Tracking down the story of Poland
Riding the rails to discover nation’s history, heritage
WARSAW, Poland — 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 recently extended its Global Pass to include Poland. Wroclaw had been named a European Capital of Culture for 2016 and would be in celebration mode.
I’d never been to the country, though part of my family had emigrated to the U.S. around 1900 from Podkamien, one of those border towns that, at any given moment, might be part of Poland, Austria-Hungary, 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 blends into the smoke from a locomotive waiting for passengers at the station in Krakow … a station that, decades after World War II, 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 at the end of World War I.
The Germans changed everything in 1939. Krakow survived the war physically whole, or mostly. The Germans chose it as the capital over Warsaw. They scrammed, with no time to destroy the city, shortly 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. 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 vendors selling obwarzanki, the local pretzels.
Oskar Schindler’s enamelware factory is a short taxi ride from the square. It’s now a stunning museum.
There’s a sparkling new (2006) main train station in Krakow. The old one 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. 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. The name Wroclaw was restored.
Ethnic cleansing came quickly: In less than a week, the city and surrounding area were emptied of Germans. Poles, primarily from the east, 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, “was in 1967.”
The war destroyed 80 percent of Wroclaw. “The bricks of this city,” Baldwin says, “were taken from here to rebuild Warsaw.”
The center is once again gorgeous, with bridges, churches, a magnificent town hall and a market square rivaling Krakow’s.
This was the best of trains, this train to Warsaw, sleek and quiet and comfortable. When it approached a station, classical music played softly: always “Nocturne in E Flat” by Frederic Chopin, a son of Poland.
When the occupying Germans left in 1944, they left rubble. Recovery was slow. Things are speeding up since the 2004 entry into the European Union.
Warsaw’s Old Town, the part that tourists invariably visit and photograph, and where locals dine and linger, is, even more so than Wroclaw’s, a reproduction.
“The Royal Castle,” says guide Anna Biesiadecka, “is 100 percent reconstruction.” The work wasn’t completed until 1997.
The Jewish ghetto — there was no ghetto at all until the Nazis crammed the city’s Jews into a walled district — is no more. The Germans destroyed most of what and who were left after the 1943 ghetto uprising. More destruction at the hands of the Nazis followed the 1944 Warsaw Uprising.
No numbers. Travel story.
But there are museums and monuments celebrating 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.