Excerpts From A Polish Travelogue Part III

Wednesday, July 23—It started well with a sausage McMuffin from McDonald’s and a Polish doughnut, a perfect bilateral breakfast. Then, rain. I didn’t record exactly when the rains began, but for the rest of our stay, they plagued us, dampened our clothes and spirits, and altered our schedule. Unlike the Poles, who, according to Anna, are made of sugar and melt even in light showers, we Americans absorbed our share of precipitation undaunted, but flooding in the south prevented us from going to the Zakopane and hiking Mt. Giewont. Of the repeats I would have like to execute, climbing Giewont would have been paramount, but some things are not to be. Today was Auschwitz, a dreary day—much like the day of my first visit to Oswiecim—suitable for black and white film stock.

On the way to Auschwitz, however, we made a stop at a small castle, an unrestored ruin of a country stronghold of the bishops of Krakow. A side-trip new to me, the Zamek Lipowiec offered lovely views and a memorable highlight. While not the Zakopane, the castle elevated us and took our breath away. High on a hill surrounded by a wood, the castle’s approach has a decidedly fairy-tale look, and yet altogether natural. I love the forest landscape in the Old World, how clean it is kept, the brush cleared and the trees pruned for kindling, so that visibility extends to a distance—one can see wicked witches and predatory beasts half a mile off. Walls so thick of rough-hewn stone and brick, you’d think that these were not so much rooms constructed as caves, hollows, or pockets of air structurally permitted by the orderly piling up of masonry. These were forts, prisons, redoubts, refuges, not royal villas; a modern basement provides more amenities, but has much less atmosphere. And we climbed up into that, atmosphere, spiraling tightly into oxygen debt, the abounding silence of life far below, the Wisla flowing, autos trundling, cemeteries resting in peace, and falcons, below us, diving into the tree-tops below them. With only the sound of the wind. Mounting a castle tower or a mountain is the medieval equivalent of flight.(128-150)

Auschwitz, again, failed to move me, though Birkenau succeeded as before in evoking something of a sense of melancholy and a little of mystery. I do not know why this most awful of places weighs so little upon my psyche. Perhaps, as Arendt has argued, the banality of this particular evil, affects our memory of it. Perhaps it requires reenactors, Nazis recruited from the White Supremacy movement. Perhaps we should be sorted at the entrance, separated from our families, some sent immediately to the gas chambers, others to work. Perhaps our material goods should be confiscated, pilfered. Perhaps we should be physically abused. Perhaps we should be made to fear, not to reflect. Movies do a better job of recreating the horror; the static site itself preserves only the banality, a banality not without occasional pathos or arresting imagery, but nothing like the place it should be, the sickening blow it should deliver. Perhaps my soul has been deadened, and I refuse to feel the way people—even good people—want me to feel. I did appreciate the prison photographs of the seized and the murdered, which I had not seen before. They personalized the horror, and their eyes communicate all the individuality of response to their plight, from boredom and despair, to impending hysteria. The cafeteria was quite good, and shouldn’t be there at all.(151-155)



Steady rain shortened our stay at Birkenau, a more open camp site, and compelled us to our cars and a return to Krakow. We mistook a turn and traveled most of the way back behind a truck loaded with poultry, encountered a traffic jam of the sort that makes me curse Chicago, dropped Anna off, and succeeded, at Erin’s direction, in finding our way back to the hostel. We dined at Restaurcja Nostalgia, I the potato placki. I defeated Alex again in chess, pretty much by accident. We know the proper movements of the pieces, but nothing of strategy—armies that clash in the night.

Excerpts From A Polish Travelogue Part IV

Thursday, July 24—Rain was forecast for the day, so we decided to stay in Krakow and as much as possible indoors, opting for a tour of Wawel Hill, the royal compound, taking in the cathedral and the royal apartments. Having reported previously on Wawel, I will only gloss a few of its newly distinctive moments.

Rain fell steadily and at times, heavily, which packed the cathedral with candy Poles. Not easy to move about. Like St. Adalbert’s, the cathedral dates to the early 1000s, and by its completion some 700 hundred years later, exhibited the gamut of architectural styles, inside and out. I rather like agglutinative aesthetics, but I don’t particularly enjoy the challenge of explaining them.

A few tombs of interest on the main floor, Kazimierz the Great, Stefan Batory, and the silver reliquary supposed to house the remains of St. Stanislaw—not likely—of whose butchery you will read shortly. What Italians could do with marble in the Renaissance astonishes! Orangey though, with the complexion of pepperoni. Equally perplexing is how and why, exactly, marble? We, I (again), did not descend into the crypt for more tombs—surcharge.

Repeated my tour, as well, of the royal apartments. Nothing new to report, and my comments regarding the Royal Castle in Warsaw could be inserted here. One ceiling was impressively beamed with larch, a second ornately paneled with deeply recessed boxes, a third, the most famous, populated with carved heads that stare down upon us with the same vulgarity as we gaze up at them. A bust of Caracalla wears the look of a school bully. Otherwise, simply fabulous, again. We descended into the caves below the castle, the dragon Krak’s lair, where I unsuccessfully attempted photography. Too dark, I think. The folktale goes that Krak, like most dragons, made himself a pest by eating the locals. Enter king, beautiful daughter, inventive farm boy who induces Krak to devour a Trojan sheep stuffed with sulphur. Boom. Next thing you know, a thriving Krakow.

More interesting, though not drier, was our walking tour of Kazimierz, the former Jewish district of Krakow. My old haunt, having lived for two weeks there in 2004 on Miodowa, a main street. Visited the Old Synagogue and the New Jewish Cemetery, an almost random assortment of stones and memorials, a charnel junk drawer. I feel more fully the tragedy of the Holocaust here than at Auschwitz, for not only were the Nazis intent on murdering a people, the Jews, their purpose was to erase an entire culture as well, the wonder of which culture that is so evident in restored Kazimierz.



Christianity, Roman Catholicism, likewise abounds in Kazimierz, with its coincident charms, coincident with the names and color schemes of my growing up. There is the Church of St. Catherine, in which St. Rita has prominent billing, the names of my grandmother and mother, respectively. No one seems to be able to take a clear picture of the statue of St. Rita, the Patroness of Difficult and Impossible Cases. My efforts blurred, and the post-card I received from a very kind Protectress of the Card Table Display of the Holy Bric-a-Brac is similarly unfocused. The church Boze Cialo (Bozhay Ciao-wo), or Corpus Christi, I love for its blacks and its gold, and its black and gold—the Steeler Church. It’s of the 1340s and the 1970s. Not far away, though not in Kazimierz proper, is the Norbertanek cloister, my father’s patron saint. And finally, the Paulite Church “On the Rock,” which impressed itself in my memory on this trip for two reasons. First, we happened upon a pool into which a finger of the dismembered St. Stanislaw is reputed to have been thrown. Stashek was killed and quartered in 1079 in a power struggle with Boleslaw the Bold, a struggle in which holy men generally lose but become saints in the process: vide Thomas Becket and Thomas More—two of my favorite old movies. Remember Peter O’Toole’s (Henry II) wonderful line, “He’s read books, you know. It’s amazing.” And second, in the crypt of the Church “On the Rock” lie interred a number of Poland’s cultural heroes, including now Czeslaw Milosz, who died during my second visit to Poland and who lived, I found out recently, not far from David. Owing in part to Milosz, and Szymborska and Zagajewski, I’m reciting more poetry now than ever, and certainly more poetry than prayer.

To find my home in one sentence, concise,
as if hammered in metal.
Not to enchant anybody,
not to make a name for oneself in posterity.
An unnamed need for rhythm, for order, for form.
Which three words are opposed
To chaos and nothingness.

Or words to that effect. This tangle of associations makes Kazimierz my favorite quarter of Krakow.(156-162)

Excerpts From A Polish Travelogue Part V

Saturday, July 26—Our last full day in Poland, and finally a clear one, Alex and I hiked the Zwierzyniec to the Kosciusko Mound, stopping en route at the Norbertanek cloister. Fine views of Wawel, of the Wisla, of the Mound itself, and of Krakow from the Mound. Judgy, a little acrophobic, soldiered on and up like a trooper, and given that our second objective for the day was to climb the Mariacki bell-tower, we accomplished great things, took wide views, before returning to headquarters for a final game of chess, which he began famously by taking a rook advantage. I persevered and salvaged a draw, before retiring to try and catch some sleep for the overnight drive to Warsaw. I rested but did not succeed in sleeping, a familiar story. We bade farewell to Krakow at about 11 o’clock that night.(170-191)

Sunday, July 27—Arrived unremarkably and too early to Warsaw, fiveish, sixish, for an 11 o’clock flight. The second most difficult leg of my journey was finding my way back into the parking ramp, which took me an hour—no airport employees around to direct me. So we spent some time laying around in the terminal, getting a few minutes. Loaded up on the Gdanska for the daylight flight home.

Wreckage

La Cueva

R_ was pleased to take us to La Cueva. He rarely tipped his hand as to what mood he might be in, but there always was a detectable note of pride when he was about to show you something you'd never seen before. This trip he seemed to wear that look a lot. La Cueva is a large cinder cone in a field of large cinder cones although it seemed to stand off by itself, the nearest one being a few miles away. That's only a guess, and maybe a bad one. Distances are hard to gauge here. R_ says it probably got it's name from the small cave at it's base, but he also knew of a shallow cave on the north side about three-quarters of the way up. That's where the skull used to be.

R_ has a tradition of watching the sun set. In a respectful manner. Once, driving I-10 back from California, he made note of the time, pulled off the next exit, found a dirt road and drove up to the top of a hill. With an eye on the quickly falling sun, he grabbed two folding chairs from the back and two warmish beers, and we sat looking west until the orange sun had disappeared. The performance over and the bottles empty we rose and packed up. It might be my imagination, but it seemed like birds, bugs, and bats went about their business after having stopped, like us, to watch the day end.

In the same way, our arrival at La Cueva coincided with the setting of the sun. Lawn chairs were set up in a row in front of the mouth of a cave that opened in the ground about a stone's throw from where we would set up camp. After sunset we sat without talking or moving much. As the darkness fell and quiet got louder, you could see flickers of light in the black mouth of the cave. What appeared to be pale butterflies were actually bats, testing the night air and waiting to feed.
Their flights got longer as it got darker, and eventually they broke free of the safety of the cave, wheeling and diving at incredible speed. Our bodies just rocks or tree stumps for them to navigate around. I wondered at the time, "What eats bats? What could catch them?"

In the morning, R_ presented us with a kangaroo rat he found on his walk, recently deceased. Must have passed during the night of natural causes which I bet is rare around here. It was beautiful, and I took a picture of it on the hood of the truck. We made the hike up the south side of the hill, skirting the wide crevice that started at the lip of the crater and went most of the way down. Like someone started to cut a cake and then thought better of it. Two large raptor nests perched in the sheer side of the crevice although they appeared to be empty. The hike wasn't too strenuous, short dry grass dotted side and the cinders were packed down, and we were soon in the shallow bowl of the crater.

Looking down the north side, you could see bits of plane wreckage strewn down to the bottom, but the drop was sheer for a ways, so we had take an indirect route to the cave. It was more like two hollows side by side, and the plane must have hit a little ways down. But that's where R_ said the pieces of the skull were. A year ago a friend had moved the bones to the other side of the hill to better photograph them and left them sitting on a rock. That didn't sit too well with R_, and on the next trip he gathered them up and moved them back. He tries to tread lightly in this world.

The story is that back in the Seventies, a single-engine plane crashed into the north face of La Cueva in the middle of some moonless night. The assumption being that this was a drug run and that the pilot fell asleep or lost his bearings. No one reported the plane or the pilot missing and the wreck might have been there for months before anyone found it. The body was scavenged but nothing ever claimed, even by authorities, whatever authorities might be out here. Soon the wreckage was picked over for scrap or parts until there wasn't much left. And the skull remained, or the pieces of it. Walking down the hill you could see bits of seat cushion, bent pieces of aluminum, orange cloth, and pieces of plastic. Nothing bigger that a garbage can lid. I found part of a jaw bone, but R_ seemed to think it unlikely to be from our pilot, maybe desert sheep. I'm no dentist, but the teeth looked pretty human. This is a place where the lost and discarded have a pretty good chance of turning up someday.

Church Sky