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** POLAND 2010 - Weeks 3~4 ** |
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 CAMPING
IN POLAND 2010
- Wrocław, Upper Silesia, Auschwitz and Kraków:The morning we left the Karkonosze, misty rain clouds obscured the entire line of hills making the wooded landscape bleak and grey. This area of Lower Silesia had once been heavily exploited for its coal resources, but now with all the mines closed, the large industrial town of Wałbrzych had a sad and depressed air as we passed through: the industry was derelict, the roads full of unrepaired pot holes, and even worse the people looked care-worn. On a grey, rainy day, it was one of the most woe-begone places we had seen on our travels.
The main Route 8 to Wrocław typified Polish driving hazards with speeding and impatient overtaking; we were thankful to reach the city and share the busy streets with trams on the way through to Camping Stadion Olimpijski set next to the city's stadium. The grandiosely styled but rather careworn campsite was certainly welcoming, providing street plans and tram tickets for a city visit. It was a large open site with little shade, but we managed to tuck George into a clump of willows for relief from the scorching July sun. That evening, we relaxed with welcome chilled beers, trying to avoid the voracious midges.
Exactly as at Ópusztaszer, the darkened approach ramp suddenly emerges into the bright display rotunda, the cleverly arranged natural foreground giving the painting a wonderful 3D effect. The commentary gave the historical background to the insurrection, with the Polish hero rallying his troops against the Russian cannons (see right). With their tragic history of repression, it was unsurprising to see 21st century Poles taking such pride in this symbol of their triumph over oppression, and a privilege for us to share in this sentiment (Photo 3 - Racławice panoramic painting displayed at Wrocław).
Wrocław's iconic image is without doubt its Gothic-Renaissance Town Hall in the centre of the glorious Rynek (central square), symbol of the city for the past 700 years (Photo 7 - Wrocław Rynek and Renaissance Town Hall). The bright afternoon sun lit the intricate carvings of its south façade, and children played in impromptu fountains set up around the square. We sat for a relaxing beer at a pavement café before catching the tram back out to the campsite. Without doubt, Wrocław was one of the finest cities visited during our travels, and its citizens can be rightly proud of its heritage and splendour.
We moved on to the small, otherwise insignificant town of Oświęcim (pronounced Osh-vien-tsim), where before finding tonight's campsite, we relaxed with a beer (Tyskie naturally) in the quiet Rynek. Like many eastern Polish towns, Oświęcim had a sizeable Jewish population which had grown to 7,000 by the 1930s, some 60% of the population; by 1945 this number was reduced to 40, because something supremely evil happened at Oświęcim, better known to the world by its more sinister German name of Auschwitz. Driving out to the campsite, we passed what appeared an innocuous collection of brick-built warehouses; only the electrified barbed wire topping the concrete wall betrayed the fact that inside German barbarians perfected the ultimate practice of inhumanity, degradation and industrial-scale mass murder, utterly incomprehensible to the civilised world.
With nervous forebodings about our forthcoming visit to
Auschwitz, we stayed at the well-appointed camping area of the Oświęcim Centre
for Dialogue and Prayer just 10 minutes walk from the Auschwitz Museum. With the
number of visitors in summer, you are obliged to join one of the multi-lingual
organised tours but the guides at Auschwitz provide a knowledgeable commentary,
pulling no punches about Germanically perfected practice of utter barbarism. The
guide led the small group through to the infamous gate at Auschwitz with its
cynical superscription Arbeit Macht Frei (Photo 11
- Auschwitz concentration
camp - Arbeit Macht Frei). Some of the barrack
blocks are now set out with modern exhibitions to illustrate
Words simply cannot describe the incomprehensible barbarism of Auschwitz. Suffice to say that if any readers are inclined to feelings of forgetting and forgiveness towards German crimes against humanity, then let them come to Auschwitz to see for themselves the sins committed here by Germans. Perhaps such an experience will evaporate ingenuous and misguided feelings of forgiveness. Certainly all that we saw and felt at this small Polish town of Oświęcim will remain with us for ever, to be recalled whenever we witness the arrogant behaviour still shown so often by modern Germans. It is also to be regretted that the natural human empathy felt towards Jewish suffering in the Holocaust is today overshadowed by modern Israeli bigoted and genocidal policies towards their Palestinian neighbours.
Our trip continued with a couple of days in the
small Ojków National Park just north of Kraków, and spread along the limestone
gorge of the Dolina Prądnika with its varied landscape of river valley,
limestone rock formations and peaceful forests. Equally appealing are the remains of 14th century castles built by King Kazimierz the Great to protect the
Polish Kingdom and its trade routes from And so to Kraków. About the only thing to be said in Camping Smok's favour is that it is just a 15 minute bus ride from Kraków's centre; other than that, it is excessively overpriced with utterly surly owners who complacently believe that guests will always want to come to Kraków and there is no need to offer any hospitable help whatsoever. Given the size of the camp, the facilities are hopelessly inadequate and not particularly clean. The site is named after Kraków's legendary dragon, ironically apt given the owners' rapaciousness. Having said that, Kraków is a tourist dominated city with prices that reflect this; but it is also a beautiful and historically significant city which has to be visited. Just don't expect to come away with other than an empty wallet.
A short tram ride brought us from the busy centre
across the River Wisła to Plac Bohaterów Getta in Podgórze in search
No visit to Kraków would be complete without
seeing Wawel Hill which from medieval times became the seat of Polish royal and
ecclesiastical power with the Castle and Kraków's Cathedral. Even after the
capital moved to Warsaw, Polish kings were still crowned in the Cathedral and
buried in its crypt. Following the Partitions and loss of Polish independence,
the Wawel Cathedral became the symbol of Polish national identity and a national
Perhaps the most moving experience however was to
enter the gloomy confines of the crypt to see the tombs of Polish kings and
queens from throughout Polish history. More recent heroes buried here are the
post-WW1 independence leader Josef Piłsudski who despite his almost dictatorial
period of rule, is now revered by Poles as symbolising their passion for
resistance and independence, and the WW2 leader of the Polish government in
exile General Sikorski who died under mysterious circumstances. The final tomb was that of the
late President Lech Kaszynski and his wife, killed in the April 2010 plane crash
on their way to the 70th anniversary commemorations of the Katyń massacre.
Kaszynski had been a contentious figure as president but his death prompted a
mass outpouring of grief. The decision to grant him the honour of a Wawel burial
alongside Polish
Leaving Wawel Hill, we returned to the Rynek to
visit the magnificent 13th century Mariacki Church which towers over one corner
of the square. Legend has it that in 1241 the city watchman sounded a bugle
alarm from the church tower to warn the citizens of Kraków of the approaching
Tartar invasion; he was killed by a Tartar arrow before he could complete his
hejnał bugle call. Today the legend is kept alive as every hour a lone
bugler sounds the curtailed alarm call from the Mariacki tower. The church's
interior is startling with richly coloured 19th century decorations, but the
highlight is the gilded and polychrome panelled altar piece, carved in the 15th
century by master craftsman Veit Stoss (Photo 24 - Mariacki
Church in Rynek Glówny at Kraków).
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After a visit to the giant Riese underground
complex, built by the Germans in WW2 in the remote Sowie Hills of Lower Silesia
using slave labour from the nearby Gross Rosen concentration camp, to shelter
their armaments production from Allied bombing, we camped in the grounds of the
delightful Leśny Dwor (Forest Manor), a small campsite near the village of
Wolibórz. The precipitous 900m high plateau land of the Góry Stołowe (Table
Mountain) National Park is weathered into huge pinnacles, part of a range of
similar rock formations at Adršpach across the nearby Czech border visited
last year. Paths squeeze a way through narrow clefts and crevices (Photo 1 - Tight squeeze among
Góry Stołowe rock towers)
between the outcrops and rock towers to emerge at the rocky profile of a great
ape looking out across the Czech valleys (Photo 2 -
Ape
Rock in the Table Mountains). That night in camp, fire flies again
danced like tiny fairies around our supper table.
Continuing eastwards along the Czech border, we
reached the small town of Paczków. This quiet market town founded in 1254 to
guard the SW border of the Duchy of Wrocław from marauding Bohemians has managed
to preserve intact the entire circuit of its medieval fortification walls and
defensive towers, and is according labelled the 'Carcassonne of Poland'. While
perhaps not in that league, it has at least been spared embellishment by
over-zealous 19th century restorers and invasive crowds of tourists. The
Town hall tower gave
panoramic views over the town's quiet Rynek (see left), its surrounding
medieval walls, towers and shady park, and the huge parish church fortified in
the 16th century against Turkish invasion. Paczków may not be in the main
tourist route, but its multilingual guidebook shows it to be one of those
delightfully unpretentious places which admirably sets out to promote its
charms, and deserves to attract visitors.
The
following morning, we caught the tram from just outside the campsite into Wrocław
centre. The city, founded in the 9th century as the Slavic market town of
Wratislavia on a sandy island in the River Odra, came under Prussian control at
the 18th century Partition of Poland and was restyled Breslau and became second
only in importance to Berlin. It remained under German control even after
post-WW1 Polish independence, and in 1944~45 the retreating Germans made a
determined stand at Breslau; it took the Red Army 4 months of intensive
bombardment to recapture the city leaving 70% in total ruins. As part of post
WW2 Poland, Wrocław was renamed with the modern version of its Polish name; the residual German population was expelled westwards and the city repopulated
by Poles displaced from Lwów in Western Ukraine by Stalin's annexation of that
former region of Poland. These new Wrocław citizens brought much of their
Eastern Polish culture and traditions, and considering the scale of wartime
damage, Wrocław has been wonderfully restored in the years since. Getting
off the tram at Plac Dominikański, we stood looking around in amazement at the
bright, modern city-scape.
Our
first visit in Wrocław was to the Racławice Panoramic Painting, similar in
design and nationalist sentiment to its Hungarian equivalent at Ópusztaszer. The enormous
panoramic painting, 120m long and 15m high is now displayed in a specially-built
rotunda building. It was commissioned in 1874 to celebrate the centenary of the
defeat of the Russian Tsarist army by peasant militia led by Poland's national
hero Tadeusz Kościuszko at Racławice near Kraków in April 1794. The
victory was in vain since within a year, the final Partition wiped Poland off the
map. Despite this, the battle was viewed a century later by patriots of the
still subdued Poland as a supreme expression of national will and
self-sacrifice which deserved fitting memorial. The painting's history is a
remarkable saga which mirrors the fate of Poland itself: originally displayed in Lwów, it was damaged by bombing in 1944 and brought to Wrocław after WW2 by
the Poles of Western Ukraine. Being politically unacceptable under communism to
allow Poles to glory in the historical defeat of Russians, it was consigned to
storage; Solidarity's rise in 1980 forced the authorities to review patriotic
traditions and the painting was meticulously restored and displayed in the new
purpose-built rotunda. This we had to see.
Along the delightful embankment of the River
Odra, we crossed to Ostrów Tumski island, site of the original Slavic settlement
and home to Wrocław cathedral and other magnificent churches (Photo
4 - Wrocław Cathedral and
bridge to Ostrów Tumski island). On the nearby south
bank, the Market Hall (Hala Targowa) was filled with a wonderful array of stalls
loaded with attractive fruit, vegetables and flowers (Photo 5 - Wrocław vegetable market hall, Hala
Targova). In the University quarter, a student
cafeteria, Bazylia, served us a cheap and filling Polish lunch of pierogi (dumplings)
to sustain our afternoon amblings. Wrocław University's Collegium Maximum
showed its Habsburg origins with the ornately Baroque Aula Leopoldina, and the
terrace of the Mathematicians'
Tower gave wonderful panoramic views over the
city (Photo 6 - River Odra from Wrocław
University Tower).
We
now had a long motorway drive to Katowice in Upper Silesia and the next phase of
the trip. The huge conurbation of Upper Silesian industrial cities, the most
densely populated area of Poland with 2 million inhabitants, has the collective
name of Górnośląski Okręg Przemysłowy (GOP) - Upper Silesian Industrial
District. The region, with its rich coal and mineral reserves, had been heavily exploited during the 19th century industrial revolution. Post WW1, the
Allies were divided as to Upper Silesia's fate despite strong claims from the
new Polish state to its industrial economy. The Poles seized control of the
industrial areas by armed insurrection, and in 1921 the League of Nations
partitioned Upper Silesia, awarding its industry and coal mines to Poland. In
1945, Poland gained control of the whole region and during the communist era,
Upper Silesia's industrial workers enjoyed privileged high wages, but over
exploitation by heavy industry produced devastating pollution and high incidence of
disease. The once mighty coal and steel industries of the GOP went into decline
in the post-communist 1990s, dramatically increasing unemployment around
Katowice, but there are still large numbers of working modern pits.
Our reason for coming to Katowice, despite its industrial urban sprawl, was to
see a preserved part of its industrial heritage, the former Guido Pit, now a
mining museum, at Zabrze near to Gliwice, once one of Upper Silesia's most
prolific coal, iron and steeling producing cities. Driving in from the motorway
past depressed-looking buildings, we reached the headstocks of the former Guido
coal mine (Kompalnia Węgla Guido) (Photo 8 - Head stocks of Guido Mining Museum at Zabrze).
Named after its 1855 founding owner, Count Guido Henckel von Donnersmarck, the mine finally closed in 1990, later becoming a
mining museum. Two of the working levels are preserved, showing both historical
and modern coal extraction techniques. Issued with hard-hat and lamp, we
descended in the cage to the 170m and 320m levels to the clanging winding-gear
bell-codes. For 3 hours we were led by the retired miner guide along a network
of tunnels and galleries, seeing ventilation equipment, coal-conveyers and
modern coal-cutting and propping technology (Photo
9 - Underground gallery and coal-cutting).
The climax came with a demonstration of an enormous brute of a coal-cutter which
an operator drove forward on its caterpillar tracks, its massive cutting head
moving to and fro, with pneumatically operated props moving in behind. As we
returned to the surface, the guide taught us the Polish version of the
traditional miners' 'Good Luck' greeting, Szczęść Boże (pronounced
sh-chen-sh-ch bozh-e) which needed practice over a few Polish beers.
Katowice campsite, wedged between motorway and
urban dual-carriage-way, provided a surprisingly restful night. The campsite
leaflet produced by the Katowice authorities made brave attempt to downplay the
city's industrial image by promoting its modern appeal as a centre of arts and
learning; it felt more like a PR consultant's unconvincing offering. But next
day's visit to the Tyskie Gronie Brewery in Tychy provided a welcome
restorative. Now part of the same brewing conglomerate as Lech and the Czech
Pilsner Urquell, Tyskie Browary Książęce (Ducal Brewery) is one of Poland's
major brewers, taking its princely name from its 1629 aristocratic
founder. The
brewery covers a huge area and as we approached, the air was filled with the
refreshingly hoppy smell of freshly brewed beer. Ewa our guide for the visit
spoke perfect English and in the brewery museum took us through Tyskie's
history. The buildings of the old brewery site are set in parkland and included
the original brew house which was lined with decorative blue tiles and equipped
with copper mash tuns (Photo 10 - Tiled Brew House and mash tuns at Tyskie Brewery).
Alongside the fermentation, filtration and maturation building, enormous modern
cylindrical storage tanks towered overhead. After seeing the automated bottling
and canning plant, the visit concluded with a generous tasting of freshly brewed
Tyskie in their sampling cellar. The company's open policy of visiting makes
commendably good commercial sense, and we extend our personal thanks to Ewa for
her patient hospitality.
Immediately
following the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, Oświęcim was
incorporated into the Reich and its name changed to Auschwitz. Concentration
camps for Polish political prisoners and POWs was a German priority for imprisoning and eliminating Polish intelligentsia and
leadership classes. Oświęcim already had a pre-war Polish barracks and its
position on the railway network singled it out as the site for a concentration
camp. Under the notorious commandant Rudolf Höss, work on adapting the barracks
began in April 1940, and the first round-ups of potential Polish opposition to
German domination were delivered in June. Overworked, undernourished and subject
to disease and utter brutality, prisoners suffered high mortality from the
start. Following German invasion of USSR in mid-1941, Soviet POWs flooded into
Auschwitz making conditions even worse. A second camp was therefore constructed
at Birkenau at the site of the village of Brzezinka 3 kms north.
Auschwitz-Birkenau's
role as the key extermination centre for Europe's Jews developed from the
Wannsee Conference chaired by Rienhard Heydrich in January 1942
which decided on the 'Final Solution to the Jewish Question'. Auschwitz provided the ideal location for
conducting mass murder on an industrial scale: the technology for such grotesque
inhumanity had already been perfected by experiments on Polish and Soviet POWs,
using Zyklon B pellets to produce cyanide gas and disposing of the bodies in
crematoria. By mid-1942, Jews were being transported to Auschwitz by rail from
all over Europe; the SS already had lists of 11 million European Jews, even from
neutral countries such as Switzerland, Sweden and Ireland, who were to be
eliminated with systematic German thoroughness in the forthcoming genocide,
along with others considered by perverted German ideology as 'untermenschen'
such as Roma-gypsies. After a rail journey of up to 10 days locked in cattle
trucks, the dazed prisoners were herded out onto the unloading ramp at Birkenau
where the railway line came straight through the gatehouse into the camp
compound. SS doctors segregated women and children from men, and after cursory
examination, those considered unfit for work (elderly, disabled, pregnant women
and infants)
were ushered directly to the gas chambers for immediate murder. Zyklon B was
sprinkled through ceiling vents into the underground 'shower rooms'/gas
chambers, and their bodies burnt in crematoria or open pits. Those deemed
fit for slave labour were lucky to survive for 2 months, dying of infectious
epidemics in the unsanitary overcrowding, Polish winter temperatures of -20°C,
malnutrition, overwork and brutality. The precise numbers murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau
cannot be known since Jewish prisoners were never registered, but it is
estimated that 1.6 million human beings died here at German hands, including
Jews, Poles, Russians and Roma.
exactly what
happened here, while others have been preserved in the same state as when the
Germans evacuated the camp in January 1945. Some show the material remains
discovered by the liberating Red Army: huge bales of human hair shaved from
prisoners for use in the German textile industry, piles of spectacles,
prosthetic limbs and tooth and hair brushes, piles of suit cases showing the
names and home towns of victims. These pathetic piles of belongings taken from
prisoners, the detritus of mass murder, evoked such extreme feelings of sorrow
and rage, as did the catalogues of prisoners photos systematically recorded by
the Germans. One block showed evidence of grotesque experiments carried out on
their human victims by SS doctors like Josef Mengele. Around the lines of barrack
blocks stood the gaunt remains of the electrified barbed wire boundary
fencing (Photo 12 - Electrified
barbed wire fence at Auschwitz 1). We were led through to stand inside
Auschwitz 1's gas chamber, peering up in the gloom to the ceiling vents where
experiments with Zyklon B poison gas were carried out, and next door the
surviving crematoria, fitted by a German engineering company, the starkly
chilling sight of its brick chimney visible through the trees outside (Photo 13 - Gas chamber and
crematorium at Auschwitz 1).
A bus took us out to the Birkenau death camp
where the 175 hectare site contained over 300 huts. The most chilling
sight here awaited us as we stood looking back along that infamous railway
line running through the gatehouse to bring trucks of victims to their deaths (Photo 14 -
Gatehouse and railway line at Auschwitz-Birkenau), as was portrayed in
Spielberg's film Schindler's List which was filmed here. We were shown
the interior of one of the desperately over-crowded prison huts where cold,
malnutrition, and insanitary conditions produced epidemics of infectious
diseases like typhus (Photo
15 - Hut interior
at Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp) and the gaunt remains of
barbed wire fencing and watch-towers (Photo 16 -
Watch-tower & electrified barbed wire at Auschwitz-Birkenau). In the
extreme heat of a scorching hot July sun, we walked along that railway line to
the remains of the gas chambers and crematoria which are preserved exactly as left when the retreating Germans dynamited them in an attempt to remove
evidence of their crimes against humanity. It was an indescribably horrific sight looking down the steps into the underground undressing room and
gas chamber where victims were directed, believing they were to take showers. In
reality just deadly poison gas fell from the shower heads (Photo 17 - Underground gas-chamber at Birkenau).
Their cremated remains were dumped into 2 ponds where modern memorials marked
the scene of this vast crime.
Bohemian incursion.
Any visit to Kraków inevitably centres around the
Rynek Główny, the huge central square, dominated by the Town Hall tower,
the iconic statue of Poland's national poet, Adam Mickiewicz and the Sukiennice
historical market hall now filled with attractive stalls aimed naturally at
relieving the tourists of their złotys (Photo 18 -
Rynek, Mickiewicz statue & Sukiennice market, Kraków). Within 15
minutes' walk however, beyond the Floriańska Gate you can be clear of the
crowded tourist sites and find more interesting historical and
architectural gems like the Grunwald Memorial and Poland's Tomb of the Unknown
Warrior (see right), and the small Church of the Holy Cross whose nave and choir are
decorated with beautiful 15~16th century murals and whose Gothic vaulting is
supported by an exquisite single palm-like central column (Photo
19 - Palm-like central column in Holy Cross Church).
Perhaps
the most evocative areas to visit are those associated with Kraków's Jewish
community and the notorious WW2 ghetto where the Germans murdered 60,000 Kraków
Jews bringing to an end 600 years of Jewish history in the city. Under the Polish
Republic, Jewish citizens had during the 1930s figured prominently in Kraków's
political and social life, but following the 1939 German invasion and setting up
of the so-called General Government with Kraków as its capital, Jews were
immediately subjected to discriminatory legislation. In 1941 a ghetto was
established in the suburb of Podgórze surrounded by a 2m high wall in which all Kraków
Jews were imprisoned in overcrowded insanitary conditions. By 1942, mass
deportations to death
camps began the systematic extermination of Kraków's Jews. A forced labour camp
was set up at Plaszów under the notorious commandant Amon Goeth (as portrayed
with such evil conviction by
Ralph Fiennes in
Spielberg's film Schindler's List) and in 1943 a major SS operation removed or
murdered the remaining ghetto population. Many were simply butchered in cold
blood on the streets, or transported to Plaszów and worked to death or subjected
to Goeth's insane brutality. Oskar Schindler saved 1,200 Jews from inevitable
death by managing to bribe the Germans into allowing them to work in his
enamelware factory.
of
the memorial to the exterminated Jews of the Kraków ghetto. The open space of
Plac Bohaterów Getta, once centre of the WW2 ghetto is now filled with a
poignant memorial made up of large metal chairs strewn in rows across the
square, symbolising the ransacking of furniture thrown out from Jewish homes and
German troops murdered Jewish citizens cleared the ghetto in 1943 (Photo 20 - Memorial to the
exterminated Jews of Kraków Ghetto). In the corner of
the square the Pharmacy pod Orlem, operated by the non-Jewish pharmacist who was
allowed to remain in the ghetto to serve those impounded there, still stands as
a museum. Nearby a short section of ghetto wall is preserved as a further
memorial. We walked through the grubby workaday back streets to find the remains
of Schindler's enamelware factory, recently transformed into a museum portraying the
horrors of German occupation and extermination of the ghetto Jews. The
hard-drinking, womanising Schindler, a Sudeten German, bought up the failed
enamelware business to make his fortune using Jewish slave labour. Enigmatically
his motivation changed and he expended his fortune saving his Jewish workers, as
portrayed in the Spielberg film. Little of the factory survived the war other
than Schindler's office which now forms part of the museum along with other
displays presenting a candid record of life under German occupation. Later that
afternoon, we walked back across the Wisła bridge to see the former Jewish
residential area of Kazimierz with its restored synagogues and Jewish cemetery (Photo 21 -
Remu'h Synagogue in Kazimierz
and Jewish cemetery).
pantheon of leading figures, and since re-establishment of the Republic, Polish
statesmen have been buried there. Entering the Wawel courtyard, we were taken
aback by the huge open space surrounded by Castle buildings and the Cathedral
with its towers and distinctive copper and gilded domes (Photo 22 - Wawel Cathedral at Kraków).
The Cathedral interior is filled with royal tombs and chapels and the mausoleum
of St Stanisław, Poland's patron saint.
kings and national heroes has caused much controversy, but it
was clear from the crowds filing past the tomb that he now symbolises the
expression of Polish identity and pride (Photo 23 - Tomb of late President Lech Kaczynski and his wife, in crypt of Wawel Cathedral).
We readily joined the line to file past and pay our silent respects to the late
president of the country which is now our adopted home for 3 months.
