Sopot III
We head from positive-feeling Sejny through more lakelands, lakes connected by artful lock-filled canals, through Augustow (a sort of Bemidji, Minnesota in summer filled with people carrying rubber beach toys and kayaks) then through deep deep forests into Bialystok. Somewhere around here my aunt and uncle (I called Pawpaw and Aunt Byrd) had purchased a forest after Pawpaw, quite a rich man, had been forced near bankruptcy by prohibition (and the end of the stave business in which he had made a fortune)....they were bound for Montreal to board the old liner STEFAN BATORY when they received the news that Molotov and Ribbentrop had divided Poland...that their forest was now in the USSR.....and somewhere, perhaps on our drive, it must still stand. If I could find the deeds somewhere I could perhaps make a Bialystok lawyer's day to try and reclaim!
Bialystok (the "l" has a cross on it so the pronunciation is essentially
byaw-is-toke) was the Tsarist equivalent of German Lodz: a great textile center. The noble Braniscki family had a large palace here around which the town grew....mostly Jewish (something like 80% at the beginning of the end)....It has a wildly extravagant history.....from being Tsarist, it was for a short time at the end of WW1 the "capital" of Soviet Poland...ruled by the local biggie Red Felix Dzierzynski (who was the head of Lenin's first and perhaps most dreaded GPU-NKVD-KGB and other morphs)....his rule (he spoke to the masses from the balcony of the Branickich Palace, was replaced by that of Pilsudski, the Polish patriot from who actually mostly Lithuanian by roots from up the road......The nicest person I could find who was BORN in Bialystok was Ludwik Zamenhof the creator of ESPERANTO, which surely is one of history's most noble failures.
Polish people seem to laugh at Bialystok folk for their accents and for the fact that their city (much like Lodz) is unlovely. Unlike Lodz, it IS a backwater though it has a university. We stayed at a mammoth former state hotel which has a tropical theme park with waterslides (all inside...this is the coldest part of the whole nation) and an olympic pool. There is not much to see but we made the best of it. The ARMY Museum has THE Enigma Machine which the Polish underground found and which helped immeasurably in the Allied cause in WW2 breaking codes......There is an absolutely wrenchingly simple monument where the Great Synagogue, one of the largest in the world, was burned with, it is said, 2,000 of the religionists inside it.
Bialystok made a great base though for travels towards the Belarus Frontier. Poland and Belarus are sniping a good bit at each other. Belarus has a largely denied Polish minority (their large city of Grodno has a Polish majority) while Poland is giving its Belarus minority full rights: education, religion, etc. It is tense feeling at the actual border and one feels at the end of the earth there. We drove EAST and then on ghastly country roads, some of the only ones in Europe I can remember with no paving, through absolutely the TAIL END OF THE KNOWN EUROPEAN WORLD....past a goose collective which must have had 10,000 of the winged beasts....and into Kruszyniamy, a tatar-muslim village. We were lucky in finding the imam at the mosque, a dour, asiatic looking though rather welcoming soul who opened the mosque, walked us up the hill to the cememtery (for Tatars from all over Poland come to be buried...it is huge, beautifully situated under linden trees).....These mongol peoples have been around the area for a long time....the village traces back to 1386....and here they sit still, unmolested by Nazi, Polish fascist, Soviet or do-gooders.
We drive north to the local big town, KRYNKI...and the little villages, mostly with wooden houses with an enormous number of huge stork nests, feel like shtetls...they WERE....a land right out of I.B. Singer, a land now of ghosts. Krynki is a spooky place. The imam told us that before the 2nd world war it had 10,000 people, 8,000 of whom were Jews. Today the synagogue building is a disused cinema with an old poster for GONE WITH THE WIND in tatters but recognizable. Back to Bialystok and a swim....
We leave in the morning to the famous synagogue town of Tykocin: it is one town where the synagogue (a slightly baroque-looking late gothic heap) is larger than the church. The Radziwill family came from around here and some of these Polish magnates apparently paid the Nazis NOT to destroy the edifice when they murdered the local Jews....so here it sits: a great building serving no purpose than to be a pilgrimage site for Israeli youth coming to Poland.
We arrived about 20 minutes early and the renitent shrew who is the director would not let us in. I had a bit of a malefic fit.....then cross country to one of the most chilling sites in Europe, the small town (it is larger than a village) of Jebwabne. Here, in total contrast to the townspeople of Sejny, a group of vigilante-Ku Klux Klan type of local farmer/trouble makers committed one of the most horrible acts in a period of horrible acts. The town had been awarded to the USSR by the Molotov Ribbentrop pact...but was almost on the border of the General Government, the part of Poland which was under German control. When the local Vigliantes heard that the Germans were attacking Russia and BEFORE the Germans got there, they rounded up over 100 of the town's Jews, herded them into a barn and set it ablaze. For many years it was assumed that the Germans had done this....for the Nazi Einsaztgruppen did such things with abandon. Only when some honest townspeople began to tell the real story did the truth come out. The story was greatly publicized all over Poland (and the world...but the world doesn't listen very closely I fear) and the story has done much to teach the Polish people of those times....I hope that the gruesome happening (a mass lynching if you will) will be a historical purgative. There is absolutely no doubt that the Polish people are becoming intensely interested in their lost Jewish fellow countrymen today. At Jebwabne (and it is far from a main road) there were scores of Poles who had come to the simple, stirring monument (including a shard of the burned barn) to pay their respects. It was somehow an intensely personal place to visit and while my reaction may be illusory I came away feeling better about Poland.
You are probably deep in sleep...but one more follows!
FRED
Bialystok (the "l" has a cross on it so the pronunciation is essentially
byaw-is-toke) was the Tsarist equivalent of German Lodz: a great textile center. The noble Braniscki family had a large palace here around which the town grew....mostly Jewish (something like 80% at the beginning of the end)....It has a wildly extravagant history.....from being Tsarist, it was for a short time at the end of WW1 the "capital" of Soviet Poland...ruled by the local biggie Red Felix Dzierzynski (who was the head of Lenin's first and perhaps most dreaded GPU-NKVD-KGB and other morphs)....his rule (he spoke to the masses from the balcony of the Branickich Palace, was replaced by that of Pilsudski, the Polish patriot from who actually mostly Lithuanian by roots from up the road......The nicest person I could find who was BORN in Bialystok was Ludwik Zamenhof the creator of ESPERANTO, which surely is one of history's most noble failures.
Polish people seem to laugh at Bialystok folk for their accents and for the fact that their city (much like Lodz) is unlovely. Unlike Lodz, it IS a backwater though it has a university. We stayed at a mammoth former state hotel which has a tropical theme park with waterslides (all inside...this is the coldest part of the whole nation) and an olympic pool. There is not much to see but we made the best of it. The ARMY Museum has THE Enigma Machine which the Polish underground found and which helped immeasurably in the Allied cause in WW2 breaking codes......There is an absolutely wrenchingly simple monument where the Great Synagogue, one of the largest in the world, was burned with, it is said, 2,000 of the religionists inside it.
Bialystok made a great base though for travels towards the Belarus Frontier. Poland and Belarus are sniping a good bit at each other. Belarus has a largely denied Polish minority (their large city of Grodno has a Polish majority) while Poland is giving its Belarus minority full rights: education, religion, etc. It is tense feeling at the actual border and one feels at the end of the earth there. We drove EAST and then on ghastly country roads, some of the only ones in Europe I can remember with no paving, through absolutely the TAIL END OF THE KNOWN EUROPEAN WORLD....past a goose collective which must have had 10,000 of the winged beasts....and into Kruszyniamy, a tatar-muslim village. We were lucky in finding the imam at the mosque, a dour, asiatic looking though rather welcoming soul who opened the mosque, walked us up the hill to the cememtery (for Tatars from all over Poland come to be buried...it is huge, beautifully situated under linden trees).....These mongol peoples have been around the area for a long time....the village traces back to 1386....and here they sit still, unmolested by Nazi, Polish fascist, Soviet or do-gooders.
We drive north to the local big town, KRYNKI...and the little villages, mostly with wooden houses with an enormous number of huge stork nests, feel like shtetls...they WERE....a land right out of I.B. Singer, a land now of ghosts. Krynki is a spooky place. The imam told us that before the 2nd world war it had 10,000 people, 8,000 of whom were Jews. Today the synagogue building is a disused cinema with an old poster for GONE WITH THE WIND in tatters but recognizable. Back to Bialystok and a swim....
We leave in the morning to the famous synagogue town of Tykocin: it is one town where the synagogue (a slightly baroque-looking late gothic heap) is larger than the church. The Radziwill family came from around here and some of these Polish magnates apparently paid the Nazis NOT to destroy the edifice when they murdered the local Jews....so here it sits: a great building serving no purpose than to be a pilgrimage site for Israeli youth coming to Poland.
We arrived about 20 minutes early and the renitent shrew who is the director would not let us in. I had a bit of a malefic fit.....then cross country to one of the most chilling sites in Europe, the small town (it is larger than a village) of Jebwabne. Here, in total contrast to the townspeople of Sejny, a group of vigilante-Ku Klux Klan type of local farmer/trouble makers committed one of the most horrible acts in a period of horrible acts. The town had been awarded to the USSR by the Molotov Ribbentrop pact...but was almost on the border of the General Government, the part of Poland which was under German control. When the local Vigliantes heard that the Germans were attacking Russia and BEFORE the Germans got there, they rounded up over 100 of the town's Jews, herded them into a barn and set it ablaze. For many years it was assumed that the Germans had done this....for the Nazi Einsaztgruppen did such things with abandon. Only when some honest townspeople began to tell the real story did the truth come out. The story was greatly publicized all over Poland (and the world...but the world doesn't listen very closely I fear) and the story has done much to teach the Polish people of those times....I hope that the gruesome happening (a mass lynching if you will) will be a historical purgative. There is absolutely no doubt that the Polish people are becoming intensely interested in their lost Jewish fellow countrymen today. At Jebwabne (and it is far from a main road) there were scores of Poles who had come to the simple, stirring monument (including a shard of the burned barn) to pay their respects. It was somehow an intensely personal place to visit and while my reaction may be illusory I came away feeling better about Poland.
You are probably deep in sleep...but one more follows!
FRED
posted by ultimatetraveler at 9:08 AM
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