution was terrible. Firstly, it was by a Londoner. London is not a place that I am fond of; it is a blot on the fair face of England that both breeds ignorant tosspots and sucks decent folk in from elsewhere and then turns them into said tosspots. Worse than that though, these people are so ignorant that they never leave London and so assume that everyone else is a Londocentric arse like they are. “You can go for a weekend by rail to Spain: it does work,” enthuses Chesshyre as he raves about fast trains across France. Well actually mate, sorry, but you can’t, reply I, for in the real Britain there are no fast trains, we have to go to London before we can even get on one. Budget airlines on the other hand, can be found all over the place – I have Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham and today’s airport of choice, East Midlands all within a fifty mile radius – but more importantly, there’s the cost. Chesshyre’s budget seems unlimited – and considering his job, it is probably not far off; the cheapest Eurostar ticket quoted is to Lille, which is £65 whilst to Spain it’s £191. We’re travelling over twice that distance for £80. No, laudably green they may be, but for the working man, and especially the working man in the provinces, budget airlines are a boon for they have made the impossible possible.

More annoying than all of this though, is Chesshyre’s travelling companion, his girlfriend, E who I assume he has not named openly for fear of reprisals. She is the London tossette defined. She goes to Belgium and drinks wine, (excuse me, beer capital of the world…), and indeed she seems to spend most of her time drinking wine in soulless wine bars designed for pretentious arses like, well… her and Chesshyre,[1] and when she isn’t doing this she is either a). moaning about hotel rooms being not chic, refined and tossette-friendly enough for her, b). making patronising and vaguely xenophobic comments about the locals, c). complaining about the lack of vegetarian options available, or d). turning her nose up whenever her boyfriend suggests doing something mildly cultural that does not involve wine.

So yes, I put that book down and instead looked out of the window and concentrated on the short break ahead of me. By my side, dozing away, was Mike. Was this the right person to be going away with? On the one hand he was not E – I think I should jump out of the plane if he were – but on the other hand he is another person and I am used to travelling alone. How would I cope with accommodating someone else’s needs and tastes after so long of not having to do so? That more than anything else was my big fear going into this trip. I knew that I probably wouldn’t be as sharing and accommodating as Mr. Chesshyre had been with E, but there again he was getting something out of it that I knew, or at least, fervently hoped, I wouldn’t be getting off Mike in the hotel room. I did however, want to share a few beers and still be on speaking terms at the end of week. I realised how very independent I had become.

I shifted my attentions from Mike back to the window. The clouds had cleared now and below me was a patchwork of snow-covered fields and forests. What would Poland be like? I imagined somewhere similar to Slovakia where I’d been on a similar winter break some three and a half years earlier.[2] Cold yet fascinating. I’d done my homework for this trip; I’d got the Lonely Planet from the library, talked to Paul, my Jewish friend, about Auschwitz and quizzed my Polish students on the local food and beers but, as with any new country, so much remains unknown until you actually get to the place and get a feel for it first-hand. What would my first impression of Poland be?

A couple of minutes later I knew. Despite not even having landed, I caught a glimpse of the Polish character and soul. A local farmer had planted trees/bushes in one of his fields so that they spelt out a massive ‘JPII’ to passing planes such as ours. John Paul II – or in Polish, Jan Paweł II – the Polish Pope deceased in 2005 and beloved by a billion. Even in Israel I’d only caught the religiosity of the country after we had landed.

My second impression was also a good one. The girl on the information desk in the terminal was a hauntingly beautiful blonde with that sexy Slavic accent that can reduce grown men to quivering wrecks. But she wasn’t the only one; most of the girls that milled about the airport were stunning, possessing a grace and elegance unseen on our side of the Berlin Wall. Mike’s eyes goggled. So did mine. In the bus to the station they met and we nodded with the feeling of brotherhood that men the world over will understand. “If only I was thirty years younger,” was all that he said.

The information board said that a fast train would take us to the city centre, but the train that escorted us from Kraków Balice to Kraków Główny never exceeded 20mph. Still, that wasn’t a problem since we’d fallen into conversation with Stefan who was an interesting chap indeed. He was a concert violinist who had just returned home from a tour of Belgium and the Netherlands. In Poland he supplements his income by playing in an ensemble in bars and restaurants, but he was more interested in asking us about where we come from since he has a sister who lives in Derby and he is planning to visit her soon.

Arriving in Kraków Główny, we bade Stefan adieu and went off to find our hotel. Using the internet, we’d booked into an establishment called Blue Hostel which was incredibly cheap at £8 per room per night. It was near the station and after we’d checked in we found it basic but clean, spacious and with free internet access it more than satisfied our requirements. We dumped our stuff in the room and then hit the town, heading into the Old City which lay only a hundred metres or so across the road from our hotel.

Kraków’s Old City reminded me strongly of Riga’s.[3] Large and generously laid out, at its heart is the vast expanse of the Rynek Główny (Central Market Square) with the Cloth Hall in its centre. We popped into the Mariacki on the eastern side, a fine cathedral church with bell towers that did not match and a plaque on the wall celebrating John Paul II – he was the Bishop of Kraków before he was Pope – that dated from the 14^th century. Inside though, although beautiful, it was not to my taste having undergone a baroque makeover which resulted in an interior so sumptuously decorated that it cluttered the mind and caused an headache.

Rynek Główny and Mariacki

We popped into a tourist office to enquire about excursions and booked ourselves onto a full-day tour of Auschwitz for the Thursday. I also asked about places to eat and to purchase paper money, and afterwards visited one of the latter picking up some bargains including some Pre-War and some Nazi Occupation notes to add to my collection.[4] We then continued our tour of the Old City heading up to the Florian Gate – the only remaining part of the city walls which were pulled down in the 19^th century – and the Barbican, a mediaeval fortress which once defended the Florian Gate.

Turning back on ourselves, we headed south to the Wawel, looking for the restaurants that the tourist information centre had recommended en route. On the way we came across St. Andrew’s Church which was visibly older than the others we’d seen – I later learnt that it is 11^th century and one of the oldest in Kraków – and I decided to pop inside in the hope of getting a glimpse of the mediaeval Polish Christianity that had been baroqued over in the Mariacki. Once inside though, whilst intimate and atmospheric, I was dismayed to discover that this church too had been subjected to a barrage of baroque and for me it was all too much.[5]

The question you may ask is what exactly is my problem with baroque? Well, with all the gilding and swirls it is just too much for my brain to take in; it’s a cacophony of splendour that I struggle to stomach. I prefer bare stone and the graceful architectural lines of England’s great gothic cathedrals and in contrast these churches seem far too cluttered and over the top. Maybe it’s the Protestant in me coming out, I don’t know, but it is there. More than all that though, baroque is Italian and outside of Italy – and definitely outside of the Latinate countries – it strikes one as something of a cultural imposition. I had come to Poland to see Poland, not some copy of Italy. I wanted to see how Roman Catholicism expressed itself here, in a cold Slavic country on the very frontier with Eastern Orthodoxy, to see if there was some blending of the two traditions. So far, I was disappointed.

We wandered down to the Wawel, the royal fortress from which Poland was once governed, (and not so long ago either, for the Nazis ruled their General Government of Poland from it during World War II). It certainly was an incredible sight, a huge fairytale extravaganza of turrets and walls from which, only a few decades before, dark forces had inflicted misery and destruction upon this land. What terrible discussions were held in the chambers behind those windows? How many murders were planned behind its walls? We both vowed to check it out closer a few days hence.

Feeling tired and with darkness creeping in, we turned back to our hotel. Below the Wawel Mike spotted a large beer hall that offered meals that looked good and we agreed to check it out later on. First though, it was time for a rest, a siesta to blow away that flight fatigue.

There are several reasons why it’s good to travel with someone else and one of them is that, if you pick the right person of course, they can offer something to your trip that you’d have never thought of yourself. So it was with Mike and Pod Wawelem.

I would probably never have gone to the beer hall below the Wawel if it hadn’t been for Mike. In fact, I’d have probably never noticed it. Which would have been a shame for Pod Wawelem as it was called, (the name literally means ‘Below the Wawel’), was the find of the trip. It was a huge place, loud and bustling, the type of place where one finds in films about the Second World War where there are German officers drinking and cavorting whilst the waiters and waitresses – members of the Resistance all – plot their downfall. Whether they were planning to overthrow the government or not I can’t say, but our service was by a bevy of pretty waitresses and efficient waiters in a green and white uniform based on traditional costume, and at one end a string quartet played. Beer was served in huge glasses but huger still were the meals, enormous kebabs and mixed grills with rice, cabbage and potatoes. It was, put simply, one of the finest eateries that I have ever had the pleasure to enter and Mike too was equally pleased. We vowed to return, although only when we had room in our stomachs to digest such an enormous platter again.

Pod Wawelem: recommended by Mike and Matt

After dining we toured the bars of Kazimierz, a suburb of the city where the majority of Kraków’s Jews had once lived. Prior to the war, Kraków was approximately a third Jewish, (circa 65,000), and most of these lived in Kazimierz. These days, thanks to Hitler and then emigration to Israel and the USA, only around two hundred remain although the quarter still retains something of its Jewish flavour with several old synagogues and kosher restaurants. We drank at a couple of small cosy bars, putting the world and work to rights over glasses of tasty Żywiec, Okocim and Leżajsk before heading back to our beds, pleased with our first day in Poland.

Next part: Poland 2012: Part 2: Czestochowa

Flickr album of this trip

 

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[1] Here’s an example: ‘ …we find the cosy La Douce wine bar, run by a friendly woman in jeans, who serves crisp glasses of Pinot Blanc and meltingly delicious crepe monsieurs. The place had an intimate, chic, laid-back feel with scuffed wooden tables, wooden floors, painted brick walls and gilded mirror… We could not have found a nicer spot. “It’s all very us,” says E.’ No shit.

[2] See ‘Slovakia and Hungary 2008’.

[3] See ‘Latvia, Georgia and Turkey Part 1’.

[4] Collecting world banknotes is an hobby of mine and I have close to a thousand from all over the globe.

[5] And I’m not the only one. A Bulgarian Muslim friend of mine working in Vienna once wrote that she had visited St. Stephen’s Cathedral, another Mitteleuropean cathedral subjected to a baroque attack and whilst it was beautiful and artistic, to her it was too much and God seemed absent.