Birch Forests
I learn a lot on my trips, about myself and other people, as well as this crazy world we live in. Some trips have been a pure delight, like my pilgrimage to New York in 1978, which was the first time I was more than 100 miles from home. Another life-changing trip was when I first went to Amsterdam in 1984. I learned a lot about enjoying myself on those voyages of discovery. Other trips have provided valuable life lessons, sometimes harshly learned, like the last time I went to the Netherlands a few years back. My visit to Warsaw in early 1999 was a sobering trip. I learned something about the connection between geography and history with cruelty, and how that affects the ways people treat one another. There were times when I felt really frightened, and longed for the familiarity of home, but most of the time I was my usual wide-eyed self, clumsily stumbling into situations that by turn amused or baffled me.
Things got off on the wrong foot (literally), when I hurt my leg getting off the plane in Frankfurt. During my one day in Berlin I hobbled around with quite a bruised shin, and when I hit the sack rather early at 9:00 pm, it was a relief beyond imagining that I was at last horizontal.
All day long I'd been humming a tune I'd listened to on the plane on the way over: "Valse Triste" by Sibelius. I hadn't heard it since college, but I remember playing it over and over on the cheap stereo I'd bought back in 1978 just so I could listen to classical music. I fell asleep humming it, and next morning as I waited for my train to Warsaw, I was some sort of walking (limping) broken record. It's a morose piece, and I would soon discover that my entry into Poland would be a bit downbeat. Perhaps that couldn't be helped: it's a haunted land, with more sadness per square mile than most places in the world.
I thought a train-ride through birch forests would be beautiful. My original plans to ride through the birch forests of Finland and Estonia had been tossed aside just two weeks before, when I realized that the Baltics were experiencing the coldest winter in decades. At the last minute, I changed my whole itinerary and booked a flight to Berlin with a sidetrip to Warsaw. I have to admit my spirits sank as I thought about the historical significance of these rail-lines: fifty-five years ago they were used to transport the Jews to Auschwitz. Ironically the gas chambers and crematoria were actually adjacent to Auschwitz, in a camp called Birkenau. That word translates as "In the Birch Woods", and just beyond the barbed-wire of the camps were beautiful birch forests.
This trainline would not be passing near Auschwitz in southern Poland. I did plan a one day visit to Krakow nearby later that week,but I didn't want to actually visit the camp itself. I've been aware of the Holocaust from a very early age, and I really wasn't in the right mood to go there now, although I did want to go to the site of the Warsaw Ghetto. That's all I thought I could handle truthfully.
Much of this part of Poland is flat, with large parts of the countryside between the western border and Warsaw given over to farms. We passed through many villages and small towns, most with prominent churches. A lot of these villages and small towns were a bit shabby, and ever so often I would be startled by the unexpected farm-house with aluminum siding like something out of an industrial town in New Jersey. I realized these were probably built by returned Poles who wanted their homes in the old country to reflect the "prosperity" of where they had lived in America, but they certainly looked out of place in Central Europe!
It was snowing after we left Poznan, a large industrial city. It's a big university town and cultural center, but seemed weighed down by decades of pollution. From what I could see from the train, it was beautiful, but it seemed lively. Several more hours of small villages, and as we got close to Warsaw it was snowing furiously. Finally though I could just make out the outline form of the building that's come to represent postwar Warsaw: the gigantic Palace of Science and Culture built by the Russians in the early fifties.
Warsaw's main railway station is very disorienting, very crowded, and quite nerve-racking. I wandered through tunnels after I decided to walk to my hotel, which was no more than 1,500 feet from the station. This short journey was the hardest part of my trip so far, limping and dragging my bag through the hustle and bustle. I quickly discovered the Warsaw gait: push and shove, and elbow your way through. I very slowly made my way to my hotel, shunted to the side by the rushing crowd. I felt like a character from a Gogol novel, shambling along in the snow.
Soon enough though I was at the Hotel Metropol and up in my room, with my very own balcony overlooking the central intersection of Warsaw. It was an extremely cosy room, with furniture and fixtures of what I assumed was the best the socialist interior design industry of 1970s Poland could provide. It was high kitsch, which was fine with me, bringing back comforting memories of the "earth tones" of my high school days.
Open-Air Museum of Stalinist Architecture
Warsaw from my little balcony was gray, no doubt about it. There was a constant stream of red trams which livened up the palette a bit, but all the buildings were gray concrete or steel gone gray. I knew it would be like that. That was the legacy of communism, and Poland wasn't quite far enough along the way to a capitalist society to splash some color around. During a snowstorm though Warsaw looked monochromatic indeed.
I was anxious to explore in spite of the grayness and the snow. My first obstacle was getting to the other side of Marszalkowska St, the main north-south street. The only way I could do it was to use the pedestrian underpass. There wasn't an escalator, and I soon discovered that the steps were excruciatingly painful for my wounded leg, as well as being very slippery. I managed to survive this first of many, many underpasses, but how did someone with a disability get around Warsaw? It seemed impossible.
I walked down to Constitution Square. I'd seen pictures of it in every Warsaw guidebook. It was built in the heavy socialist realist style that was mandatory during the last years of Stalin's rule. Actually quite a lot of Warsaw's city center was built up with similar types of construction. The Nazis destroyed 85% of the buildings in Warsaw, so when the city was finally liberated in 1945, there was almost nothing to rebuild. Except for the Stare Miasto and Nove Miasto districts (the Old Town and the New Town), which were rebuilt to resemble as closely as possible the buildings there before the War, most of central Warsaw was new.
I think Constitution Square would be nicer if the countless tiny sidewalk kiosks were cleared away, but since the fall of communism, these were all over Warsaw. They were the first examples of Polish capitalism, and now close to a decade after they popped up everywhere, some of them have moved into the premises of the former state-owned shops, while others have just become more permanent-looking along the sidewalks, in the squares, or on the grounds of the huge Palace of Science and Culture. They weren't going away anytime soon, because they provided cheap goods to consumers who still remembered hungering for anything to buy in the last years of the communists, and who now struggled in the new dispensation to make ends meet. It was all very ugly and chaotic, but I understood exactly why things turned out like this. For forty years, Poles stood in line for practically everything, once the capitalist economy arrived, they were making up for lost time.
The surrounding buildings had some architectural merit, but many were filthy dirty and in a state of disrepair. The sidewalk paving stones were so badly planted that I felt like I was hiking along a rough path. The whole area was bustling, especially with young people, since the Technical University is nearby. I went into a Burger King (I've been known to enjoy American junk food worldwide...) and had a big lunch for under $2.00. Then I went across the street to the Hortex Cafe. This was a communist-era relic, an ice-cream parlour designed according to the First Five Year Plan i.e. it looked more like a Depression-era U.S. post-office than a cafe. In a concession to something which quite possibly was purely coincidental, the interior was pink and frilly, but with a disconcerting Stalinesque touch. The service was quick and good though, and I enjoyed a nice coffee and sliver of cake while I watched the passing scene through the enormous plate-glass windows. I pondered my next move, and since that would involve using my aching leg, I decided I should get some painkillers.
I remembered passing a pharmacy on the way to Constitution Square, so I backtracked and went inside the tiny but tidy drugstore. A pharmacist wearing a crisp white smock waited on a customer,a heavy set and overly talkative older woman who was a walking pharmacopoeia. She asked innumerable questions about various drugs, and the pharmacist seemed mildly shocked with each new request, like she was thinking: "how on earth does she know about that?" Meanwhile, the pharmacist opened and shut nearly every drawer in the pharmacy, pulling out bottles and sheets of pills, and containers of capsules, slapping them on the counter onto a growing pile . Then the old lady pulled out a stack of prescriptions! Even the pharmacist looked exasperrated! I'd read in a peculiar little book I'd picked up a few weeks before I left on my trip about how Poles are hypochondriacs. The book is called "The Xenophobe's Guide to the Poles" and it reports that they "generally specialize in one particular ailment", becoming self-taught experts, and working their beliefs, fears, and experiences about their own unique disease into the unlikeliest conversations. This woman seemed to have at least thirty conditions, and was out on some kind of a major shopping expedition, which she seemed to be enjoying enormously. Finally, the pharmacist motioned her to the side, which the old battle-axe reluctantly did. As I tried to mime my request for aspirin, the old lady kept interrupting with questions about her own medicines. The pharmacist dealt with us both without losing her patience. She understood what I wanted after I kept pointing to my leg and saying "aspirine". She gave me ibuprofen imported from America. The old lady seemed very keen on what I was buying, and although I don't know Polish, I could swear she asked the pharmacist if she could have some of what I was having too...
I ate two of the pills as soon as I left the pharmacy, and then carried on with my explorations. I made note of a bookstore displaying a book about Warsaw's architecture, and worked my way up Marszalkowska to get a closer look at the Palace of Science and Culture. Lots of Poles would like to see it torn down, and a competition was held recently to try to figure out how to integrate the building better into the city's landscape. The winning entry drew a lot of criticism, because it proposed building low buildings on the grounds of the complex, that would do nothing to disguise the gigantic impression the huge tower makes. Perhaps it just has to be lived with. It serves its purpose as a cultural center and a sort of convention center, and nowadays even has a casino and department store. It's undeniably ugly, and from any angle and any distance it's disturbing to look at, and it was foisted on the Poles by the Russians who called it a “gift”.
John Gunther's Warsaw
One of the things that I remember reading when I was a teen-ager was the title of the chapter in a book about Poland, called: "Warsaw-Ugly but Alive". True then, and true now. Much of what I knew about Warsaw I first learned when I read John Gunther's "Twelve Cities" back in the early 1970s. He wrote the book when it was only twenty or so years since the end of World War II, and Warsaw was still re-building what the Nazis destroyed. He described the shoddiness of much of the construction and the liveliness of the city's residents. I noticed these things quickly enough myself. Gunther's description of the horrors of the War were my first experience reading about what happened there. Particularly frightening was to read about how the Germans intended to put to death all but a few thousand Warsaw residents (the few allowed to live would be used for slave labor), raze the city to the ground, and then build a fortified city of less than 50,000 (Germans only) on one side of the Vistula river. This process was well on its way to completion even though the Nazis knew they were going to lose the war by the end of 1944. 800,000 of the city's 1.2 million residents were killed by the time the city was liberated by the Russians, and more than three quarters of the buildings were in ruins.
In spite of Soviet style communism being imposed on the Poles, and in spite of immense economic hardships, Varsovians rebuilt parts of their city almost exactly as they were before the Nazis systemically and willfully tried to make all physical evidence of a Polish identity disappear. It's amazing to walk through the Stare Miasto and Novy Miasto (the Old and New Towns) and realize that these aren't the actual original structures.
The Nazi and communist ideologies were both awful to Poland Stalinism was cruel, no doubt about it, and it inflicted the ugly Palace of Science and Culture on Warsaw amongt many other indignites.This architectural carbuncle did provide the city with useful cultural facilities, however. At the same time scarce resources were devoted to the painstaking reconstruction of the most valuable buildings that had been destroyed in the War. Compare that to the Nazis, who sought to exterminate people and destroy the fact they even had existed. What could compare in cruelty to that kind of ideology?
Gunther describes the period he visited Warsaw as a time of persecution by the communists of the few remaining Jews left in the country. This has been described as "anti-semitism without Jews", because there were so few left in the country once the War ended. Gunther sadly concludes that the situation was both ironic and disgusting. Some of the communist big-shots were Jewish, and it suited the government and quite a lot of the Polish population to scapegoat them. Fortunately nobody was killed during these purges in the late sixties. Even so, most of the remaining Jews in the country emigrated, and who could blame them.I would be reminded of Poland's tragic history more than once during my stay.
The snow was coming down heavily again and it was getting dark quickly,so I retreated to my cozy hotel room. I ordered room service and then watched Polish television the rest of the night. A real treat was to see a solo concert by Jaroslaw Wasik, a Polish singer I had discovered. I couldn't wait to hunt down his cd's while I was visiting Warsaw. I spoke briefly with the only contact I had in Poland: Francesco, an Italian guy teaching at the university in Poznan but living with his girlfriend here. He was interested in my model country Alphistia and the language I'd invented for it, and we'd exchanged e-mails for several months. So we arranged to meet early the next day.
Polish Nobility
I have much nicer breakfasts on vacation than I normally have at home, because most of the hotels where I stay include a lavish breakfast buffet with the price of a room. I discovered this was true in Warsaw as well as anywhere else I've stayed in Europe, and the many dishes offered were excellent. So I started my second day in Warsaw (my birthday actually), with a big plate of scrambled eggs and kielbasa with Polish rye, plus a lot of other goodies piled on my plate.
As I worked my way through the buffet I kept bumping into an middle-aged woman who seemed to pop up from under the tables and would pluck an item or two from various trays. She annoyed me immediately because I think she thought she was entitled to just pick her way around the buffet without standing in the very short line. It was pretty obvious she was collecting a whole breakfast this way, not just a breadroll or two.
I also noticed she had this look of grim determination which I'm sure was an inheritance from the difficult years of communism, when to get a complete meal, you might just have to pluck and pick your way through several lines in several stores. I'm sure under the old regime she mastered this science, but why do it at a free buffet 10 years after the fall of communism? She was a product of her time, and I was soon to observe that there were quite a few people just like her in Warsaw. But first thing in the, imagine how startled I was to see this odd lady lunging from behind me to grab a pickle here, a cup of coffee there.
There was that sort of person in Warsaw, but as I walked through the city center after my breakfast, I kept noticing in the crowds rushing to school and work very many people with a completely different appearance. I particulary noticed many young men dressed very neatly and with knit caps that hugged their heads like helmuts. They were very sensibly dressed, but the way they wore their gear displayed an innate dignity, perhaps a nobility of sorts. Life is not easy today in Poland, although it's better and freer than ten years ago. Life goes on: there are good people and bad, moments of happiness and sadness in everyone's life everywhere, regardless of the greater historical events. It was interesting to observe the Poles going about their daily lives, much harder lives than most people in Europe have had, not to mention Americans.
Linguistic Genius
At ll:00 am I went down to my hotel lobby to meet Francesco. He was right on time, and although I’d never before seen him in person, he looked familiar. Well I think in my mind’s eye he looked how I thought he would, so the familiarity probably just came from that. I’m always terrible with making a good first impression, but with Francesco I immediately felt at ease. I’m a good judge of character, and I realized at once that he was a genuine and nice person.
We started out with a slow walk along Krakowskie Przedmiescie, an elegant avenue known as the “Royal Way”. It was full of beautiful churches, palaces, mansions, and the University of Warsaw’s main building. Hard to imagine that the Nazis had reduced almost every single one of these buildings to rubble. It’s now a busy shopping street with boutiques and expensive restaurants. Even during the communist era it had a certain cachet. It leads to Warsaw’s Royal Castle, which was only rebuilt in the early seventies after the Germans had utterly destroyed it in one of their many acts of vandalism during the War. Just to the north of this is the Stare Miasto, Warsaw’s Old Town, with the beautifully restored Rynek. All of the Old Town was painstakingly rebuilt in the early 1950s, using photographs and even old prints to replicate what had been completely gutted.
All these architectural gems were whizzing by me almost unnoticed by me because I was deep in conversation with Francesco. It didn’t take long for me to realize I’d stumbled across a linguistic genius. The list of languages he had taught to himself or studied formally was staggering and practically increasing exponentially during our conversation! He could read or speak at least 20 languages, probably many more, but I couldn’t keep up. Almost any language I brought up in conversation he’d mastered or had at least studied, including Icelandic, Finnish, Estonian, Romanian, Russian, and of course Polish, which he had only begun to learn the previous summer. How did I find this very unique person?
We came across one another when he found a link to my Alphistia website on another list of imaginary countries with homes on the web. He was intrigued by references to the language I’d invented as a child and still develop, so he wrote me in the fall of 1998. I sent him some booklets about Alphistian, and he told me he’d like to learn it, but first he wanted to learn Navaho, Hawaaian, Japanese, Cherokee, and Choctaw, not to mention Inuit. This was someone I had to get to know, and so we traded a number of e-mails in the next few months. When I realized that Finland was too cold to visit and decided to go to Berlin instead, I thought it might be really interesting to go for a few days to Warsaw too, since it’s not very far. Francesco fortunately was available, so that’s how we came to meet on this sunny morning in Warsaw.
Since I was having such an interesting conversation with Francesco, I was missing a lot of the sights of Warsaw, so I knew I’d have to make some time to come back to the Old Town to look around some more. In the meantime though I enjoyed talking to this new friend about languages, and the strange world of imaginary countries.
After an early lunch, we went to Jerozolimskie Avenue. I wanted to try to find the cd’s of several Polish balladeers, so we went to the city’s largest cd shop. They had two of the three singers I’d first seen on a broadcast of the Opole Song Festival a few years ago, so I snapped those up. Then I proposed to Francesco that we walk to a large map store that I’d read about in one of the guidebooks to Warsaw I’d brought along. It turned out to be quite a long walk...it certainly didn’t look so far on a map! But finally we got there, and I set about picking out map after map of towns all over Poland. Best of all were the prices! Most were about a dollar in American money. One was an incredible .39 cents! So for about $11.00 total I got about twenty high quality color streetmaps. I don’t think Francesco appreciated how happy this long hike made me, since he hardly knew of my love of maps.
The long walk back exhausted us both, and we decided to relax for a while in a small cafe/bistro just opposite the incredibly ugly modern hulk of the Central Railway station. It was a very cosy cafe with delicious cakes and coffee that cost practically nothing. Actually that piece of cake was one of the tastiest I’ve ever had anywhere. The mood of the cafe was very pleasant and invited lingering, so Francesco and I talked for quite a while there. When we left it was already dark and early diners were arriving to what I’m sure would be a very good meal.
Francesco had plans to visit with the family of his girlfriend that evening, so I said goodbye to him. We arranged to meet again the next day, when I would visit the apartment he shared with a young Polish woman he’d met on a vacation in Tunisia a few years before. They were living in one of the many prefabricated high-rise apartment blocks built during the communist years. Since I’d never been in one of those, I was intrigued by what it would be like.
At Home in Warsaw
On Friday morning, Francesco met me again at my hotel.He was going to take me over to his apartment on the east side of the Vistula river. It was a short tram ride and then a walk through a neighborhood of prefabricated apartment houses. It wasn’t as grim as I’d thought it would be, because these building were old enough for trees to grow up around them. Stores seemed to be conspicuous by their absence. At the corner near the tram stop were some of the ubiquitous kiosks selling all kinds of merchandise, but there was nothing like a neighborhood shopping street. Francesco told me that people go to the big hypermarkets to shop nowadays, and most of them were on the outskirts of the city. Sound familiar? It sounded like it’d be a trek to get to such place without a car.
Francesco’s girl-friend Sylwia owns a one-bedroom apartment in a 15 floor building, exactly like all the other 15 floor buildings lined up in a row behind some short blocks of flats. Once we got inside the lobby I realized we were now in the remnats of communist-style housing. There were no amenities to speak of...not even much of an entry-way. And two elevators that would hold perhaps 5 people at once for what had to be more than one hundred apartments and all their inhabitants. The ride up was a claustrophobe’s nightmare. We landed on what I think was the eighth floor and stepped out into darkness. To conserve electricity, hallways are not lit, although Francesco pressed a button to get a short spurt of light to take us down a dark and dreary hallway.
Once inside the apartment, everything was bright and cosy. It was a small place, although at least twice as big as my own tiny apartment in Greenwich Village. There was a small bedroom just to the right of the entry hall, with the bathroom next to that. Straight ahead was a galley kitchen, and to the left was a good-sized living room. There were big windows and a tiny balcony jutting out of the living room. The view was of a vast area of garden allotments. A nice view actually, since it had a lot of trees. The building didn’t look flimsy or sloppily built. There were nice parquet floors, and a modern bathroom and kitchen. Not bad, really. I assumed it was a cut above some of the prefab barracks I’d seen around Poland, and the fact that Francesco’s girlfriend had her own place before he moved in certainly indicated that her housing situation was better than the Polish norm.
In any case, it was a nice place, with a study nook on one side of the living room. Here was Francesco’s computer, and he sat down immediately to log on. He wanted me to show him websites for various bookstores and colleges in the US. He was thinking about applying for PhD programs and wanted advice of schools to consider. It took a very long time to log on and surf around the various websites. I’d brought along one of the Polish cd’s I’d bought and we listened to that.
After about an hour of looking at things on the web, Francesco’s girlfriend arrived. They immediately began chatting in Italian and Polish, and I couldn’t understand a word, but fortunately the computer was still plugged in, so while they had their cross-talk, I played on the web!
Lunch was served in the living room without any formality. I only hoped had prepped his girlfriend that she’d have a guest and hadn’t been asked to cook a meal at the last minute. After lunch, Sylwia busied herself in the kitchen, and soon she appeared with her coat on. Apparently she was leaving, which was a complete surprise to me. My head was spinning after her quick entrance and now exit...Francesco and I went back to the computer to continue our hunt.
In the end I had spent the better part of a day in front of the computer. I wasn’t eager to repeat the experience, but Francesco invited me to come back the next day, promising that perhaps “Sylwia can drive us outside the city for a short excursion,” although the prospect of being in a Polski Fiat on a wintry little trip didn’t really appeal. So I shelved going to Krakow the next day for a short look. I certainly regret that decision now, because it really would be my only chance to go there.
Haunted Ground
The next day I was up very early and back out on the street by 9:00 am. My plan was to walk up to the Warsaw Ghetto and then through Stare Miasto again to take a closer look.
It was an ambitious walk, and distances in Warsaw are much greater than they look on a map. Perhaps that's not quite true, but the architecture of the city is not on the human-scale, so all those Brobdignagian apartment houses lined up along the extremely wide streets made it feel like a long trek to go for a bit of a walk.
As I trudged up John Paul II Avenue, I passed several more of the many Warsaw street markets. These were far more down-at-the-heel spots though, than the ones around the Palace of Science and Culture or in Constitution Square. Most of the vendors didn't have the luxury of a little kiosk or shack to display their goods and to keep out the cold or snow. Almost everyone just spread their stuff on old blankets, or on nothing but the muddy ground. Some of the sellers, many of them in fact, looked like old people very much down on their luck. Were they selling their own possessions? Quite probably, considering the motley variety of old pieces of clothing, spoons, books, and a whole lot of just unspecified junk. This was progress from communism? It was definitely the down side of the market economy, and was very dispiriting on this frosty gray morning.
Fifteen years ago these old people probably had no idea they would be the biggest losers when communism disappeared. In a way, they've been "lucky". The further east you go the more dreadful the poverty. At least in Poland the elderly receive their pensions regularly. In Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus things are much, much worse. I haven't heard of people losing their apartments in Poland and being thrown into the street, so although most of these people seemed desperately poor, they probably had roofs over their heads. Still, it was a sad scene.
John Paul II Avenue leads right into the housing complex built on the ruins of the Ghetto. None of the Ghetto exists anymore, except for a wall here and there. It was all pulverized into rubble by the Nazis after they sent the survivors of the Ghetto Uprising to Treblinka or Auschwitz in 1944. The communists built a model Stalinist-style housing district on the ruins. The buildings are about a meter above the street-level because they were built right on top of the rubble of the former Ghetto.
It's a mundane neighborhood nowadays, with trees helping to soften the Stalinist apartment houses. There weren't very many people around this early on a Saturday morning. It was a bit misty and I could hear crows. It was the strangest feeling to be walking around this area where some of the worst crimes against humanity were carried out: the systematic destruction of hundreds of thousands of lives motivated by pure hatred. Except for the fact I knew it was all true, there was so little evidence this was actually the place. Well, there is a big monument in a park in the center of the residential area, and that's where I was headed. There were just a few other reminders along a walking tour handed out by the tourist office.
The square has a big monument in remembrance of the Warsaw Ghetto fighters. It was erected in 1948 and made out of stone the Nazis intended to use for their own victory monuments. It's pompous and not very inspiring. I sat on a bench for a few minutes and tried to connect where I was sitting with the reality of 55 years ago.
What did that for me was reflecting that the street right next to the Monument is named after Ludovic Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto. He was a Jewish eye-doctor who was painfully aware of suffering and inter-ethnic hatred growing up when most of Poland was attached to tsarist Russia. He died long before the horrors of the Ghetto, but is buried in the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw. To me he is a secular saint of sorts. He practiced what he preached: his humanism and his life-long efforts to help people understand and love one another deserve to be taught to every schoolchild. I hope it was no accident that this relatively unknown man is memorialized right in an area where the lowest depths of man's ability for evil was everyday reality for several years.
This walk succeeded in filling me with gloom. Of course, goodness (sort of) triumphed...the Nazis were defeated which was followed by 45 years of Soviet-style socialism, with its great capacity for evil in its own right, now followed by an all-too-eager embrace of the hypocrisies of Catholicism. Zamenhof's naive hopes for a better world and universal brotherhood never went very far, perhaps because he had integrity. That’s rare anywhere, but at least the Poles named a street after him, and I'll give them credit for that.
Next I walked over to Stare Miasto. Here was the part of Warsaw which had been destroyed by the Nazis but was carefully restored brick by brick and building by building. I’d been through it with Francesco on Thursday, but hadn’t really paid attention to all the beautiful reconstruction work.
They did an incredible job, not only technically. It’s a monument to the triumph over evil. There were suggestions not to rebuild Warsaw at all after the War, but in spite of the tragedy of 1939-45, people wanted to come back and live there again. The Stare Miasto and nearby Nove Miasto were rebuilt as soon as possible to give Varsovians a connection to the city they had known. It's a more hopeful place than the Ghetto, which I’m sure was the intention.
Rebuilding the Ghetto would've been pointless perhaps, because almost every single person who had lived there had been murdered or starved to death and there were almost no Jews left alive in Poland to resettle there.
I popped into a gallery in the Old Town which had a display of wonderful posters. Poland in the communist period was well-known for its poster art. A propaganda magazine called “Poland Illustrated” that I read every month when I was in college featured a different poster in full color every month. It was great to stumble across this gallery, because all these colorful posters are gone from the streets in post-communist Poland. There were very large Marlboro ads everywhere though, which was not an improvement, in my opinion.
I had a bit of a headache after all this. I walked past the enormous Grand Theater and over to the tram on Marszalkowska for a short ride back to my hotel. I called Francesco and left a message that I wasn't feeling too well. I told him I'd call back after a short rest at my hotel. I lay down to try to nap off the headache.
I still had a headache when I woke up around 2:00 pm, but I called Francesco and told him I'd be over in just a little while, but I declined the offer for a trip in the Polski Fiat. I took a taxi over, and I think I paid far more than it should have cost, but it was still less than $5.00. Finding which of the look-alike block towers was where Francesco lived was tricky, but I finally recognized a landmark: an old swing-set in front of his building.
Francesco greeted me at the door and was wearing oversized children's slippers that made him look like he had tiger feet.The slippers would've been very comical if I had been feeling better. I suggested that I show him a few more websites we hadn't been able to access the first day, and we spent some time trying to navigate around the web again..
Another lunch was served, also delicious, almost as quickly as the day before. Almost as soon as I ate the lunch, I said I'd be going back into central Warsaw, with the excuse that I wanted to go to some bookstores before they closed. I really wasn’t up to being entertaining or being entertained. Very soon, I was saying my good-byes, not sure at all when I'd see Francesco again, but very glad I’d met him.
An ancient tram took me back into central Warsaw, but even old trams please me considerably. I wandered along the beautiful Nowy Swiat. Books tend to perk me up no matter what my mood, and Nowy Swiat has many bookstores. It had been a bleak day so far, so I could use some book-perkiness. After a nice browse, I headed to one last bookstore on Marszalkowska Avenue, to get that book on Warsaw architecture I’d seen earlier in the week. Imagine my disappointment to see a sign taped on the door, which my limited Polish skills translated as “Closed for Inventory”. Drat!
The Kindness of Strangers
For dinner, I went to a very overpriced but delicious buffet at the gigantic Forum Hotel just across the street from my own hotel. It's hard to overlook the Forum Hotel, which isn't as huge or overwhelming as the Palace of Science and Culture but still makes quite a statement on Warsaw's skyline. What's so alarming about it is its color. The Swedes designed the building for the Poles, and a special paint was used to cover the whole 30 story building. When it dried it was hard not to notice that the building had basically two hues: vomit green or diarrhea brown. The Poles were quite shocked,even though they have had to put up with quite a lot of bad design and architecture in the last 50 year. The Swedes were so thorough that apparently the tint was now a part of the concrete,and it would be prohibitively expensive to try to redo it. In other words, it was there to stay...
It was my last evening in Warsaw, and I took the last of my evening strolls after dinner. I walked down to Constitution Square once again, and noticed there were very few people out, and some of them distinctly seemed to be hookers and mafia-looking types. It wasn't late, but it was cold, and once again the sidewalks were very slippery.I felt dispirited and was glad my stay in Warsaw was coming to a close. The next day I’d go back to Berlin and I’d cheer up, since it’s one of my favorite cities. I walked to the south end of the square, but just as I turned around to head back to my hotel, I slipped and fell flat on my backside. It all happened so bewilderingly fast I didn't have time to realize I'd fallen and was sitting in mud. I'd gone from a certain amount of despair in the morning to annoyance and disappointment in the afternoon, and now I was sitting in a puddle of muddy half-melted ice.
As I tried to gather my wits, I looked up and saw an outstretched hand. A young man was standing next to me, looking just like the typical young Pole I'd seen all over Warsaw: very thin, with a nose like Chopin's, and with a knit cap on his head like a helmut. I guess he’d noticed I had fallen and had come over to help me up. He was actually rather strong, because he practically pulled me up off the ground “single-handedly”. I thanked him in English, and he looked very startled, and when I thanked him in Polish he looked very shy. He didn't say anything to me at all, but he lightly touched me on the shoulder, and once he was sure I was OK, he went on his way.
I was really taken by his kindness. Yes, he was just helping an "old man" stand up, but people in Warsaw seemed so wrapped up in their own big-city lives to bother about someone who needed help, a bit too much like New York. This little example of decency really helped my mood and definitely influenced my views about my visit.
Unfortunately this fall once again inflamed my leg! I dragged myself to a taxi for a very short ride back to the Metropol A long soak in the tub helped just a little, so I threw myself into bed rather early to sleep off the pain.
In the morning I took a taxi to the train station. It was a lot easier than trying to carry my bags since my leg still hurt.This station had the gloomiest lighting...how did they make fluorescent lights that seemed to make everything look dirty and shadowy like that? That station gave me the creeps. I stood on the platform right where elaborate pictographs indicated that the first-class coach would stop (I’d treated myself to first class since the trainfare was so cheap). The train roared into the station right on time and right by me. For some unexplained reason, the train was much shorter than the chart showed, and now I had to run for a 150 feet with my bags and bad leg. Story of M-Y life...
I’d like to go back to Poland, which might seem a bit surprising. It wasn't my most joyful vacation, that's for sure. But what did I really learn in just a few days? People say New York is not America, and I have a feeling Warsaw is not totally typical of Poland. And I think Warsaw is probably a whole lot nicer in the spring and summer as well. I’d like to see Krakow, which several people have highly recommended, and perhaps go to the Opole Song Festival myself someday to meet my favorite Polish singer, Jaroslaw Wasik! Until, then my memories, some good and others a bit mixed, will have to do.