Tuesday 13th April
The impact of the plane crash near Smolensk is felt everywhere in Krakow: most buildings and trams carry Polish flags with black ribbon attached and groups of schoolkids are taking flowers to memorials dotted around the city. Two main gathering points – in the Central Square of the Old City and at the foot of the Wawel castle hill – are a sea of candles in red jars with people stopping to pay respects. At each spot there’s an exhibition about the Katyn massacres with photos of the exhumed bodies. People taking in the story, standing silently. A long talk – in French, strangely – with the landlady of my guest house. She wasn’t a supporter of Kaczynski’s extreme nationalism but is very upset by some of the other victims, especially the man who led Poles in exile in London during WW2 and the woman who spearheaded the Solidarity movement. She sees them as real Polish heroes.
Her own family story is fascinating. Her father was a German speaking Austrian Pole who fought against the Germans in the Polish army in 1939 and then went into hiding in a safe house in the countryside. He was also a fine violinist. One day he was playing Schubert in his room and heard, through the wall, a woman singing to his tune. She was a young Jewish woman also in hiding from the Nazis, in the same building. They met and fell in love, marrying after the Germans left.
Cold and wet but beautiful in the Old City and on Wawel Hill. The St Mary Basilica is breathtaking. Monuments and statues everywhere: some wonderful faces.
Wednesday 14th April
The landlady is furious. President Kaczynski’s twin (former Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition) has insisted that his brother should be buried in Krakow Cathedral on the castle hill. “He’s making it political and dividing the country! Presidents have all been buried in Warsaw: Krakow Cathedral was for kings and national heroes. He doesn’t belong here: he had no support in this city. But the government don’t feel they can oppose ‘family wishes’. It’s all about his brother positioning himself for the Presidential elections.” She tells me there have been protests in Warsaw against this decision.
Thursday 15th April
Auschwitz. A cold rainy day means few visitors and I am often alone in key places. However much you think you know about it, the impact of the place itself is huge. Understanding the physical location, arrangement of buildings, really grasping how the system worked. The ordinariness of the buildings, the banality of the place, made what happened there even more devastatingly shocking. To stand in rooms knowing how people died there in their thousands brought it so much closer but also in a way made it even harder to comprehend. Hardest to bear: the pile of suitcases with names, birth dates and places of origin; the Roma exhibition with film of gypsy children in Germany playing in a school playground, all later to perish; and standing alone looking at the execution wall where so many were brutally murdered.
I also hadn’t realised how close the camp is to the town….
Friday 16th April
Why is everyone in the breakfast room glued to the internet? That’s when I hear about the Icelandic volcano and realise it may affect my journey home tonight. Airports may open by the evening: not much to do except wait.
Nowa Huta, the huge 1950s Stalinist housing project in monumental neoclassicist style way out to the east of the city. Wide avenues, huge grey apartment blocks, enormous square, all even greyer in the rain … and then the modernist churches people fought for and won in the 1980s, brightly painted verandas breaking the monotony, monuments to Solidarity and exhibitions showing anticommunist street protests facing police watercannon.
Twentieth century history weighs heavily here and the reminders are everywhere: the more so because of the events of the last few days.
Polish and British airports are closed. My flight is cancelled. All coaches to London are already full. It has to be a 20 hour overnight coach journey to Brussels. Luckily my nephew Jos lives there and books me another overnight coach trip on to London. Instead of being home Friday night I’ll get there Monday if all goes well. No chance of making the first day of school.
Saturday 17th April
A sunny day at last and a beautiful daytime drive across Poland and Germany. Sitting next to a group of young Spaniards: one woman on the phone first to her father: “It’s been a terrible holiday, nothing going on because of the mourning, terrible weather and then no flights … we’re on a horrible soviet-style bus and I can’t wait to get home!” Then, a few minutes later she phones a friend: “We’ve had a great time, lots of fun! Really enjoyed it… OK, so the cancelled flight was a problem but we’re OK and the bus is fine!” Well, we all tell stories differently to different audiences….
All through the night on the coach, through the Netherlands and Belgium, reaching Brussels at 4 a.m. Sitting in McDonald’s till they close at 5 then hanging around for a couple of hours till it’s a fair time to wake Jos. Enjoying watching the centre of the city begin to wake up.
Sunday 18th April
Well, the worry of unmarked coursework and unprepared lessons is offset by the joy of sitting with my nephew in a sundrenched Brussels square eating ice cream, followed by a roast chicken dinner. Then the final haul: 8 hours including a cross-Channel ferry at 3 in the morning, in London by 6 a.m., shattered.
