Poland trip, Part 2

Tuesday, July 28

We traveled to Cracow by train from Warsaw, a new experience for me. I enjoyed the travel, seeing the countryside and the smooth motion of the train on the tracks. In our compartment sat Gab, myself, her parents, and her sister, Ewa, as well as a Polish girl in her early 20s. The girl worked on a laptop - the compartment had electric outlets and I think it had wifi. But I am not sure. I had imagined before coming to Poland that it might be 40 years behind the states, or it might be roughly the equal of the states. What I had not expected was the true state of Polish living: it is both 40 years behind and roughly the equal of the states. It was entirely contextual, and I could never seem to anticipate which services would seem totally normal and which would be unusual. For instance, on the train, the toilet was free. This was remarked on more than once. This is because many restrooms in Poland require payment of 1-2 zlotys (~$.50 USD) to an attendant. How this pays for anything beyond the salary of the attendant is unclear to me.

Our train stopped approximately 10 minutes outside of Cracow. It became very warm and people exited the train cars to stand beside the tracks. Many people smoked and Gab said she wanted a cigarette. "You don't smoke," I said. "So what?" was her reply. When someone used the free restroom inside the car, they flushed and human waste poured onto the railroad ties beneath the train. We returned to our car.

After roughly half and hour a small train car arrived to push us the rest of the way to our destination. Gab's parents transferred trains and continued on to Zakopane, her hometown. Ewa, Gabriela, and I headed for the square of St. Mary's Cathedral. It is probably the single most beautiful man-made place I have ever been. Still, beauty isn't everything. Food is everything. And we were starving. We argued a bit looking for food and then argued a little more while digesting it. Maybe we felt inferior to the place. Maybe we were just tired travelers who needed pizza like spiders need a fly.

Wednesday, July 29

Ewa departed for a friend's place the previous evening and rejoined us in time for a bus out of the city, heading for Auschwitz. The name of the Nazi death camp comes from the Polish town of Oswiecim, which was torn apart brick by brick by the Nazis in order to build the camp in its place. Of the three camps, Auschwitz I, originally a POW camp, has been converted to a museum presenting pictures, documents, and other horrors. Auschwitz II (Birkenau), designed as a high-efficiency death-factory, is maintained as near as possible to its condition when the Nazis abandoned it in flight from the Russian army in 1945. Auschwtiz III (Monowitz) was a work camp where prisoners were fed better rations in order to maintain productivity at a factory built there to exploit slave labor. It is not available for tours and is privately owned.

Auschwitz was a place I had imagined many times. It held an almost mythical position in my mind, the world's locus of evil and suffering. I've read regularly about the Holocaust since I was 12 or 13, but there is something that cannot be captured in words, film, documents, talks, in anything other than the experience of the place. For one thing, to know you are seeing the hallways, buildings, and guard posts many walked past on their way to death is chilling. Then there are the displays: thousands of pounds of human hair heaped and matted, collected by the Nazis for use in industrial fabrics, coat liners, etc.; eyeglasses crumpled for scrap metal, shoes for leather, suitcases marked with the date and place of origin for those who were told they were being resettled. When everyone lies a little, is the net sum a lie of epic proportions? Is this impossible without one great Liar, one like Hitler and the upper echelon who knew the full scope of their evil? To what extent did the Allies participate in the untruth by refusing to believe the years of reporting from those who voluntarily entered the camp in hopes of revealing the monstrosity of it all?

These were my questions, and a nice thing about the museum and our tour guide was that the place invites these personalized questions. The tour and the museum are quite balanced on the numerous contentious issues among Holocaust scholars. It was a very reflective experience, but I will note a few items in brief that may be appreciable out of context.

The camp commondant kept a pretty home just outside the barbed wire. His wife and two small children lived there... within 50 yards of the crematorium for Auschwitz I, where the smell of burned flesh must have been unbearable. And yet somehow, as it turns out, bearable.

The hallway in one building of the museum is lined with inmate's faces, Polish faces. (2.5 million non-Jewish Polish citizens died during World War II) Their names and hometowns are listed beneath. This was originally the method of recording the camp population. When the S.S. realized that a few months of starvation rations utterly transfigured the appearance of a face, they adapted their methods and began tatooing numbers on forearms. This adaptivity was evident in many aspects of the camps. It wasn't just that the Nazis were murderers; they were extraordinarily efficient murderers.

Auschwitz II is enormous. It is 300 square acres surrounded by double barbed-wire fencing. The idea of escape under heavily armed guard, in starvation conditions, becomes ludicrous when faced with the physical space. Incredible that anyone tried, let alone suceeded.

Thursday, July 30

This was as uplifting a day as the previous day had been painful. For our major activity, Gab and I toured Wawel Castle in Cracow, one of the country's leading tourist destinations. The place was stupendously impressive architecturally. Inside we took tours of Royal Private Chambers, the Royal Treasury & Armory, and The "Lost" Wawel. There is nothing in the United States remotely approaching the grandiosity and historical significance of the collections at Wawel. We saw original swords, muskets, cannons, pikes, halberdiers, foils, maces, suits of armor, chain mail, and banners with centuries-old coats of arms. We saw the sword of Sigismund the Old (King of Poland, Grand Duke of Lithuania 1506-1548). It had many nicks in the blade. We saw the sword used for the coronation of Polish kings. We saw innumerable goblets, clocks, models, and statues made from gold, porcelain, and precious jewels. It was astonishing. The ceilings, when they weren't panels of gold or marbel, featured gorgeous paintings. The walls featured 500 year-old tapestries. The beauty of the thing.

An interesting cultural difference: Poles don't detest waiting in line with the same passion as Americans. To enter Wawel required tickets sold by one cashier. The line was about an hour's wait all day every day. And when that one cashier took a 40 minute lunch break, no one can buy a ticket. That would never fly in the states.

Friday, July 31

Another long ride, this one much smoother as the bus didn't break down as our train had earlier. The weather was gorgeous and just starting to surpass 30 Celsius (upper 80's, F). It was sunny each day of my trip. We entered the hills and later saw the peaks of distant mountains growing closer. We brought food and water on the bus. Poles normally carry liter bottles of water with them everywhere. I was glad I had adopted this habit. At the side of the road children held up jars of preserves or berries for sale. In the fields were haystacks, sheep, and laborers with scythes and other tools. Polish roads are not well maintained for the most part and there are not really exit ramps the way we think of them on major routes. So you might have to come to a dead stop in the left lane because someone is turning left off the highway. However, roads are less crucial when there are good train lines to get most places. We stopped once to allow a herd of cattle to clear the road.

We arrived in Zakopane, the idyllic mountain town where my sweetheart grew up. It is the "winter capital" of Poland, known for excellent skiing and picturesque views for hikers. A nearby peak, Giewont, is widely known for its resemblance of a knight sleeping on his back. Visible are his brow, nose, mouth. and his hands on the hilt of a sword laying atop his chest. We hiked upon our arrival for around two hours and I was as happy as I had been at any point in the trip. We ate a large meal at a Highlander restaurant where they played raucous fiddle (in the "gypsy" style popularized by the band Gogol Bordello) in a group of about 12 family members and friends. I looked out the bedroom window from which, as a child, Gabriela looked out into the world. The view is of a grazing field traversed by sheep, a narrow rocky footpath, and towering over it all, the Tatra Mountains and mist-enshrouded Giewont.