79. To Hel and Back

(Poland by train and tram: Gdansk –  Szczecin - Poznan – Nowa Huta – Katowice – Bytom - Krakow: 3 – 13 November, 2024)

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SUNDAY:     Gdansk

(I feel so sorry for the school children of Poland, struggling to learn a national history of shifting or disappearing borders and lurking adjacent empires keen to swallow the land and Polish identity.

Gdansk has been a long surviving city: of Poland, of the Teutonic Order of the northern Crusades, of Poland, of Prussia;  a Free City during the Napoleonic Wars, swallowed up by Prussia, made a free city (again) by the League of Nations, invaded (after destabilisation) by the Nazis, then a city in Poland after WWII when the former majority German population was expelled or fled).

When hurrying along a gritty laneway between a demolition site and a gasometer, you know you are not in the loveliest part of any town as you try to make the deadline for a timed museum entry ticket.  This is the direct walk from Gdansk Glowny station to an attraction that would be closed for the next two days. The haste was not in vain.

It takes a (very) strong coffee to recover from 3 hours in the Museum of the Second World War. After descending several levels to the underground bowels of the building to enter, those who are exiting pass by slowly, looking to be in quiet shellshock. On the other side of the turnstyle is an extended journey through expansive parallel underground halls evidencing the human impact of WWII and the ideologies that led to such cruelty and destruction.

The WELCOME:

“The Second World War was the most tragic conflict in the history of humanity. It was launched by the totalitarian regimes of Germany and the Soviet Union which cooperated with each other. They committed acts of unimaginable cruelty and crimes in the names of lawless ideologies. In these times of contempt for human life, to act honourably was heroic, and people paid the highest price for defiance. Everyday life was transformed into a battle for survival…”

This museum parks Poland in the eye of the storm and pulls no punches about the impact of totalitarian ideology and dogma. When walking into a hall called “TERROR”, be sure of what you are about to experience.  The “big picture” is pieced together from hundreds of small biographies.

Invitation to French workers to share their "Qualite Francaise" in Nazi Germany

Standing underground, in Gdansk, 120km from the Russian border, shortly  after the election of Trump, at a time of the sustained rise of international right-wing populism, immersed in the echoing historical strategies which empower totalitarianism and ethnic cleansing of nations is discomfiting. At best.

4.30pm: riding the escalator up towards an already pitch-black sky feels cleansing; bracing. So is the sea breeze. An extended walk along the glossy waterfront past rowdy bars, opening bridges, baroque arched town gates and palaces, through the extensive, largely restored and floodlit 15th Century “Old Town” is cleansing.

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MONDAY:

The wisdom of the Gdansk City Walking Tour Guide:

“You know, Lech Walesa, after leading Solidarity in the fight for national freedom from Communism, became our first democratically elected President. He narrowly lost the next election and was at a loose end after playing such a huge part in establishing democratic Poland.

 He returned to welding at the shipyards, but the international media kept hounding him for interviews and to film him at work. He was “let go” from shipyard work.  When asked about it he said that former US Presidents could at least work on building their post-presidential library. So the city council gave him an office in the Green Gate to the Old Town. He would arrive at “work” at 8 in the morning and go home at 4, meeting and being interviewed by whoever wanted to speak to him. He’s over 80 now and has fully retired.”

Old Gdansk was largely destroyed on World War II. The rebuilding of the Old Town was enabled by the return of exiled Poles from the Soviet Union (previously removed due to Stalin’s suspicion of educated class enemies as well as prevailing Communist racial theories) who brought their engineering and architectural skills. Housing was needed, urgently; the government was committed to rebuilding old Gdansk. The commemoration stones outside of some apparently 500-year-old houses therefore have inscriptions such as “AD 1998”.

Gdansk had been part of the medieval Hanseatic League of northern European trading cities, before nation states cared to, or were powerful enough, to protect international trade. As such, the Old Town is reminiscent of contemporary Belgian or German architecture, recently and faithfully (externally) rebuilt from paintings and engravings that survived WWII: Antwerp meets Poland.

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The Solidarity Museum is a deliberately massive rusted-industrial steel monolith, next to the gates of the still-functioning shipyards. The courtyard is a soaring steel monument surrounded by plaques detailing individual bravery, deaths, heroism and resistance in the combined struggle for a free trade union and eventually the overthrow of Communism from Poland. The sweep of Perestroika engulfed a faltering dictatorial government, forcing it to release and seriously negotiate with the Solidarity leaders-made-political-prisoners in the glare of international media. The building celebrates industrial, collaborative political determination and power and faith.

Solidarity memorial forecourt towers and museum

Gdansk museums, and the historical landscape itself, take visitors on journeys of redemption.

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TUESDAY:

35 Kilometers of Sand Bar:

On every extended journey, there comes at least one low, low, low day. Mine was this drizzly Tuesday, one month after leaving Sydney. The snotty Polish flu that had been bubbling for some days broke its banks and drowned any headachy inclination to vaguely wander quaint reconstituted medieval streets or to squint at labels in museums through bloodshot eyes. I doped up on the mysterious dynamite flu drugs bought in Italy last April to reach a kind of wavery high with rivers of lumpy, salty sputum; at least able to walk across the road to find a lazy there-and-back local train trip, with a good lunch, to fill in the day.  The appropriately matronly railway ticket seller in the spectacularly ornate Gdansk Glowny (safely behind a germ-barrier glass screen) suggested a day trip on a little branch line train to “Hel and  back”.

How appropriate.

After standing (firmly masked), jammed with the morning peak commuter train hordes through industrial Sopot to big-city Gdynia, I hopped onto a little diesel train hauling one quaint 1950s era passenger carriage with its bike storage compartment and a few locals returning to and from a succession of villages from Puck to Wladyslawowo. The train then ambled along the extended west to east isthmus through Jastarnia to Hel: the Baltic sea to the left; the calmer Bay of Puck with distant views of the industrial coast to the right.

And it was a delight.  

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(Polish school child’s history learning nightmare: From 1440, Hel was part of the Prussian Confederation; 1454: became part of the kingdom of Poland who handed responsibility to Gdansk city; 1893: swallowed up by the German Empire; 1918: became part of the new state of Poland (German population encouraged to leave); 1939: invaded by Nazis  (Polish population forced to leave); 1945: became part of post-war Poland. Clear as???)

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This is an area of summer tourism of the healthy-walking-through-fresh-air-along-white-sand-beaches-and-cycling-through-forests-and-photographing-sea-and-birdlife-while-staying-in-little-cabins-in-woods variety. Summer tourism had ceased a week earlier. The lines of overnight cabins and cottages in the villages were vacant and shuttered.  The little train persevered through picturesque Autumn foliage passing sandy wooded tracks and stone churches and even more prettier Autumn foliage before passing a siding of dilapidated pre-war railway carriages converted to even more cabin accommodation as the railway met the parallel road to Hel.

Or this all could have been a bit of a flulike fever dream between extended dozing which dislocated the 2 hour journey into something vaguely episodic, being woken by one’s own choking snores…

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From Wikipedia:

“Hel (from Old Norse: hel, lit. 'underworld') is a female being in Norse mythology who is said to preside over an underworld realm of the same name, where she receives a portion of the dead.

The lurking flu had reached the stage where I was contemplating which bodily portion I might need to be offering up….

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The welcome scenery as you walk out of the Germanic Mock Tudor station into the world of Hel (while the train busies itself, reversing for the afternoon return trip) is a life-sized carved-wood collection of seven caricatured musicians  (fortunately mute, as one was an accordian player: another on potentially headache-inducing percussion). This was no fever dream: I have photos. The local Biedronka supermarket chain was flogging its Specials in a distant window; Groszek convenience store was advertising a “festival” of breaded sausages next to dimly lit “Double Hit” and “Chicken” digital kids’ game consoles on the street.

A short boardwalk led to a pure-white, finely-sanded beach with a small breakwater and to a smaller lighthouse. The largely Winter-shuttered  harbour front offered but one open bar with bracing outside seating for lunch: delicious fish soup with enough salt and texture to befuddle failing tastebuds. The shimmering distant views of Gdansk New Port formed a silvery harbour background to a HYpermanic YOung WAiter IMpressing WIth HIs EXpressive BBC ENglish WIth EMphasis on FIrst SYllabes of EAch WOrd…  The FOcused INdividual service lurked at my left shoulder meal in his shirtsleeves for the duration of the meal  in the FResh BRRRRReeze (I was in puffer jacket, woolly beanie, thermals and thick scarf in the watery sunshine).

Pure salty fish soup deliciousness mixed with a Paracetamol and a Cepacol chaser promoted deep, deep sleep for most of return run towards the commuter burbs in Gdyna.

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WEDNESDAY:

Szczecin:

The lovely, comfy, morning Intercity express train trip towards the German border was interrupted by the potential misery of bus-bridge-trackwork: just like weekends home… The dynamite Italian flu drugs softened the experiencessszzzzzzzzz…….

Trudging from bus back to train at Slupsk ("Bloody trackwork!")

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Lonely Planet Poland Guide:

“Szczecin is interesting if you are German and looking for an overnight stop before going somewhere with more attractions.”

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"Stettin" (as it was when part of Prussia, then part of Germany until the Polish borders ate up Eastern Germany following WWII) was the stuff of espionage fiction of Len Deighton, John LeCarre et al.

(School child history-learning nightmare: Szczecin: has been part of 10th Century Poland then Denmark, Sweden, The Holy Roman Empire, Prussia and Weimar Germany. On the Oder river, until 1945 it was the main seaport for Berlin. After 1945 it was Polish.)

For visitors, there’s a large and slightly bland Renaissance castle, a formal viewing platform of the sunrises over a de-industrialised port landscape in front of early 20th Century Teutonic university buildings (now a National Museum), and the smaller Szczecin History Museum in a 13th century Gothic Town Hall building. This had been “damaged when shelled during the Swedish period, rebuilt in the Baroque style in the 18th Century” then rebuilt after WWII devastation in a “blend of Gothic and Baroque styles”(!).

It’s an eclectic warehouse of relics now, from “Swedish, Prussian and German periods to postwar times”… So, limited resources mean displays of carved bits and pieces lumped under vague headings with semi-related art and armour, early 20th Century photographs of a very German city, and concise telling of the Nazi efforts to wipe Poland and the Polish and their language from the map thorough Lebensraum, forced removal or reculturing of the remnant population and destruction of the Jews. Displays of the post-Germanic Communist era are no less unkind.

What was left of the German population was largely forced back over the (newly adjacent) East German border in 1945, being replaced by Poles returning from countries to the north and east where they had been exiled when the Soviet Union swallowed northeastern Poland in 1939.

Szczecin a wonderful small city for tracing architectural, cultural and political history… and also for dire post-industrial landscape photography of clanking Communist era trams on rumbly concrete-sett Eastern European streets passing background scenery of decrepitly ornate Germanic industrial tenements and abandoned warehouses and cranes in acres of former dirty industrial wastelands.

Very few Old Town buildings were reconstructed in this (only 7th largest) Polish city. Perhaps, Dear Reader, you would be well advised to take the Lonely Planet advice and skip the experience.

I liked Szczecin.

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FRIDAY

Poznan: 11.15am.

I have 15 minutes to change trains for Krakow. I have followed the crowd, riding up and escalator into… a glitzy shopping centre. There are no signs to station or trains, just the artificial light of a mesmerising mall. After some tentative wandering to (what I find out later is) the bus station, I stumble upon an excellent English speaker at one of those island counters selling mobile phone trinketry. Very concise advice in formal BBC English, and I am within two escalator rides of my distant train, fortunately delayed, making the front carriage just as the guard is furiously whistling.

This is the daily EuroCity train from Berlin to Przemysl on the Polish side of the Ukrainian border. According to The Man at Seat 61 website:

“All these Berlin-Krakow EuroCity trains have a Polish restaurant car, staffed by WARS, the Polish train caterers.  Treat yourself to a meal and linger in the restaurant for an hour or two over a beer and a meal.  A tasty sausage soup, main course of schnitzel, potato & salad served on proper china, a beer and coffee for only around €10.”

“WARS” in the restaurant car is about right. It’s the Friday afternoon rush to reach home for the long weekend of Polish Independence Day. Forget “Treat yourself to a meal and linger in the restaurant for an hour or two”… Every unbooked passenger who cannot find a spare bit of vestibule floor is crammed in here: it’s luggage along the walls and standing/leaning room only. I can smell and see remnants of delicious, freshly cooked, schnitzel and beetroot meals on plates piled on tables, before the passengers joining at Poznan invaded. Accompanied and advised by a stoic nun, we both order freshly made chicken wraps (delicious) and apple juice (cloudy plastic bottle) to take back to our seats… Not quite the advertised, anticipated delight.

The "dining" car....

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Three “postcards” from Southern Poland:

SATURDAY

Your postcard from Nowy Huta.

The build-up to Polish Independence Day (11th November) is massed red and white bunting in the streets, especially draped around statues of nationalist writers, artists, musicians and resistance heroes who kept Polish culture alive for centuries when dominated by diverse foreign regimes. Krakow has a rare example of a large, surviving, authentic  Old Town, having avoided WWII aerial bombing because the Nazis’ Headquarters for Poland  were located here.

An early tram ride to the east (sitting opposite a middle-aged man in overalls enjoying his first beer of the morning) is Nowy Huta. I entertained myself by reading the screens announcing future tram stops and trying to pronounce them before they were announced. These sounds bear no resemblance to any alphabet I was taught… Memo to self: point at map when asking directions, otherwise sound like the drunk opposite…

The Communist regime established a “showpiece” workers’ model Communist town on the eastern fringe of Krakow to house employees from new “showpiece” steel and tobacco plants. At first blush, the grey colonnaded blocks of apartments with ground floor shops and large internal courtyards seem familiar, echoing similar “showpiece” schemes in Warsaw… They are grouped around a large central square (Plac Centralnyi, renamed Plac R Reagana when the large Lenin statue was replaced by a cluster of patriotic red and white flags and a Solidarity monument). Delve a little deeper, literally, and things become a tad bizarre.

Enter what was the city theatre, adjacent to a Soviet-Hideous-Modernist-Mass-Tourist-Hotel of external concrete lift wells imposed upon 7 floors of anonymous paired windows which lurk behind a square steel-and-plastic atrium of function rooms. You find these remnant controlled-group-tour complexes in former Soviet countries from Siberia to Cuba. They do not age well. This one just lacked the cracked and falling marble tiles much favoured in the Soviet Far East.

Beyond the peeling theatre foyer, enjoy a quite engaging exhibition of “Rebellion in the System” (the extended fight to bring jazz and western pop music into Soviet Poland despite the suppression efforts of the secret police). Then enter a dark stairwell into: “Nuclear Threat”. Beyond the walls of paranoid propaganda posters encouraging the fear of attack are the gas masks, air pumps and a map of Nowy Huta showing the shelters, in red, for every apartment and office and school and health centre in the town.

In the words of the exhibition guide: “the Communist authorities deliberately demonised this threat. …in the face of a common enemy, it was much easier to unify the nation, and the vision of war allowed to justify the often criminal actions of the Security Service, aimed at any or all symptoms of resistance…”

Emerging, slightly scathed from all of this, I was asked: “and would you like to visit our school?”

This was a pleasant 20 minute walk – with a lunch stop at the local Costa’s - through the “showpiece” town towards the distant “showpiece” castle-like offices of the steel works on the distant ridge atop along Solidarity Ave to Vocational School Nr 17.

Imagine, if you will, wandering into a standard brick 1950’s long- concrete-corridored high school which is still operating. There were very familiar stray steel framed, laminated wood desks near the window where you say hello to the school secretary on the way in. She directs you across the quad, up the steps, past the counter (tuck shop sweets) and down the concrete steps beyond, not turning left or right past the neat lines of worn classroom doors. All good; vaguely familiar, until reaching the air-tight double steel doors.

One creaked  open to reveal, in the dim light of a couple of incandescent bulbs, the school’s emergency shelter, protective gear, air pumps (“can be operated manually in case of power failure”), and emergency posters. A grim exhibition explained the regular and compulsory drills the population were subjected to, and an admission that no-one was told that basement shelters could not protect from radiation.

The idea of walking the Old Town and Castle and Cathedral and basilica with celebrating long-weekend crowds was an excellent antidote to all of this, as was a solid beetroot borsht with excellent cabbage roll at Restaurant Jarema, which had been discovered last night.

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SUNDAY:

Your Postcard from Plac Sikorskeigo, Bytom:

(Polish history students’ nightmare: Bytom has a very complex geo-political history, even by Polish standards. This area has been fought over and divided then reunified with shifting eastern, western and southern borders.  From 1742 the town was in Prussia, adjacent to the Russian border; from 1918 it was a bit north of the new Czechoslovak border following WWI, then occupied and terrorised by the Nazis, then the Russians…).

Scattered with post-industrial relics, the architectural styles of business buildings and grand hotels and workers’ tenements reflect the intent and style of whichever nation was in control in whichever historical era. Memorials to industrial disasters and uprisings and wartime outrages are all bound together into a fascinating microcosm of 20th century political, industrial and architectural intent of entitled imperial regimes and their subordinates.

IV Liceum Ogólnokształcące im. Bolesława Chrobrego is a colourfully patterned Teutonic brick and clocktowered affair from the early 20th Century housing a technical school. Adjacent is the modestly grand, white Pomnik Fryderyka Chopina Opera House - still functioning with a welcoming bust of Chopin to greet you. The estates of down-at-heel workers’ flats and seedy Communist-era apartments provided labour to “Poland’s Klondike” of Silesian coal and heavy industrial towns which surround Bytom don’t really prepare you for this one quiet square of practical education and bourgeois culture.

Accidents of history have led to the survival of a 50km wide spiders’ web of rural roadside and small-town trams networking on wandering single tracks between 13 (now) de-industrialised towns, anchored in the south by modern Katowice (“Katto” to the locals). In Bytom, the local population has resisted the removal of the oldest, boxy, post-war-austerity trams in the system. They serve a shuttle line of just 5 stops into the northern suburbs. Passengers take it in turns to haul the massive side doors open and shut at each stop while assisting the elderly up steep steps, before perching on spare 1940’s wooden benches as under-floor motors grind and wail uphill, echoing between stolid four-floored brick apartment buildings on each side of foggy narrow streets towards a quick change-of-ends at the terminus.

A streamlined , modern (and generally empty) low-floor tram trundles up and down after each service to ensure EU disability requirements are addressed.

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MONDAY

Your Postcard from Krakow:

(Polish history students’ nightmare: even Wikipedia is simultaneously complex and vague about Krakow’s political geography with the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s mates trying to own Krakow over the centuries, including its trial as a Free City after Russian control in the 18thCentury, settling on: “With the emergence of the Second Polish Republic in 1918, Kraków reaffirmed its role as the nucleus of a national spirit.” And it celebrates a certain local Archbishop becoming Pope…)

Waking up was to the cheerful local TV news about Poland building an “East Shield” continuing the Baltic Defence Line along borders with Russia and Belarus to Ukraine. This was followed by an even more jolly program in English about international armaments companies’ research using AI. (I was beginning to crave the relative blandness of ABC24…).

Across the railway line from the Oscar Schindler factory, the Plac Bohaterow Getta tram stop looked like a brutalist utilitarian wartime shed: deliberately so.

The whole square was the centre of the former Jewish Ghetto where the roll calls, selections, cruelties, tortures and murders took place. Scattered, apparently randomly throughout the across the granite square are 70 differently sized and designed grey steel chairs, each chair in this memorial installation represents 1000 former Jewish residents of Krakow. When the Gestapo raided Jewish residences, one of their first actions was to throw furniture from the windows: thus the chairs are symbols of the disrupted and dislocated deceased. Even in the tram sheds where the chairs are lined up as if to be used, it’s not done. Some chairs have individual biographies of victims attached. Most do not. To the south west of the square is Apteka pod Orlem: the one pharmacy allowed in the ghetto by the Nazis, largely because of the fear that typhus infections in the ghetto would spread beyond the high brick walls (shaped as lines of Jewish gravestones). The pharmacist and his staff risked their lives to carry information and materials to and from the ghetto until it was strategically cleared of all humanity. This began with the children, the aged and the sick who had been separated from the rest of the forced-labour population. Several blocks to the west, the pair of buildings at Podgorsky Square, which formed the only gate into the ghetto, are decorated with flags for Independence day with the usual sad, small garden of red and white flowers.

Two hundred metres away, in front of St Joseph’s Church, a vintage car rally is forming to celebrate Poland’s Independence Day.

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WEDNESDAY:

I’m not sure that booking a Krakow Secret Food Tour for my departure day to Warsaw Chopin Airport was an entirely wise plan. The tour itself was a brilliant walk through the Kazimierz Jewish District and the area around the Market Square and Bazylika Mariaka with its hourly trumpeter, covering epic local bars, a smart café or two and seedy take-out counters for local snacks.

Perhaps it was the bland workers’ café perogi in the restored Communist era “Milk Bar” (“ ‘Milk’ because there was unlikely to be any meat”). Possibly it was the four vodka shots between three restaurant visits and the huge tumbler of mulled wine that eased me into deep sleep on the Intercity Express, entirely missing the last glimpse of rolling green farmlands at sunset and free pre-dinner taster plate…

 #Poland #Warsaw #History #Food #TrainTravel