Some post-trip musings, as I look through the photo albums and souvenirs of my Polish Adventure…
(1) Poland is a land where old and new are colliding…hard. New houses, new apartment blocks, new roads, new offices, new shopping malls. They’re sprouting like weeds, in direct reaction to 50 years of Communist stagnation. Half a century frozen in an ideological morasss. But now? Warp speed into the 21st century, making up for lost time…with a grandeur & scale that borders on desperation.
And yet…the old Poland sits there…at times — literally — in the way. Old homes…crumbling, abandoned…the spots they occupied for up to a century or more slowly being surrounded by the encroaching, grasping fist of the hyper-active present-day. My own grandmother’s house in an example. It sits on a street where every other house is like her own…empty, damp, deteriorating…but still taking up physical…even spiritual…space. Newer, sturdier, more colourful structures go up around them, threatening to smother them out of existence. As if the overgrown plots & yards…the ever-present ghosts…aren’t doing a good enough job on their own…
It was eerie, poignant, and fascinating. The light-speed evolution of a society. Quantum leaping, everywhere I looked.
(2) In Poland, more than any other nation, history never seemed so physically THERE. Even more than England, where a thousand years of glorious Britannia continues to stand mighty and proud. Even more than Greece and Rome, where the foundations of western civilization literally expose themselves for all to see, bleached by thousands of years of sunshine. In Poland, the past is a living thing…seeping from the gothic brickwork, the cobblestone streets, the renaissance stonework. You can smell & taste it on the wind…it is all-encompassing, stiched into the fiber of buildings, monuments…even the people. The history wraps visitors in a blanket of such potent memory that it is impossible to resist. It lives, it tells its stories, and it waits (sometimes, it seems, impatiently) for the future to catch up with its vibrant, living past. Yet how can what-is-to-come live up to the sheer force of what-came-before?
(3) For a society that contains so much past glory, Poland wears a veil of immense, aching sadness. So much visceral horror…so much death…so much pure, unadulterated sorrow. How can a single country contain so much suffering? The Parititions, the Swedish Deluge, the Russians & their Soviet descendents, two World Wars, massacres, uprisings…and the Holocaust. NONE of it is dusty, book-confined memory. The walls (and wall fragments) scream out these past terrors…spitting in the face of anyone who might even momentarily entertain the notion that knowledge of such experiences should fade into the ether. Poland’s historical sorrows demand your attention…impossible to ignore…and all the better for its in-your-face attitude. An ancient graveyard, where the nightmares of humanity are writ large as never-ending lessons…and many of them include members of my own family. Perhaps this is why each and every cemetary in this nation is a necropolis of astonishing size and complexity. The dead…having contributed so much…now reside in cities of their own…constructed in gracious tribute by the living…
(4) …and yet…so much of the past glory remains JOYOUS, in spite of the aching, communal sorrow. Was there ever a more breathtaking journey than our trip to Zamosc? Through rolling fields and old-growth forests frozen in sumptuous, centuries-old glory? Was there ever anything more astounding that seeing SO MUCH medieval architecture alive in the modern-day, continuing to function as it did 600 years in the past? Was there ever anything more astonishing than wandering through a city as ancient and intact as Krakow…then following it up with Warsaw, where the ancient has been resurrected from the rubble, in what amounts to a miracle? This is a country where an age-old circulatory system continues to feed a powerful, throbbing heart…and shows no sign of social or spiritual sclerosis.
This, ladies and gentleman, is my historical homeland. I feel privileged to have been born in a country like Canada…young and fresh and so very NEW…but I’m doubly privileged to trace my ancestry back to an ANCIENT nation like Poland…where human triumph and tragedy have combined to define a society of incomparable beauty and powerful living memory. I’m incredibly fortunate to have had this experience.
