The topic, self-assigned, was easy enough: “Training Through Poland.” The story came hard. The trip took days, the writing months.
It certainly was timely. Eurail, beloved of backpackers for generations, had only recently extended its Global Pass to include Poland (www.eurail.com; www.raileurope.com). Wroclaw had been proclaimed a European Capital of Culture (along with San Sebastian, Spain) for 2016 and would be in celebration mode.
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I’d never been to the country, though part of my family had emigrated to the United States around 1900 from Podkamien, one of those border towns that, at any given moment, might be part of Poland or Austria-Hungary or Russia or Ukraine.
No one knows how many Poles were slaughtered by Ukrainians in the 1944 Podkamien massacre — the Germans had disposed of the remnant Jews earlier — but it doesn’t matter, because this is a travel story.
The first scene in “Schindler’s List” shows Sabbath candles burning low. One expires, sending a plume of white smoke into the air, smoke that director Steven Spielberg artfully blends into the smoke from a locomotive waiting for passengers at the station in Krakow … a station that, decades after the war, is still there.
The history of Poland is complicated, too complicated to fully explain in a brief story like this one. For centuries, it was linked to Lithuania; then it wasn’t. By 1795, there was no Poland at all, its lands grabbed by Austria, Prussia and Russia — and it essentially remained a shadow nation until 1918, when Poland was restored at Versailles.
The Germans changed everything in 1939.
Krakow survived the war physically whole, or mostly. The Germans considered the city German and chose it as the capital over Warsaw. They scrammed, with no time to destroy the city, a few days before the Russians moved in.
“One bomb was dropped into the Royal Cathedral,” says Jerzy Korta, a guide. “Fortunately it didn’t explode.”
Krakow’s historic center is lovely. Its market square is Europe’s largest. Parts of the city’s 14th-century wall remain, and horse-drawn carriages clop along the square’s perimeter. But the old town is a walking place, with its cathedral and Wawel Castle and cafes and vendors selling irresistible obwarzanki, the local pretzels.
Oskar Schindler’s enamelware factory is a short taxi ride from the square. It is a museum now, and in every way it is stunning.
There’s a sparkling new (2006) main train station in Krakow containing a McDonald’s and other good things. The old one, the station from the Spielberg movie, still stands alongside it.
In 1939, the Germans renamed the station the Hauptbahnhof Krakau; they renamed Oswiecim, one of the towns served by the station, Auschwitz. I won’t go into numbers here, because this is a travel story. The train ride to Oswiecim today takes about 80 minutes from the new Krakow station. From there, it’s a long walk or a short cab ride to the camp, a little farther to Birkenau. Both are museums. Admission is free. Essential.
The train to Wroclaw from Krakow takes less than five hours. Rather than return to Krakow from Oswiecim then transfer, we traveled 45 minutes by charter bus to Katowice, then hopped a three-hour train to Wroclaw.
The train was awful. It was a warm day, there was no air conditioning, and opening the vents above the corridor windows provided little relief. But the 160-year-old station? Like a squat Disney castle.
Wroclaw, like the rest of Poland, is — of course — complicated. It was Wroclaw, then Prezzla, then — from 1741 and now under Prussian rule — Breslau. So for 200 years, it was a German city. After the end of World War II, the totally German Breslau and surrounding territory became part of Poland (again, complicated), and the name Wroclaw was restored.
Ethnic cleansing came quickly: In less than a week, the city and surrounding area was emptied of Germans. Poles, primarily from the east (where they were cleansed from territory ceded unhappily by Poland to Ukraine), took their place.
Others were pushed out as well.
“The last expulsion of Jews from this city,” says Chris Baldwin, a Brit who has spent three years in Wroclaw preparing for Cultural Capital programming (Information: www.poland.travel/en-us), “was in 1967.”
The war destroyed 80 percent of Wroclaw. “The bricks of this city,” says Baldwin, “were taken from here to rebuild Warsaw.”
The center is once again gorgeous, a city of bridges (135 now) and churches and waterways, a magnificent town hall (it’s the original) and a fine market square rivaling Krakow’s.
And dwarfs. They began as dwarfs furtively painted on walls to mock the ruling Communists. Then, the Communists gone, they switched to small bronze sculptures.
“Outside a bar,” says guide Magdalena Babiszewska, “there’s a dwarf eating pierogi. Now there are more than 300 dwarfs, because they are reproducing very quickly.”
This was the best of trains, this train to Warsaw, sleek and quiet and comfortable. This time, the air conditioning worked. When our train slowed as it approached a station, classical music played softly: always it was “Nocturne in E Flat,” by Frederic Chopin, a son of Poland. His life story — again, like so many stories in Poland — is complicated.
When the occupying Germans left in 1944, they left rubble. And with no Marshall Plan for the Eastern Bloc, recovery was slow.
Things are speeding up in Warsaw since the country’s 2004 entry into the European Union.
“You can see here, all of our buses, all of our trains, all of our trams are brand new,” says Anna Biesiadecka, a local guide. “The train you came in on was a brand new one.”
Warsaw’s Old Town — the part of the city that tourists invariably visit and photograph, and where locals dine and sip and marry and linger — is, even more so than Wroclaw’s, a reproduction.
“The Royal Castle,” Biesiadecka says, “is 100 percent reconstruction.” The reconstruction wasn’t completed until 1997.
The Jewish ghetto — there was no ghetto at all until the Nazis rounded up the city’s Jews and crammed them all into a walled district — is no more. The Germans destroyed most of what and who were left after the 1943 ghetto uprising. More death and destruction at the hands of the Nazis followed the 1944 Warsaw Uprising.
No numbers. Travel story.
But there are museums and monuments here celebrating heroic and iconic Poles and tracing a thousand years of Jewish presence in Poland.
One of the rooms in the Museum of the History of Polish Jews is devoted to — trains. Within the room, a representation of a train station.
There is no smoke.
Alan Solomon is a freelance reporter.
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