Swapping Euros for Zloties (De Euros a Zloties)

It might be terribly clichéd to say this, but one of my favourite things about living in Europe is being so close to so many different places, languages and cultures. Here in Barcelona, I can jump in the car and in two hours everything is in French.

A few of weeks ago we decided to go a little further afield (three hours in the plane) and took a quick trip to Poland.

During winter, the only direct flights to Poland from Barcelona are to Warsaw. I hadn’t planned on visiting Poland’s capital (we wanted to head straight to Krakow) but seeing as we had to fly in and out of there, we decided we’d spend a couple of nights. I’m glad we did.

I found it fascinating. Warsaw was almost totally obliterated by the Nazi’s during their occupation of the city in World War 2 - only about 10% of its buildings were left standing.

Being on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain after that war (and obviously with an urgent need to build and build quick), Warsaw was reconstructed in good communist fashion: row after row of those broad, foreboding, Lego-looking blocks of flats so popular in the “Eastern Bloc” (as we called it when I went to school).  These days this communist legacy is feverously being interspersed with modern skyscrapers that would not look out of place in Sydney’s CBD.

The sensationally Stalinist Palace of Culture and Science (1955). For decades Warsaw's tallest building.

Post-war "communist blocks" are quickly giving way to modern skyscrapers in Warsaw's centre

And that’s what grabbed my attention: although I was standing in the centre of a city that dated back a millennium, just about everything around was an echo of only the last 70 years. It was a stark reminder of the horror of war.

Another such reminder we found in a little non-descript parking lot just off John Paul II Street, a post-war boulevard that cuts right through the centre of town. The back wall of this car park is all that remains of the wall that bricked in Warsaw’s Jews during the Nazi occupation.

According to a plaque fixed to the wall, at one point 450 000 people were crammed into the Warsaw Ghetto. One hundred thousand of them would die there from hunger and disease, 300 000 others would be sent to the gas chambers of Treblinka. It was chilling to stand there.

There is a Stare Miasto (Old Town) in Warsaw. It has a stunning market-square, cobbled streets lined with fairytale buildings, a castle and a wonderful city wall. The Stare Miastro and the confusingly named Nowe Miasto (New Town), just outside the wall, are a beautiful glimpse into old Warsaw and well worth a visit (we had a couple of great meals there too), but they also are less than 70 years old. They're a faithful reconstruction of the very same area before the War, rebuilt using the rubble that was left behind and done so well that it is actually a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The beautiful Market Square in Warsaw Old Town. All totally rebuilt after the wall

This is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It's not actually in the Old Town, but I wanted to include it mainly for
what is behind the guards. Look closely and you'll see yellow tubes just behind the feet of each guard. They're heaters.
It was so cold the poor buggers would freeze without them! 

A quick 30-minute flight from Warsaw is Krakow. We wanted to visit Krakow for two reasons: 1) it’s magnificent World Heritage-listed Old Town, which was thankfully spared the bombs and dynamite during WW2 and 2) it’s proximity to something far less appealing.

The Stare Miasto lived up to the hype. The Market Square is one of the most beautiful squares I have seen. It dates back to the 13^th century and is lined with more fairytale 14^th and 15^th century buildings (although I was horrified to see that in one of them there is a Hard Rock Café and another a Zara).  

Krakow’s Old Town is a lot bigger than Warsaw’s and it was great to see that it's not all just for tourists (although there is a lot of that). The stunning University Quarter is still full of students and professors and throughout the Old Town we found bakeries, bars, cafes and even a Polish fast-ish food joint (in which I had some sensational goulash with dumplings) where Polish was still by far the dominant language being spoken.

The early 14th century St Florian's Gate - part of the old city wall (most of which is now gone)

Outside of the old town, we visited the Wawel Castle area, a wonderful fortified precinct high on a hill overlooking the Vistula River and the place where Krakow began a thousand years ago, Kazimierz, the Jewish quarter before WW2 and just over the river from that, Podgórze, where Oskar (Schindler’s List) Schindler’s factory is still standing. To be honest, it’s just a bland industrial building, but we wanted to see it and stand within the walls of a place where such good was done during such bad times.

The Cathedral inside the Wawel Castle precinct

Part of Wawel Castle

Which brings us to talk about a place that’s an incongruously pretty, hour-long drive from Krakow, through quaint villages of neat and brightly coloured homes: the Nazi death camps of Auschwitz.

The contrast of these villages to Óswięcim, the town around which the Auschwitz camps are located, could not be starker, or more fitting according to G. It’s a shabby, industrial place with little character and situated by a major railway junction - one of the reasons why it was a perfect location for the camps.  Ominously, a single railway line branches out from the junction and runs alongside the road, accompanying you to the first camp.

We took a tour from Krakow, which included a guided tour through both the Auschwitz I and Auschwitz-Birkenau camps. The guide was a very proud Pole who was obviously distressed about what had happened in his country probably more than twice his life ago. It was quite powerful to listen to him. You don’t have to, but I’d recommend visiting Auschwitz with a guide.

I’m nervous that anything I say about Auschwitz will sound puerile or clichéd. It’s a ghastly and disturbing place obviously, not so much for what it looks like (at first glance, Auschwitz I doesn’t actually look all that bad, the 25-times bigger Auschwitz-Birkenau is another matter entirely) but for what went on there and of course its very reason for being.

The main entrance to Auschwitz I camp with the famous and terribly cynical "Work brings freedom" motto written above it in German.

Auschwitz II - Auschwitz-Birkenau

We’ve all seen documentaries and films or read books about the Holocaust, so there’s no need to go into the details. I’ll just say that despite the difficulty of the visit, we were both very glad we went. It felt right to visit a place where such evil happened, both in memory of the victims and to more immediately acknowledge what went on there by actually standing in the same spaces. 

For this reason I was really happy to see a lot of school groups there and from all over Europe too. I must admit though (in an obvious sign I'm becoming a grumpy old man) they were bloody annoying at times...

Reading back over this post, I’m worried I’ve portrayed Poland as just about memories of war and its horrors. Apologies to my Polish friends as there’s obviously much more to the country than that. I hope some of the photos I’ve included here at least hint at that.