Sopot II
Swieta Lipka was for me a different kind of mental purging from Stutthof.
The church in retrospect is this: a lovely baroque shell then done to death (it is the religious equivalent of a new Las Vegas hotel) with the wrong colors (blue and green to replicate I suppose malachite), gold which is too shiny, overrestored ugly religious paintings and frescoes.....I am sure that the Polish Americans from Hamtramck or Ypsilanti or wherever love the place.
Now we drive through the pretty lakelands, through the town the Poles call Kestrzyn (pronounced ken-shin more or less) to Gierlos....this in the Nazi times would have been through the Prussian town of Rastenburg to the Wolf's Lair headquarters of Hitler. I had pictured the area unpopulated, deeply forested, possessing a feeling of never never land. It isn't quite that.
Of course the headquarters site is in a thick copse (rather than great forest), one across which nets could be strung as camouflage to change with the seasons. The actual site of the Stauffenburg attempt on Hitler's life is a great pile of concrete....a rock crusher-like feeling...and what one makes out of it is what one brings to it. I was chilled. Even though the attempt was too little vastly too late (no one much tried to slay him while the Nazis were winning), had the attempt succeeded maybe a million people or their descendents would still be alive. Lodz, for example, had still over 100,000 in the ghetto when the attempt was made.
We drive down to the road to a tidy, rather suburban looking villa on a pretty lake: here was the house of Eva Braun. where Hitler could sneak away to from that farrago of military/political buildings....where Hitler could exult in his vegetarianism, play with his dog, possibly have sex with Frl Braun and be his other self. It was just odd as hell to sleep where SHE slept. From all reports she was a colorless little entity possibly with a bust size larger than her IQ....still, it felt odd to sleep in her house and to eat a Wienerschnitzel where Hitler had his mass of greens. Adam went swimming in the reedy lake and I ruminated.
The next morning we drove away on especially back lanes, stopping at the German actual MILITARY headquarters where there are still intact bunkers to explore and towers to ascend.....I ascended one, Adam several....then almost cheek-jowl along the Russian border (remember East Prussia was divided between Russia and Poland...) through Goldap (a scraggly place full of Russian whores who have come over for the day for the Polish largesse)....through intensely pretty countryside, rolling...out of what WAS German into what WAS Tsarist Russia and later intrinsically Poland....The area knmown as the Suwalszczyna...the land of the great writer Czeslaw Milosz, my favorite Polish author, for me a sort of combination of Faulner and Welty but in a highly agrarian Polish sense.
His NEW YORKER stories are fine, his novels magnificent, (he is a Nobelist), his poetry pretty damned obscure (but maybe it is the translation?)...at any rate, I felt him, FELT HIM as we wandered along.... passing a great double railway viaduct that the Germans had built in expectation of having a rail line east, now serving as a cynosure for picnics, etc. We head along the now-Lithuanian frontier to the remarkable town of Sejny.....the seat of a lovely mostly baroque church and one of the prettiest classical synagogues which remains in Poland.
I liked Sejny: the people of the town came together to restore the synagogue (which the Nazis had turned into a fire station) in deference to their slain Jewish compatriots.....a site perhaps unique in Poland....and today Sejny is the headquarters of the Borderland Association, a group to foster ties and exchanges with the Lithuanians and Belarussians for both borders almost abut the town....the town also has a well known Klezmar band which apparently (and to the pride of the town) came in second in a Klezmar competition in Brooklyn!.....a klezmar band minus Jews of course.
-Fred
The church in retrospect is this: a lovely baroque shell then done to death (it is the religious equivalent of a new Las Vegas hotel) with the wrong colors (blue and green to replicate I suppose malachite), gold which is too shiny, overrestored ugly religious paintings and frescoes.....I am sure that the Polish Americans from Hamtramck or Ypsilanti or wherever love the place.
Now we drive through the pretty lakelands, through the town the Poles call Kestrzyn (pronounced ken-shin more or less) to Gierlos....this in the Nazi times would have been through the Prussian town of Rastenburg to the Wolf's Lair headquarters of Hitler. I had pictured the area unpopulated, deeply forested, possessing a feeling of never never land. It isn't quite that.
Of course the headquarters site is in a thick copse (rather than great forest), one across which nets could be strung as camouflage to change with the seasons. The actual site of the Stauffenburg attempt on Hitler's life is a great pile of concrete....a rock crusher-like feeling...and what one makes out of it is what one brings to it. I was chilled. Even though the attempt was too little vastly too late (no one much tried to slay him while the Nazis were winning), had the attempt succeeded maybe a million people or their descendents would still be alive. Lodz, for example, had still over 100,000 in the ghetto when the attempt was made.
We drive down to the road to a tidy, rather suburban looking villa on a pretty lake: here was the house of Eva Braun. where Hitler could sneak away to from that farrago of military/political buildings....where Hitler could exult in his vegetarianism, play with his dog, possibly have sex with Frl Braun and be his other self. It was just odd as hell to sleep where SHE slept. From all reports she was a colorless little entity possibly with a bust size larger than her IQ....still, it felt odd to sleep in her house and to eat a Wienerschnitzel where Hitler had his mass of greens. Adam went swimming in the reedy lake and I ruminated.
The next morning we drove away on especially back lanes, stopping at the German actual MILITARY headquarters where there are still intact bunkers to explore and towers to ascend.....I ascended one, Adam several....then almost cheek-jowl along the Russian border (remember East Prussia was divided between Russia and Poland...) through Goldap (a scraggly place full of Russian whores who have come over for the day for the Polish largesse)....through intensely pretty countryside, rolling...out of what WAS German into what WAS Tsarist Russia and later intrinsically Poland....The area knmown as the Suwalszczyna...the land of the great writer Czeslaw Milosz, my favorite Polish author, for me a sort of combination of Faulner and Welty but in a highly agrarian Polish sense.
His NEW YORKER stories are fine, his novels magnificent, (he is a Nobelist), his poetry pretty damned obscure (but maybe it is the translation?)...at any rate, I felt him, FELT HIM as we wandered along.... passing a great double railway viaduct that the Germans had built in expectation of having a rail line east, now serving as a cynosure for picnics, etc. We head along the now-Lithuanian frontier to the remarkable town of Sejny.....the seat of a lovely mostly baroque church and one of the prettiest classical synagogues which remains in Poland.
I liked Sejny: the people of the town came together to restore the synagogue (which the Nazis had turned into a fire station) in deference to their slain Jewish compatriots.....a site perhaps unique in Poland....and today Sejny is the headquarters of the Borderland Association, a group to foster ties and exchanges with the Lithuanians and Belarussians for both borders almost abut the town....the town also has a well known Klezmar band which apparently (and to the pride of the town) came in second in a Klezmar competition in Brooklyn!.....a klezmar band minus Jews of course.
-Fred
posted by ultimatetraveler at 7:22 AM
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