Northeastern Poland
Sopot, August 12th...it is about 930 AM, the sky is steel colored as is the Baltic out my window: they seem to merge...and maybe Copernicus was wrong?
These notes will start a longish report and I figure it will bore you to death. I write these lines for myself...for future writing....and you, dear friend, just happen to be stuck with my musings.
Adam Serbinowski and I started out at 900 AM and drove to Stutthof....the particularly heinous (and somewhat forgotten) camp which the Nazis in Gdansk had actually started (as they did with their list of intellectuals- socialists-all Jews etc) while the city was still under the protection of the League of Nations. On the way, we drive past the former villa of the local gauleiter, FORSTER, with great hunting grounds. He was the malefic type of guy who would stock the woods with deer and wild boar and then kill then along with guest Nazi factota from Berlin. Stutthof, like the other camps I have seen, sits in pretty countryside...in this case on a long sandy spit with weeping willows and Lorraine poplars all over the place...And yet, (perhaps it is what we brought to it) the place exerts a chill as we walk up to the main gate. No "Arbeit Mach Frei" here...merely a couple of watch towers and then barracks stretching almost to the horizon.
The ground here is particularly sandy and devoid of nutrients and this contributed to the general dysentary experienced by the prionsers. The "hospital" block was merely a killing field. A series of films are shown, oddly dispassionate for no adjectives are needed. After the initial complement of Gdansk Free City prisoners, others started arriving deracinated from as far away as Vienna....and slowly, methodically, the place turned into a killing center. When the Red Army had taken Koenigsburg (Kaliningrad) and were headed towards Stutthof, the living prisoners were marched out into still wet snow (many barefoot) for forced marches toward Germany. Again, I wonder at my motive for coming to such a place...but I feel like I am making a memorial to the victims. Stutthof must be remembered. It is probably the largest death camp where the majority of those murdered were not Jews.
We drove silently (Adam possesses the great quality of not having to make
conversation) south....on oak-tree lined country roads...He absolutely understood that I wanted only the back roads and little hamlets. These were mostly German until 1945, red brick, Hanseatic-looking with towering village churches, severe...once protestant of course, now catholic. We drove past some remarkable ones....to Frombork and its great Teutonic Knight castle (which our family had visited in our funky little rented Fiat from Sopot 30-odd years ago) and then deeper into Masuria, that land of East Prussia with Minnesota-like lakes and tidy little brick towns.
Terrific churches here and there (Ornata particularly)....and it is gratifying to see that the Polish inhabitants (many here came from what is now firmly Lithuania when the Germans were expelled) are as prim and orderly as the Teutons. There is an absolute noticeable absence of litter.
We head for the great Polish pilgrimage site of Swieta Lipka. Isn't it rather interesting that great miracles happen mostly in Roman Catholic regions? Hmmm......This site has to do with some poor clod who was a prisoner of the Teutonic Knights but who was released and who in gratitude placed a statue of the Virgin Mother on a lime tree...to which subsequent people came and were cured of this and that. The site is between two pretty little lakes....and is a baroque explosion, almost shocking after the inorante brick of the villages. There is a quite wonderful wrought iron gate (which has been painted a sort of nile green...the church hereabouts has no more taste than it does in LR where they put astroturf on the steps)..Inside is the predictable throng of mostly older women with Pillsbury Doughboy faces all looking reverent...a huge organ (fanciful too...done by a famous Jewish organ maker from Koenigsburg in the early 18th century) is playing with many objects on it jumping about not quite in synch....ah, a baroque Disneyland....and I feel a little guilty at being so fractious about a place which pleases the local masses so.
- F
These notes will start a longish report and I figure it will bore you to death. I write these lines for myself...for future writing....and you, dear friend, just happen to be stuck with my musings.
Adam Serbinowski and I started out at 900 AM and drove to Stutthof....the particularly heinous (and somewhat forgotten) camp which the Nazis in Gdansk had actually started (as they did with their list of intellectuals- socialists-all Jews etc) while the city was still under the protection of the League of Nations. On the way, we drive past the former villa of the local gauleiter, FORSTER, with great hunting grounds. He was the malefic type of guy who would stock the woods with deer and wild boar and then kill then along with guest Nazi factota from Berlin. Stutthof, like the other camps I have seen, sits in pretty countryside...in this case on a long sandy spit with weeping willows and Lorraine poplars all over the place...And yet, (perhaps it is what we brought to it) the place exerts a chill as we walk up to the main gate. No "Arbeit Mach Frei" here...merely a couple of watch towers and then barracks stretching almost to the horizon.
The ground here is particularly sandy and devoid of nutrients and this contributed to the general dysentary experienced by the prionsers. The "hospital" block was merely a killing field. A series of films are shown, oddly dispassionate for no adjectives are needed. After the initial complement of Gdansk Free City prisoners, others started arriving deracinated from as far away as Vienna....and slowly, methodically, the place turned into a killing center. When the Red Army had taken Koenigsburg (Kaliningrad) and were headed towards Stutthof, the living prisoners were marched out into still wet snow (many barefoot) for forced marches toward Germany. Again, I wonder at my motive for coming to such a place...but I feel like I am making a memorial to the victims. Stutthof must be remembered. It is probably the largest death camp where the majority of those murdered were not Jews.
We drove silently (Adam possesses the great quality of not having to make
conversation) south....on oak-tree lined country roads...He absolutely understood that I wanted only the back roads and little hamlets. These were mostly German until 1945, red brick, Hanseatic-looking with towering village churches, severe...once protestant of course, now catholic. We drove past some remarkable ones....to Frombork and its great Teutonic Knight castle (which our family had visited in our funky little rented Fiat from Sopot 30-odd years ago) and then deeper into Masuria, that land of East Prussia with Minnesota-like lakes and tidy little brick towns.
Terrific churches here and there (Ornata particularly)....and it is gratifying to see that the Polish inhabitants (many here came from what is now firmly Lithuania when the Germans were expelled) are as prim and orderly as the Teutons. There is an absolute noticeable absence of litter.
We head for the great Polish pilgrimage site of Swieta Lipka. Isn't it rather interesting that great miracles happen mostly in Roman Catholic regions? Hmmm......This site has to do with some poor clod who was a prisoner of the Teutonic Knights but who was released and who in gratitude placed a statue of the Virgin Mother on a lime tree...to which subsequent people came and were cured of this and that. The site is between two pretty little lakes....and is a baroque explosion, almost shocking after the inorante brick of the villages. There is a quite wonderful wrought iron gate (which has been painted a sort of nile green...the church hereabouts has no more taste than it does in LR where they put astroturf on the steps)..Inside is the predictable throng of mostly older women with Pillsbury Doughboy faces all looking reverent...a huge organ (fanciful too...done by a famous Jewish organ maker from Koenigsburg in the early 18th century) is playing with many objects on it jumping about not quite in synch....ah, a baroque Disneyland....and I feel a little guilty at being so fractious about a place which pleases the local masses so.
- F
posted by ultimatetraveler at 5:06 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home