Poland

 

 

Berlin

We were to drive to Poland from Berlin.  In September and October 2014 were in Berlin to meet and spend some time with my new grandson, Leander.  But because we were concerned that we might be a burden to entertain for a whole month-and-a-half, what with the demands of a five month old baby and so on, we had pre-planned a number of side-trips.  The last of these was to Poland. 

To pick up the car that I had booked months before, we caught the U-Bahn from Magdalenenstraße, close to Emily's home in Lichtenberg, to Alexanderplatz.  Quick - about 15 minutes - and easy.

Or so we thought, but where was that car rental place?  I'd seen the depot when roaming about here on a previous occasion and knew it was here somewhere, otherwise we might have been discouraged trying to find it again.  I asked in several shops and half dozen shop assistants had no idea.  We asked both in English - pointless - and poor German: Wo ist der Auto rental? 

What the hell do they call it?  It would have been a good idea to have looked up 'Mietwagenverleih' before asking but then I probably would have messed up the pronunciation:  Meat-vargen-ferlige?  My German class had only reached Lekton 2 before we left home.  But why would I need it?  On earlier trips to Germany in the 70's everyone in the cities knew English, and indeed native Germans still do, but now, and particularly in Berlin, a lot of people who work in shops and in casual jobs are immigrants who have learnt only German.

We had previously found a similar communications problem asking likely informants which bus to get to go to the Reichstag.  After asking half a dozen people in shops, one girl overheard us fruitlessly asking another in a travel agency 'Oh - das Reichstag!' she interjected and told us where to go. 

On the bus I resorted to asking for the Brandenburg Gate stop.  No problems with that!  The driver would tell us when.  After all, that's where all the stupid tourists want to go.

 

Reichstag - Bundestag; Brandenburg Gate
Inside the Dome

 

Actually Bundestag is the more common name these days. Reichstag the building; Bundestag the Parliament.  One would think das Reichstag is so important in the City's, and indeed the County's, recent history that everyone would know of it but a lot of people have never heard of it.  Wendy and I were both sure we were pronouncing it exactly the same way as the girl in the Travel Agency but perhaps not.

Pronouncing things in German even for other Germans from another part of the country is like asking for a tomato on a sandwich in New York or aluminium in an American hardware - the shop assistants genuinely have no idea what you are talking about, until you pronounce it the American way. 

It was Oktoberfest in Alexanderplatz.  It was a bit fairgroundish (that's a new English word) although you could get a wurst on a brotchen and a bier or cider and listen to some Ump-pa.

On another day in town Wendy derided this little fair and wanted to know if there was a larger Oktoberfest celebration, more in keeping with her conception of the event, a couple of hundred hectares perhaps, somewhere else in Berlin.  She went to the tourist information place who directed us to the Hauptbahnhof (Central Station).  We wandered around there looking for Bierkellers and listening for tell-tale Ump-pa in vain, until we twigged - they had been directing us to Munich!

So there we were, with our smaller bags, searching the interstices of Oktoberfest infested Alexanderplatz for Das Auto-rental.  Half an hour later we eventually found the car rental place only to be told that I had mistakenly booked it for the previous day.  Our car was gone. We would need to upgrade to a more expensive car. 

As it turned out this nicer car was actually what we needed for this long trip. 

We'd also hired a Garman GPS navigator, so we punched in the address of our hotel in Kraków and set off immediately for Poland.  'At the next intersection, in 50 metres, turn right',  it confidently told us.

Unbeknown to us at the time the navigator had been set to avoid tolls so we ended up entering Poland on a road that made some fire-trails look like highways. It was heavily used by trucks and the surface, the moment we crossed into Poland, became a linked series of potholes.  I joked that it was a ploy to discourage the Germans from invading yet again.  We didn't realise at the time that there is a perfectly good autobahn that might have shaved several hours off our journey.  This goat track is used by numerous trucks because it avoids the tolls.  Thanks navigator - you saved us $20 or so.

They'd told us the car didn't have in-vehicle navigation.  But playing with the consol screen to get some music we discovered that our upgraded vehicle did indeed have a GPS navigator built in. All we had to do was set the computer language to English.  So now we had two.  This came in handy later-on when the car told us we had just 2000 km to go to get to our next destination.  The portable was fired-up and revealed that we were already more than 50 Km off track.  The car was trying to go to some previous destination in Germany.  So all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds. 

Anyway, back to our entry to Poland. 

After about an hour of bone jarring, shaking and bouncing we needed to eat, ablute and recover.  A roadside service station eatery and money exchange place appeared in the wilderness and we drove in, not expecting anything good.  But we were in for a surprise: the toilets were spotless and homely with fresh flowers; the food was delicious and amazingly inexpensive; and the exchange rate was equal to the best we got for the whole trip.  Here we were introduced to the Polish love of elaborate mesh curtains, nick-knacks and Pope John Paul II.  Themes that would follow us for the remainder of our visit.

Pleasantly fed and watered we were suddenly liking Poland. 

Driving by the back-roads does have an advantage, you get to see the countryside close-up and in this case how flat and fertile that part of the world is. 

Farms are not huge yet the older farmhouses often are - big two storey affairs built in brick, presumably supported by a few tens of acres of what must be very productive fields. The reason that this country has been so fought over.

There are lots of wind turbines but many are small and quick rotating, less than a megawatt.  They must contribute little to the Grid and be quite uneconomic.  

 

 

A little historical background

The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was once among the wealthiest and most politically advanced countries in Europe.  This wealth was based on agriculture, both because of the richness of the land and the low cost of labour based on serfdom (as in Russia).  The Commonwealth abolished serfdom (indentured slavery) before Russia but little changed for the peasants who continued to provide cheap labour to their aristocratic overlords, organised into five Duchies. 

The Commonwealth sat on the interface between Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox religion, with each roughly equally represented.  In an attempt to limit religious conflict between these forces the Commonwealth had legislated freedom of religious belief.  The Roman Papal Legate was one not happy with this and reported:  'This country has become a place of shelter for heretics'.   Relative religious freedom began to attract the Jewish Diaspora from an early date and an estimated 80% of the world's Jews came to live here, amounting to around 10% of the total Commonwealth population.

But internal conflicts between the Duchies progressively weakened the Commonwealth, leading up to a disastrous war with Sweden in the mid seventeenth century that reduced the country to a vassal state.  According to Wikipedia: Swedish forces completely destroyed 188 cities and towns, 81 castles, and 136 churches in Poland between 1655 and 1660.

Over the next century the Commonwealth's parlous condition led to its partitioning among its neighbours, Austria, Prussia and the Russian Empire (under Catherine the Great).  Thus before the end of the 18th century Poland was effectively wiped off the map, and remained so until the end of the First World War in 1918, when Poland and Lithuania were re-established under the League of Nations as independent countries.

As most people know, it was Germany's reinvasion of Poland in 1939 that triggered the Second World War.  It's perhaps less well known that Russia simultaneously invaded eastern Poland in accordance with of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, secretly agreed between Stalin and Hitler to reabsorb the territory.  It took the two armies less than a month to annex and then to divide the whole of Poland between them: the West to Germany and the East to Russia.  The Germans then proceeded to expel many Poles to the East and to replace them with ethnic Germans.  Many refugees were shipped to dozens of forced labour camps, known as Gulags, within Russia.

 

Polish Civilians being expelled to make way for German Settlers 1942-43

 

Two years later Hitler turned on the Russians in Operation Barbarossa.  This went well for Hitler's generals at first but soon turned out to mark the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany. The first stage of Operation Barbarossa was to take of the remainder of Poland from the Russians, killing tens of thousands of Russian soldiers and taking tens of thousands more prisoner. 

 

Soviet Prisoners of War 1941

 

After Germany's defeat by the Allies in 1945 many people celebrated.   But for the Poles Russia, the old enemy of 1939, was back, this time as victorious allies of the US, Britain and France. 

Now any remaining Jews and other targeted minorities, including other dispossessed Poles released from the Russian work camps, fled the Russians.  They were assisted in this by the new Polish Army, formed as the Polish Armed Forces in the West, consisting of Poles who had joined the Allies during the War, some of whom had fought alongside the Australians against the Italians at the Battle of Monte Cassino. 

My English father had taught many other Poles to fly fighters and fighter-bombers in Canada when he was a flying instructor in the Empire Air Training Scheme (EATS), as I have mentioned elsewhere.

Some of these refugees, like the mother of filmmaker Sophia Turkiewicz whose story is told in a new film 'Once My Mother', made their way South to the Black Sea and then by ship to British held Turkey, from where they were taken to refugee camps in Rhodesia, ultimately to be resettled in Australia, England and other parts of the British Commonwealth. 

Others were not so lucky.  Churchill's 'Iron Curtain' had fallen and the 'Cold War' had begun.  The Russians closed the escape routes to the West and even torpedoed refugee ships, as they tightened their grip on Poland and the other Countries of the Eastern Block.

During the war and its aftermath the population of Poland had fallen by nearly a third.  1.1 million had disappeared.  Now, during the Soviet period, the population recovered to just over 38 million.  It has stabilised since at around this level. 

As a result of shared history, recent Russian influence and landform, there is considerable physical similarity between the infrastructure and farmland of Poland and Eastern Germany.  But once across a line that forms the now virtually invisible border, the language and script changes and the Euro is no longer an acceptable currency.  Poland is again its own country with its own economy.

Like Eastern Germany, Poland has been experiencing rapid economic growth but has endemically high unemployment rates and low rates of pay.  As a result the Country is suffering a considerable 'brain drain' as the better educated leave for greener economic pastures in Germany and elsewhere in Europe and the World.

We pondered these similarities and differences as we drove across the countryside towards Kraków. 

 

 

Kraków

Again Wendy had booked an hotel in the old city area not far from one of the largest town squares in Europe. 

 

Kraków Town Square

 

And the city is quite beautiful.  It avoided being bombed or significantly damaged during the War, although apparently air pollution during the Soviet period was quite severe and damaged stonework and gilding on public edifices.  It doesn't seem to be a problem now, at least not during our time there.

 

Kraków Town Square at night

 

As in other European cities it was interesting driving into the older part of town through narrow lanes and the one-way system.  On this occasion it involved some fancy driving across dedicated tram tracks and through what, at first, looked like the entrance to a park. 

The Street outside the hotel is partly one-way.  A public parking area directly opposite is not strictly approachable, without going back around the one-way system, once outside the hotel.  I tried backing-up the required 20 metres but some bloke in a cab moved up close-behind, deliberately preventing me from backing around him. So I did a quick U-turn, going the wrong way alongside him for about two car lengths, to get back to the car park entrance, much to his abuse-screaming displeasure - in Polish and German?  Then I realised, German plates - not everyone loves Germans. 

We had already spent some hours driving across country observing Polish drivers in their natural habitat.  And any idea that Kraków cab drivers are unusual sticklers for obeying the road rules was quickly dispelled once we set out as pedestrians. Here dodgem rules apply, with little tourist trains, horse drawn carriages and other unusual vehicles adding to the chaos. 

Nevertheless it was very pleasant wandering around Kraków and we enjoyed the food in the open markets. 

 

Around Kraków

We spent a couple of days visiting things we wanted to see outside the city like the Salt Mines, reported below.  

Then just before leaving we visited Wawel Castle and explored the grounds.  But having got there we decided not to go in as we had a long drive to Warsaw and were both pretty well 'castled out'.  This Castle is dauntingly festooned with crosses and statues of Saints and Popes and the prospect of spending precious time gazing at another over-decorated room, tapestry, carved chair or gilded nick-knack, or worse, a heavily ornamented chapel, replete with no longer existent theological celebrities, weighed heavily on us.  But we did like the view.

Wawel Castle in Kraków

 

 

Wieliczka Salt Mine

The old Salt Wieliczka Salt Mine works were recommended.   At one time salt was essential for preserving meat over winter and was amazingly valuable, ranking with silver and gold weight for weight.  Now of course, it is one of the least expensive of commodities. 

At the works here there is a multipronged solution to declining profits:

• First among these is a bit of classic product differentiation: claiming that natural salt, with all its additional chemical contamination, is better for you.
• Second the mine itself is a tourist attraction, boosted by the historical enthusiasm of the miners and others for carving salt sculptures, à la Disney. 
  It is said to attract 1.2 million visitors a year and, like Jenolan Caves in Australia, has its own resort Hotel on site.

Down the Salt Mine - a la Disney

It is certainty an interesting experience, akin to large limestone caves, with the additional real prospect of a methane, also known as firedamp, explosion. 

As an additional hazard large sections of the roof have fallen in, in the not so distant past.

From and engineering point of view there is an interesting array of ancient and modern roof support technologies and separate ventilation zones, with air locks, as a means of fire and explosion suppression. 

Roof Bolting and Timber Roof Supports

 

Water management is also interesting.  The considerable quantity of water in the mine is supersaturated and so dissolves no more salt.  But who knows what fresh rainwater has seeped in above or from the adjoining water table. This is continuously dissolving away more salt within any strata into which the fresh water has been seeping. 

Is a large volume of water about to burst through the walls or roof I wondered? 

I have since discovered that commercial mining ceased here in 1996 due to the mine flooding in just one such incident.

 

Water management

 

The tourist entrance we used is via wooden stairs spiralling down a very deep shaft. 

If you've ever been involved in a building evacuation drill from the 20th floor or higher, imagine doing it in a half sized stairwell.  This one's a pretty good approximation of a chimney - loosely packed with wood and nice fatty bodies covered in flammable fabrics.  A fire starting near the bottom would be certain death for everyone on the stairs. 

I had fun thinking about this during the frequent stops while some less fit below recovered their breaths.

In the chimney - I mean the entrance shaft
The second photo is about half way down - looking back up the central void towards the top

 

Fortunately I'm neither claustrophobic nor prone to panic but I have met people who are. 

Once, while on a plane waiting to take-off, I made innocent conversation with a colleague about the obvious poor state of the aircraft's repair, pointing to some loose fittings, and exposed wires.  This caused him to throw-up. 

I should've known better.  Years earlier, on a Laker flight from London to New York, I'd complained to a hostess about luggage being stacked against the emergency exits and made some disparaging remarks about a broken seat and the plane's obvious poor state of repair.  The fellow next to me went white and once we were in the air swore that if he got off this plane alive he would never fly again.  As he was an Englishman, flying for the first time to the US and Canada on a business trip, I wondered how he would get home. Maybe he was obliged to emigrate?  On the bright side he'd ordered a meal that came in a paper bag, like a school lunch, that he was unable to eat and gave to me so I had two.

Anyway, I'd learnt my lesson and held my tongue on this occasion.  I decided that someone 'freaking out' in this tight space could be unpleasant, so it might not be wise to voice my observations within hearing of our other 'English-speaking-group' companions.

Once underground it's huge, like a small town.  Unsurprisingly, given the obvious dangers the miners faced, there are frequent places to pray. 

 

Chapel and Church

 

Led by our guide, we wondered around sometimes slippery paths, learning about the history of salt and about myths and misunderstandings that once governed people's lives and actions.  Then we had a late lunch in the café before queuing to get out.  This ended up taking a lot longer than to get in.  It involved queuing several times and being formed into groups as attendants managed the flow of visitors through the caverns.

The way up is via a the original mineshaft elevator to which a multilevel car has been fitted into which people are packed like sardines - very tightly - I mean squeezed together - in separate little cans.  By mid-afternoon there was a very large number of people in the mine.  I did a little sum.  The guide said they get 1.2 million visitors a year.  That's an average of around 4,000 visitors a day, give or take a thousand, depending on the season and day of the week.

When we were waiting our turn, we noticed that they lift out around 34 people each ride on about a four minute cycle. That'll take around eight hours to lift 4,000.   So that's why they schedule the people entering according to how many they have in the mine and have guides controlling the flow.  They must start lifting people out well before midday, on a peak day, to avoid having people still waiting to leave after 8 at night.  At any one time they must have close to a thousand visitors in the mine.

If the elevator or air supply or electricity fails or there is some disaster, like a fire, flood or explosion, they are going to have a lot of trouble getting all those people out.

As a result, I doubt if this place could operate like this, for the general public, almost anywhere else in the World.   

So you can only see/experience it in Poland. 

The drive from the city interesting and, notwithstanding its obvious OH&S/public safety shortcomings, the salt mine was most unusual and informative too - and a nice girl gave me some bath salts for participating in a marketing survey. 

During the drive back we both agreed, we had had a great day.  But if you think this is a recommendation, be aware that you have been warned.  It's a disaster waiting to happen.

 

 

Auschwitz

THIS CONTENT MAY BE DISTRESSING - CLICK HERE TO SKIP THIS SECTION

 

I suppose that Auschwitz is among the most infamous places in the world. 

All Nazi labour camps, concentration camps, are infamous but this is perhaps the worst because it became the principal Jewish and Roma extermination camp. 

The majority of labour camps outside of Poland were to provide slave labour essential to the war effort. 

A variety of people were rounded up and forced to work as slaves in the related factories: manufacturing bricks, chemicals and munitions or working on infrastructure projects such as autobahns.  Those incarcerated included actual criminals sentenced to hard labour, Communists and other political enemies of the Nazi regime, Russian prisoners of war, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Gypsies (Roma) and Jews.

Each camp bore the inscription on the gate 'ARBEIT MACHT FREI', literally, works makes one free, more poetically work ennobles. The phrase preceded the Nazis and was supposed to indicate that hard work is good for you.

On a previous visit the Berlin, Emily and I went to the site of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg, 30km north of Berlin. 

 

 

Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp

At Sachsenhausen and similar work camps, Jews were generally in the minority. For example at its peak at the beginning of 1945 the Sachsenhausen complex, that had grown to include more than 40 sub-camps serving the manufacture of war materiel, had more than 65,000 labourers about 17% of whom were Jewish.

By May 1945 many prisoners and even the guards were starving as the economy collapsed under the Allied attack and food ran out.  Records on display in the museum there show that there were no Jews left at Sachsenhausen.  Those not already shipped to Auschwitz or shot had not been fed.

The Nazis had come to power on a popular anti-Semitic platform and the promise to eliminate the alleged subversive influence of  European Jewry. Their support came mostly from the working classes.  There were similar movements in other Countries.

The Nazi's initial agenda was to force Jews to leave Germany by means of intolerable social isolation and harassment at home; and by actively facilitating their departure. 

For example, during the Kristallnacht riots in November 1938, during which anti-Semitic mobs attacked Jewish businesses and homes across Germany, tens of thousands of Jews who resisted were arrested.  Around six thousand of these were sent to Sachsenhausen but most were immediately released when they undertook to emigrate.  So by the end of 1938 only 1,345 remained in custody.

In 1933 Nazi Germany had negotiated the Haavara 'transfer agreement' (Heskem Haavara) the with a Zionist agricultural company to facilitate the emigration of German Jews to Palestine. It is reported that despite some internal concerns about letting Jews escape, this program continued to have Hitler's support until the invasion of Poland in 1939.  British figures show that some 50,000 German and Austrian Jews joined the Zionists (Jews wishing to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine) in British Mandated Palestine, helping to precipitate 1936–1939 Arab revolt in that country.  Despite attempts by the US government to restrict the numbers of Jewish refugees, around 100 thousand successfully also entered the United States during this period.  Britain too received around 100 thousand Jewish refugees, some 40 thousand from Germany and Austria alone, before 1939. 

Those that were most successful in settling elsewhere were predominantly middle class Jews with sufficient means.  They included intellectuals like: Albert Einstein, Max Born, Henry Kissinger, André Previn and Ludwig Wittgenstein and family, mentioned elsewhere on this website. There are long lists of names in Wikipedia.

Unadvisedly, large numbers also fled to France and other Continental countries that would soon be occupied by Germany.  These unfortunate people would ultimately be rounded up, like Anne Frank, and sent to a Concentration camp. 

While some German Jews had an opportunity to leave, Poland was a different matter. Poland had been home to around 80% of Europe's Jews before war broke out and the majority were poor, with no means of escape before Germany and Russia invaded. So in Polish concentration camps around 90% of the prisoners were Jewish.

After the Americans entered the war in 1941 and the war with Russia on the Eastern Front was grinding to a stalemate it became obvious to the Nazi leadership that the Allies might win the war.  In January 1942 Heinrich Himmler, the Nazi Interior minister who had set up the Concentration Camps in the first place, proposed the: Endlösung der Judenfrage - Final Solution to the Jewish Problem - extermination. 

Lists of prisoners by category in the museum/information area at Sachsenhausen show that the proportion of Jewish prisoners fell rapidly as a result of Himmler's Final Solution.  In 1942 a proportion were sent by train to Auschwitz.  Then, in 1943, a crematorium was built, the remains of which are still there, to dispose of the bodies of the dead.  These included the remaining Jewish and Roma prisoners who were shot in purpose built concrete pits that are still there.  Some may also have been gassed.

In the Polish extermination camps conditions were even more appalling than at Sachsenhausen.  In the most infamous of all Auschwitz, experiments began on chemical sterilisation, along with many other horrendous medical experiments that needed disposable human test subjects. 

 

The sign over the door says Extermination - this block was used for experiments - like gassing Russian soldiers.

 

Surprisingly, Auschwitz I is not terribly daunting.  Today with trees growing and spacious thoroughfares it seems quite pleasant. The original institution was obviously a well established military base or prison with around 30 well-built three storey brick blocks laid out in a grid, and it's not very big, a couple of hundred metres on a side.  It was converted to a concentration camp in 1941, initially to house Soviet prisoners of war, and it was they who were victims of the first experiments with poisonous gas.  The chambers in which they were gassed are now memorials to these Soviet soldiers. There is also a wall that was used by military firing squads.

 

Auschwitz I

 

The people sent to Auschwitz worked in the nearby factories and were marched there each day. The camp orchestra welcomed them back in the evening.

Initially, a small bunker at Auschwitz was converted as a gas chamber for the first mass killings and Himmler was so pleased with this that he ordered the construction of a larger facility.

 

The first gas chamber and the outer electric fences - a handful did manage to escape

 

Two and a half kilometres away and more horrific because of its scale and farm-like ambiance, is a vast area known as Birkenau (Auschwitz II) where around 124 hectares were covered in almost 300 primitive dormitory huts. Initially these were poorly constructed brick huts and latterly wooden farm sheds based on military horse stables.  Into these the predominantly Jewish workers were thrown like animals. 

At night they heaped together in communal beds in the most appalling conditions.  Many had dysentery. During the day they worked in a nearby chemical works as slave labour. 

As the Allies brought the Third Reich to its knees everyone was short of food.  But in the concentration camps inmates were deprived of sufficient food to sustain them and were thus worked to death, typically dying within months. 

Over a hundred hectares were covered in these farm-shed dormitories
Bottom right are the communal latrines:
form four lines - march in - turn - sit - stand (ready or not) - march out - next group...

 

Opposite to the entrance at Birkenau what amounted to an 'extermination factory' was constructed, consisting of a production line of linked stages: change rooms; showers/ gas chamber; and crematoria.  The ruins are there still. 

 

The ruins of the buildings pictured and the Memorial over the gas chamber

 

It was blown-up in an apparent attempt the destroy the evidence prior to the Russian army's arrival in 1945 and now it is a memorial with plaques in many languages repeating the same message:

 

 

Forever 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

 

Towards the end Jews were shipped in by train, to be processed through this death factory, not just from Poland now but from other concentration camps all over Europe. 

 

They came here from all over Europe

 

Around one and a half million people, mostly Jews, were systematically gassed and then cremated in this purpose-built facility.  As they arrived their personal possessions were confiscated and they were sorted.  Those able to work went through the gate into the camp.  All the rest, the sick and elderly and the children were sent to the showers.

 

Killing Factory

 

Our guide told of the horrors of forced work on limited food and literally being piled into huts at night. I imagined clinging to others, many with dysentery, for warmth until death came in a month or two.

It was then that I and others on the tour realised it was the lucky ones who were directed down the path that led to the showers.  They would experience a smell of almonds followed by death within a quarter of an hour if they struggled.  But if they had fallen to the floor or knew to pickup and swallow a Zyklon B pellet it would be over in under a minute. 

 

Zyklon B pellets

 

Zyklon B pellets release hydrogen cyanide when wet.  They are still manufactured for fumigation in some countries and were used in some states in the US for Capital Punishment (the Gas Chamber).   Cyanide is the fast acting poison preferred by secret agents to avoid interrogation.  Death is very fast if swallowed.

Maybe guards shouted to some to swallow a pellet if they wanted to avoid suffering?  It almost beggars the imagination to put oneself in either situation: panicking for breath; or as a guard.

Walking around with the official guide and imagining myself there I realised that someone like me would not have been sent here, except perhaps, as a guard.  So I found myself wondering what it would have been like to have been a young German man who had patriotically signed-up to defend his country but was insufficiently skilled or suitable to be sent to the front to fight. 

Instead he ended up as a guard in a concentration camp, bit by bit becoming inured human suffering and to his fate - working in a human abattoir.  Yet hundreds did as they were ordered to.  Could I have been one of the few who allegedly refused and were shot as mutineers?

I was asking our guide what she knew about the guards.  The officers were German but what of the guards, were they Poles or were they Germans?  How did they communicate with the workers and other prisoners?  Just then we came to the one small freight carriage that remains. 

 

People were railed here like cattle

 

I recalled the cattle and sheep wagons we watched passing endlessly on the railway behind our school as children. I imagined the terror of being herded into one of these wagons.  I imagined the complicity of fellow townsfolk and conservative working people who had been shocked at the new liberality in the big cities and had puritanically voted the Nazis into power. 

I recalled the Spanish Inquisition murdering tens of thousands of Jews; and the Russian Pogroms; and the good people of York who pulled all of the Jews out of their beds one night in 1190 and murdered them all.  I imagined generations of people calling out in indignation when the terror came:  'I'm not Jewish... but he/she is...' 

Now it's so easy to avoid the blame: 'The nasty Nazi bully did it.  I was an innocent bystander ...  Like the kids in a school yard, circling young combatants, yelling:  fight  fight!...  I might have voted for them but I didn't know they'd do that!'  

But then I remembered what an elderly Polish lady had, shocking, said when we sat in her kitchen in Castle Hill, in Australia, having a nice cup of tea and cake.  She was the only genuine survivor of a Nazi Concentration Camp I have ever talked to at length.  I listened with interest to her stories of hardship; how the food ran out; and people were dying of starvation; and how she and others had joined with their German guards to flee to the Americans away from the Russians; and how some of the guards had also died of starvation on the journey; and how her dead husband had suffered even more terribly at the hands of the Russians in a Gulag camp.  Finally I asked her if she had known that they were killing the Jews.  'Yes - But they deserved it!' she replied. 

The dreadful truth is that eliminating Jews was not unpopular among working class Poles like her; or Germans; or even in England.  It's been going on for over a thousand years - supposedly justified because the Jews killed Christ. 

The more immediate cause in the interwar period was that they were identified as the Pawn Brokers and lenders of last resort to the working classes.  At the other end of the social spectrum Hitler, agreed with Henry Ford and others in the US and Sir Oswald Mosley in the UK, that mainstream Jewish bankers were responsible for the first World War.  Hitler was at pains to point out that Karl Marx was Jewish and hence the Communists and Russian Bolsheviks were part of the Jewish plot to take over the World. 

When hyper-inflation hit the Weimar Republic and the economy collapsed in 1929, many tradesmen, shop owners and small land holders lost whatever little capital or savings they had and again the Jews got the blame.  It was on this popular wave of anti-Semitism that Hitler and the Nazi party road to power.

At Auschwitz today are rooms containing long showcases filled with the personal affects of civilians put to death, eyeglasses, luggage, shoes and so on.  These affect different people in different ways. 

Suitcases and shoes

I found most of these displays historically interesting, like cabinets in a museum - until I got to the huge display case, like the one with shoes above, filled with human hair.  I choked and tears spontaneously came to my eyes as they are doing now as I write. 

 

Pope John Paul II

Following the sudden unexpected death of Pope John Paul I in 1978 a Pole, Karol Józef Wojtyła, was elected the first non-Italian Pope for 400 years and took the name John Paul II. 

Shortly afterwards, in 1980, the first cracks in the Soviet edifice began in Poland at the Lenin Shipyards in Gdańsk when a strike led to the Shipyards' worker's Union gaining its independence under the name of Solidarity.   Lech Wałęsa, the Solidarity Union leader became known worldwide and other unions across the Soviet Union demanded the right to local independence.

Solidarity went on to demand free democratic elections in Poland and a decade later Lech Wałęsa was elected President of Poland. 

 

Solidarity

 

As subsequent disclosures around the Vatican bank revealed, hundreds of millions of Western dollars had been secretly fed to the Solidarity movement through the resources of the Vatican and the Catholic Church. 

Thus historians generally agree that John Paul II substantially hastened the demise of the Soviet Union and Saint John Paul II became a hero of the Western World and he remains so in Poland.

 

John Paul II still most popular in Poland

 

Now 83% of Poles are Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox heretics have been vanquished.  Unlike many Roman Catholics elsewhere who identify as Catholic but do not practice, over 63% of Poles are regular church goers attending more than once a month.  Protestants, unbelievers and assorted eastern religions account for most of the remainder.  Jews are virtually nonexistent. 

Poland now challenges Malta as one of the most Roman Catholic countries in the developed world and this is in evidence everywhere.

 

Public Christianity

 

When a large sample of Poles were asked:  'Is religion an important part of your daily life?', three quarters affirmed that it is.

This is extraordinary in a Europe where there in hardly another country, except of course Malta, where a majority of those polled answered Yes.  In northern Europe three quarters of those polled answered No.

 

In addition to being credited by some with the demise of Communism in Europe the Polish Pope, John Paul II, was first and foremost an ecumenicalist.

In 1982 he met with the Queen of England, head of the Church of England, and attempted to reconcile Roman Catholicism with the Anglican tradition, only to be foiled by the ordination of women in that tradition.

He was also first to publically recognise the hurt that the Church, and some twenty previous Popes, had inflicted on the Jews.

In some degree this was a response to Jewish and secular historians pointing to the Church’s early accommodation with and encouragement of Hitler. For example, when Hitler remilitarised the Rhineland and Catholic priests blessed the invading soldiers and Cardinal Karl Joseph Schulte held a Mass at Cologne Cathedral to give thanks.

Catholic historians have responded that the Church strongly admonished Hitler for ethnic cleansing, particularly in relation to Poland where huge numbers of people were driven out of their homes to make way for German settlers; and children were 'stolen' from parents to be taught German and German culture. 

For example in 1939 Pope Pius XII published his Summi Pontificatus after his election. This encyclical, subtitled 'On the Unity of Human Society', proclaims the equality of all humans born of Adam.  It is said to have been an implicit condemnation of ethnic cleansing as it specifically condemns the killing of the disabled and genetically defective.  A later encyclical letter:  Mystici Corporis Christi (1943) clearly condemns the destruction of Poland, calls its immediate restoration and denounces the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

Although Jews are not specifically identified in these and similar admonishments of Nazi wrongdoing, Jews were obviously included among those injured.

As an underground priest in training Karol Wojtyła had firsthand experience of the Holocaust.

To make amends for the Church for its numerous acts of oppression against Jews, in 2000 John Paul II visited the Western Wall in Jerusalem, the most holy Jewish place of worship, prayed and left a letter of apology in a crack.

 

The Western Wall - see our trip to Israel

 

The following year he attempted a reconciliation with Islam by praying in the Great Synagogue in Damascus and proclaiming Islam a religion in the Abrahamic tradition. 

 

The Great Synagogue in Damascus - see our Middle East trip

 

His successor Benedict XVI was far less conciliatory.

 

 

Warsaw

After three nights in Kraków we drove the 300 km to Warsaw.  On the way we found another charming local restaurant and had a very nice Polish lunch. 

 

Roadside Restaurant - Polish style

 

A pretty waitress even ran out to the car to return my reading glasses that I had left on our table.

The hotel in Kraków turned out to be well located and walking distance to much of what we wanted to see.  It consists of a series of suites spread out within what is otherwise a group of commercial buildings.  It's a bit odd, but it turned out to be comfortable and quite central and offers a good continental breakfast with soft or hard boiled eggs, in one of those French style boil-it-yourself troughs, cereal and an espresso machine, in addition to the usual selection of breads, pastries, fruit, cheese and meats.  It also styles itself as a music lover's hotel and features nightly Chopin recitals in the parlour.

 

Television

On TV in our hotel room in Warsaw we have both CNN and RT (Russian TV in English). Flipping between them is rather interesting. RT is obscure as to why the West is mounting sanctions against Russia. RT has an obvious bias spends a lot of time criticising US politics, using largely British left wing commentators who occasionally make a valid point and are otherwise amusing.  While CNN is not as right wing as Fox News, it too wears its heart on its sleeve: the Russians need to be isolated and sanctioned over their actions in the Ukraine and Putin is a smarmy ex CIA, I mean KGB, monster and just too popular.

Surprisingly, almost the same points are being made on RT and CNN about ISIS and Syria.  Basically both agree that millions of people have been displaced by those desperate to unseat Assad and, as a consequence of the piling weapons, money and foreign fighters into Syria, everyone is now threatened by new enemy. 

The only difference of opinion seems to be the conflicting views their differently biased commentators have of the of the validity of that original goal, a commentator on CNN describing Assad as the epitome of evil.  A bit strong I thought.  He's not exactly Hitler and definitely an improvement on his father, who seemed to get away with much worse.  And Syria is quite secular and a sort of Democracy - certainly more democratic than Egypt and several other countries in the Region, like Saudi Arabia.

Having been to peaceful and relatively prosperous and enlightened Syria prior to its deliberate destabilisation I find myself asking: 'what for?' too.

There is also amazing agreement amongst the competing commentators about the probable consequences: a new wave of radicalised terrorists sweeping across the world trying to bring down modern civilisation and establish, in its place, an Islamic Caliphate.

 

We had a pleasant afternoon and night and the next morning we set out to get a bit of local culture.

We tried to go to the Chopin museum but found it closed, so we went to the Curie Museum with the same result. On the way we had a second look at the statue of the other world famous local,  Copernicus. 

As the world knows, Chopin is one of the most loved and influential composers of all time - particularly of sonatas, mazurkas, waltzes, nocturnes, polonaises written for the piano. 

When I was a student I often played a (vinyl) record of Chopin pieces by the piano virtuosi Rawicz and Landauer on my home-made stereo while studying. A record was the only commercial way of recording and replaying music back then.  Now you can get similar quality from a CD and even a listenable download from YouTube:

 

No responsibility is accepted for linked third party video or media content - see Terms of Use and Copyright.

 

 One day one of the neighbours stopped me and said:  'You are so talented'. 

I glowed with pride at this mysterious recognition of skills I had not revealed to her - until she said:  'Yes, I often pause passing your open window and listen to your wonderful piano playing...'  

Well, at least it was a fine endorsement for my home-built speakers and amplifier, not to mention my most valuable possession, an extremely expensive cartridge, with shibata diamond stylus.  But I was a bit mystified as to how she thought I could play two pianos at once.

Marie Curie was a similarly talented Warsaw born chemist and physicist.  She married the French physicist Pierre Curie who, with his brother, was first to demonstrate and describe piezoelectricity, the basis of many electronic devices, and to describe the effects of temperature on magnetic materials. The Curie Point, a property of ferromagnetic materials, is named after him.  Marie was awarded the Nobel Prize twice.  Once in Physics, jointly with Pierre, for discoveries in radiation and a second time in Chemistry for isolating the elements radium (Ra) and polonium (Po). 

Unfortunately all isotopes of these chemicals are radioactive and she died in 1934 from complications due to radiation poisoning.  Pierre was already dead.  He was run over by a horse drawn carriage in 1906 in Paris 28 years earlier.  At the time, Marie was the only woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize and remains the only woman to receive it twice, in different disciplines.

Copernicus (1473- 1543) was the father of what we now call the Solar System.  He was a bureaucrat, diplomat, economist and classics scholar, who worked in the Court of his Uncle the Prince-Bishop of Warmia, which was one of four bishoprics of Teutonic Prussia (now Poland again), from the age of thirty until his death.  He had qualifications and interests in numerous disciplines: canon law; medicine; languages; mathematics and astronomy. 

In the year of his death he published his idea about how the Aristotelian view of the Universe, that had put the Earth at its centre, could be simplified by putting the Sun at its centre.  This book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) revolutionised astronomy and simplified celestially based navigation.  It later allowed Kepler and then Newton to correctly describe the orbits of the planets, and thus evolve the Newtonian theory of gravity. 

When the outcomes of his re-framing became evident 90 years later, Galileo was convicted by the Holy Inquisition on suspicion of heresy for 'following the position of Copernicus, which is contrary to the true sense and authority of Holy Scripture' and placed under house arrest for the rest of his life.

Today we know that there is no easily defined centre of our unimaginably vast Universe.  It seems to each of us that the centre is where we are standing.  The entire universe moves around us, no matter where we go, specially when those people bump into us or those bloody cars try to run us over.  But a model of reality that moves its centre to Mongolia or the International Space Station, if you chose to travel there, might be perfectly valid for you but it's useless to me. 

All Copernicus said is that it's a lot simpler for those thinking about how the planets move, and building instruments and tables modelling the heavens for navigation, if we all agree to put the Sun at the centre.  Many saw the logic of this and even the Jesuits began to teach it in places like China, with the proviso that it was nothing but a simplifying geometric trick.

 

Copernicus' vision of the universe in De revolutionibus orbium coelestium - public domain

 

Today practical navigators, like NASA, still use the same simplification, putting the Sun at the centre, even though astronomers have long known that the Sun is but one of billions of such stars revolving around the centre of our galaxy, which in turn, is moving very fast in relation to many billions of other galaxies.

The principal error made by the Ancient Greeks, and by subsequent astrologers and theologians, was to hypothesise that the infinitesimal part of Universe visible to the naked eye is all that there is and that things in these Heavens are pure or perfect, unlike things on Earth.  Thus objects in the visible heavens, which were conceived of as concentric spheres, must move eternally, at one speed, in circles.   Copernicus' simplified solar-centric model was nothing but a reframing of this model and was based on circles and epicycles too. 

But some excellent observational data, collected by the eccentric Dane, Tycho Brahe, allowed Kepler to realise that there was something seriously wrong with this.  It was Kepler who first demonstrated and mathematically described elliptical orbits and variable velocities and Galileo, using his early telescope, who revealed that: other planets had moons; Jupiter and the Sun had spots; Venus had phases like the moon; and thus imperfection ruled in the heavens, as on Earth. 

It was the now obvious and demonstrable errors of fact, endorsed by numerous Saints and Prophets and even the Bible itself  'contrary to the true sense and authority of Holy Scripture',  that was so profoundly disturbing to the Church.   The growing realisation that the Earth was in no way special and that life on it must be equally insignificant to a hypothetical Creator or First Cause, came later.

 

Closed Museums: Chopin & Curie
Copernicus has no Museum - just a bronze

 

One place that was open was the huge Palace of Culture and Science that had been a gift from the Russians to Poland in 1955.  So we took the tour, culminating in a visit to the viewing level at the top. 

 

Palace of Culture and Science

 

Many features reminded us of a Moscow subway station of a similar vintage.  But this was either fitted out on the cheap or the Moscow subway is better maintained, possibly both.   Our Guide had a standard commentary and one thing that obviously gets a laugh is that one of the foyers is known as 'the chapel' because members of the public started to come in and pray there thinking that a very secular bass relief there, depicting industry and science, was a religious icon.  'People will pray to anything here,' she said laughing.

 

Inside the Palace of Culture and Science

 

When it was built it was one of the tallest buildings in Europe, it still ranks ninth, and about the only thing standing in Warsaw that had be levelled by the Germans during the war.  Slowly the city has recovered and other buildings have risen around it. 

The observation deck however was well worth the price of our tickets.

 

The view from the Palace of Culture and Science

 

There was a café in the foyer and a tourist information place.  We had a coffee and Wendy decided to ask about things to see in town. An extremely annoying woman, accompanied by a whispering browbeaten husband, spent over an hour thinking of 'just one more thing' before she stood aside to let Wendy ask her simple question:  What is open today?  That is, in addition to Zara - which, of course, we had already found. 

I realised that this could take some time and went back to the café.  Eventually the information guy marked a brochure listing venues with a single dot.  On a Monday, only the technology Museum around the corner.  That suited me and off we went.  The Museum door was ajar and in we went.  The multitude of police, who were there providing security for some visiting dignitary were nonplussed.  But such was their surprise at our unexpected appearance that they didn't have the presence of mind to tackle us to the ground, or shoot us, so just as quickly, out we went.  

But all was not lost for Wendy.  Across the plaza from the inaccessible museum  - behold! - another Zara! 

So while she browsed I roamed about the ultra-modern shopping mall, deciding if I should buy a gun or a throwing knife from the stand outside the children's-wear shop or go down to pick up some sexy fetish gear from the shop in the subway under the road.

 

Retail Warsaw-style

 

The Old City

Much of Warsaw needed to be rebuilt after it was levelled during the war and in the old town area historic buildings provide a pleasant place to walk.

 

The old Town

 

Later we explored the reconstructed old town for a second time.  On out first visit we had been attracted by an Irish Pub where I had a very non-Polish Guinness and Wendy a cider this time we wanted to have a Polish dinner and check out the reconstructed buildings. 

In the end due to the favourable exchange rate Warsaw turned out to be a good place to shop.

 

More Retail Therapy

 

I finally succumbed to retail therapy and bought some Danish shoes, that are made in Thailand.  We even bought something designed and made in Poland, a pretty ceramic bowl.

But one of the things we liked most of all was the food.  Because of a very good first experience there we did what we hardly ever do .  We went to the same restaurant twice.  The second time we ordered kebabs and a nice crisp white wine.  The meal that arrived was huge, varied and wonderfully tasty and all at very modest Polish prices.

 

Dinner Polish style

 

As we drove the 570 km back to Berlin by the nice smooth autobahn the following morning, we were happy.  It had been a very pleasant little trip.  I returned the car with thanks. 

 

 

The car

(For those considering a trip to Poland or elsewhere in Europe)

I had driven a total of 1,709 km in six days.  I was very pleased with the almost new Hyundai i30 upgraded from a: 'Volkswagen Polo or similar' from Europcar (but booked through a 'best value' site).

Although only 1.6 litres and lacking the power I'm used to, it had a very useful 6th gear, in which cruising at 150km/h was not a problem.  It also delivered excellent fuel economy, coming in at just A$186 on my card.  Good fuel economy is important because in Europe fuel can cost as much as the car rental.

Might we have been better off going by train?  Possibly. 

Checking the prices the cost of car hire plus the fuel was almost identical to two second class train tickets:  Berlin - Krakow - Warsaw - Berlin.  But side trips and getting to and from the stations involve significant additional expense.

A car is door to door, with one's luggage, and all those other stray bits of clothing and little purchases chucked into the back.  One sees a lot more of the countryside in a car, the small towns and suburbs, local people going about their business and using the roads, up close, whereas the view from a train window is mostly distant or repetitive and boring. 

On this quick trip, the car also saved a lot of valuable time, notwithstanding wasting several hours going in the wrong direction one day, thanks to excessive trust in the GPS navigator.  Even then, we got to see some unusual places, and a lot of roadwork, and had some memorable experiences and interactions with Poles in the countryside. Like trying to get directions using sign language - quite an adventure.

I've looked up the train times.  Not counting waiting and the hassle of getting to various stations on time using local transport and having one's day dominated by a train schedule, the three trips take a total of 18 hours 30 minutes, main station to main station. 

The longest leg takes 9 hours 10 minutes by train station to station, while that leg took us around seven hours in the car door to door, saving at least four hours.  And we were able to leave when it suited us and stop if we wanted to.  For example, we took longer to drive the 300 Km from Krakow to Warsaw than the three hour high speed train journey but we left when we wanted to from the Castle in Krakow, and we drove directly to our hotel in Warsaw, no cabs or public transport.  We would probably have taken around three hours had we not stopped along the way for nearly an hour for a pleasant lunch. 

The downside to hiring a car is that driving requires more concentration, particularly on the wrong side of the road with the gearstick on the other side, and there is more chance of something going wrong, not that long train trips and public transport are a bed of roses. 

 

More photos of Poland