The brakes squealed as the heavy-duty night train lurched to a stop in the
mountain railway station, sending bleary-eyed travellers after their
rucksacks and excited conductors waving flags in all directions. Tired and
hungry, I was only dimly aware of the general confusion of the scene as I
raced on to the platform and the train that would return me to Warsaw. It
felt like so much longer than just two weeks before that I had commenced a
journey across Poland on a similar diesel locomotive, footloose and
fancy-free but wholly unprepared for the challenge ahead.
I had been sent to this nation on the edge of Europe by Rough Guides
travel-books to write a chapter for their new European edition. The dream
summer job? Yes, I admit it, but surely not one for the faint of heart. A
mere fortnight to explore the famous towns, indulge in the local food, and
embrace traditional customs before then encapsulating the workings of an
entire nation into 5,000 glib words, something to be perused by the bored
backpacker as they flipped the pages between “Norway” and “Portugal”. How
can one come away from such an experience not feeling woefully inadequate?
I had crossed from the Baltic port of Gdansk in the north, through the rich
Medieval trading towns and grand Teutonic fortresses of Silesia, past the
pristine former royal capital of Krakow and the haunting Nazi death camp of
Auschwitz and finally to the spectacular Tatra mountains that line Poland’s
southern border. Now I was on my way back to Warsaw and England, my notebook
crammed with a daunting string of disparate thoughts and impressions on a
nation that, I now realised, had entered the 21st century on the cusp of
momentous change.
Images of striking ship workers at Gdansk flooded the world media in the 1980s
and acted as the harbingers of the disintegration of communism in Eastern
Europe. After almost two centuries of foreign domination, the nation's
return to democracy at the end of the decade had brought new freedoms and an
economic revolution, but the adjustments had proved difficult for many and
contradictions abounded. Looking out from my train window on my travels
across the countryside, I would see new cars vying for space with tiny,
communist-era models and horse-drawn carts. The role of the Catholic Church
was clearly as important as ever, with its presence visible in Baroque
buildings, roadside shrines and the many images of the late Pope John Paul
II, the former Archbishop of Krakow.
As this final train noisily lurched out of the station some minutes after
midnight, however, any reasoned thoughts on the Polish landscape and psyche
were far from at the forefront of my weary mind. I opened the door of the
first compartment I could find, threw my rucksack on the luggage rack and,
without a second thought, lay down and shut my eyes. It was only after a
couple of minutes in the closed carriage that the pungent smell of stale
“piwo” beer and shag tobacco became overwhelming. I was not concerned enough
by the prospect of a five-hour trip with a chain-smoking companion (not
uncommon on the Polish rail network) to end my slumber, but soon after I was
rudely awaken with a sharp shove and the foreboding call: “Hey Englysch!” I
opened my eyes to see a man sitting opposite - red-faced, sweating,
moustachioed, wearing threadbare camouflage trousers and long military
boots. Holding a vodka bottle in one hand, a rolled cigarette in the other.
My two-week crash course in the Polish language had not brought me to a ripe
enough understanding of military expletives to fully gather what he was
saying, but the anger in his tone was clear enough. English travellers (was
I so obvious?) were clearly not the flavour of the day. I was just about to
leave when a smart lady, bedecked in business suit and carrying a laptop
entered. She took one look at me and my new companion and snapped something
in Polish, before turning to me, “this is a non-smoking train and alcohol is
also not allowed!” I was so surprised by her bravado in confronting the
drunk that I could only swiftly murmur "djenkuye" in reply as she
sat down and calmly began typing. Thoroughly chastised, the drunk retreated
to the corner and looked glumly out of the window for the rest of the
journey. Welcome to the New Poland, I thought as a blissful sleep closed my
eyelids.
Waking on my final day to the gleaming office skyscrapers and grey, fifties
apartment blocks that compose Warsaw, I felt how representative these
buildings were of this dynamic new nation rising under the stereotypes of
Eastern European greyness. As with much of Poland, the capitol initially
draws uneasiness from travellers, but it rewards exploration. North of the
lively business centre are stunning Baroque palaces and the meticulously
reconstructed Old Town, to the south are some of Central Europe's finest
urban parks, and towards the east lie reminders of the rich Jewish heritage
extinguished by the Nazis.
Hitler’s determination to exterminate the Jews and the resistance efforts
during the war had left 90 per cent of the original city in ruins and
850,000 Varsovians dead by the end of the war. Rebuilding had been a
continuous process and grandiose Communist state buildings and modern towers
now made the city an intriguing collage of old and new as I walked by. Even
my brief exposure to Warsaw’s nightlife, packed with sophisticated
city-bars, vast nightclubs and a lively gay scene, suggested that a modern
hedonist lifestyle just as compelling as the city’s defiantly independent
past.
Yet it was this incongruous mix of a lively clubbing scene and the sombre
memories of a war that had left Poland with unimaginable physical and
psychological scars that also cast the longest shadow over my journey. It is
Kraków in the south, the ancient royal capital which rivals the elegance of
Prague and Vienna, that is Poland’s real crowd-puller and party capitol. As
I arrived late in the ten-bed dorm room that would be my temporary home in
the city, I found the nine other occupants in a frenzy of activity,
preparing for a night’s revelry in the central square. “Oh, by the way,
we’re going to Auschwitz tomorrow”, one Mancunian girl shouted, in a
lightness of tone inappropriate to say the least, as she slung on some heels
and breezed out of the door.
Just some sixty kilometres to the west of Krakow lies the small town of
Oswecim, site of the Oswiecim-Brzezinka concentration camp, better known by
its German name of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Of the many camps built by the Nazis,
this was the largest and one of the most horrific, the final destination of
nearly two million people, the vast majority of them Jews. I arrived early,
entering the barbed-wire encampment through the steel gate inscribed with
its notorious message “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work sets you free). The hours
passed in a blur as I moved through torture-rooms, horrendously cramped
living quarters and dank cells; through the halls crammed with the shoes,
suitcases and even human hair that the Nazis extracted from their victims in
a gruesome distortion of the “waste not, want not” philosophy.
I returned to Kraków pensive and strained, with thoughts of the Central
European backpacker trail far from my mind. Yet the scene as I re-entered my
room was almost a carbon copy of a day earlier. I heard the same Mancunian
accent – “Hey love, where’ve you been? Fancy a Smirnoff?” Half of my fellow
backpackers had not even managed to wake up to reach the camp and the others
were off for another night’s partying.
Three years after joining the EU, Poland is still far from the finished
national article. Unemployment remains high and young workers, faced with
the option of emigrating to Polish cities or the West in search of work, too
often choose the latter to not have an adverse effect on their home economy.
It is this emigration that has produced to some of the most popular national
jokes:
Pole 1: “Statistics show four out of ten young Poles live in stress. Where do
the rest live?” Pole 2: “London”.
On my flight home, packed with Poles seeking work in Britain and even further
afield, it was impossible not to appreciate the dynamism of this people,
renowned over centuries both for their fierce independence and their warmth.
Even on the most whistlestop of tours, I had seen that Poland, lying far
from the easy tourist routes of Provence or the Spanish Costas, offers an
insight into another Europe. After centuries under foreign control, it is a
country now rising to a new eminence, politically and economically. Those
joking workers on the plane may have us all enjoying cabbage dumplings with
a sharp “Goldwasser” vodka before long.
