Giant Dwarf vs Poland, Part IV: The Trip

And we're off.....

I'm not even sure how to write this.  Was this a life-changing trip?  I'm still not sure.  Was it worth it?  Yes, but that wasn't clear at first and my agreement with the trip's worth has been taking shape over the last few months since our return.  Poland is indeed full of ghosts, and, by extension, a bit creepy wherever you go.

When you visit Poland (if you are not there just for cheap tourism, and by cheap, I mean, WTF how can something cost this little?) you cannot not learn the history.  Poles are proud, but they've had a tumultuous history.  In the last few centuries, they've rarely had extensive periods of independence from neighboring countries, and when they have had it, it didn't go that well.  (Disclaimer:  In no way am I an accurate historian; if you want to learn more about Polish history, please do your own research.  Much of this is my take-home from touring the eastern part of the country and from the bits of history I gleaned along the way.)  In recent history, they went from being occupied by the Nazis, with large cities being razed by the Nazis, only to be replaced by Soviet occupation and the Soviet-designed buildings replacing the razed old world charm of their cities.  They had the largest number of concentration and death camps during the Holocaust, with Polish citizens practically living next door to them.  There were many Poles who helped save Jews and there were many Poles who perished at the hands of the Nazis; but the history of Jews in Poland was complicated.  You can feel that.

I don't want to completely appropriate the idea of The Trail of Tears, but I don't have a better description at this point.  By the 16th century, Poland was home to 3/4 of the world's Jews.  For those first several centuries, Jews were welcomed and sometimes invited to cities or villages to boost the economic prospects for those areas.  The town of Tykocin, where my family lived prior to moving to Bialystok, had boasted a large Jewish population.  This synagogue was built in 1642:

Tykocin Synagogue

We went to Treblinka, Auschwitz, saw remnants of the Bialystok and Warsaw ghetto uprisings, Schindler's Factory, saw plazas and train depots where Jews were rounded up and deported to camps, saw Jewish cemeteries trashed and desecrated, with new houses built over some of the gravesites, saw Jewish headstones used as paving by the Nazis, saw the site of a synagogue where 2,000 Jews were trapped inside while it was set afire and burned to the ground:  everyone inside perished.  This cannot be described as "fun" sightseeing.

Treblinka Memorial

Memorial to the synagogue in Bialystok where the Nazis trapped 2,000 people inside and burned them alive, 1941. 

Auschwitz

Jewish Cemetery in Bialystok; in disrepair and valiantly but slowly being tended to by a small group of volunteers.

After being forced into a ghetto in Krakow, this was the plaza from which thousands of Jews were deported to concentration camps.

Remah Cemetery in Krakow; these were the stones that the Nazis used to pave their roads.  The fragments that were found were built into this wall circling the cemetery after the war.

But we had moments of hope and retribution throughout the trip:  Bialystok, whose Jewish population is now a whopping 10 people, commemorated the 75th anniversary of the Bialystok Ghetto Uprising, the second largest ghetto uprising in Poland after Warsaw.  The main square of this small town had a large display, with photos taken by those meticulous Nazis as proof of the occurrence.

Then there were museums dedicated to Polish Jewry and the atrocities of the Holocaust, visited by people from all over the world.  Revivals of Jewish culture in Krakow and Warsaw were apparent, and we had the good fortune of being in Warsaw during their yearly Jewish cultural festival, the Singera Festival.

Polin Museum (History of the Jewish People in Poland), Warsaw.

See....everybody thinks it's cold in Eastern Europe (from an exhibit in the Polin Museum)

Wonderful festival of music, art and letters.....we missed the Japanese klezmer band, though....

For a more comprehensive photo journal, please see my edited photos of the trip:  https://www.instagram.com/greensweater27/?hl=en

I at first thought I wouldn’t go back.  And I’m still not sure I will, but I would if I had the chance.  I want to see Bialystok again and go to the Bialowieza Forest to see the bison.  I want to learn more about Zamenhof, who created Esperanto and was born in Bialystok.  (Esperanto is a universal language, created in the utopian hope of bringing the world together.  It is still spoken all over the world today but clearly never took root as a universal language.)  I would visit Krakow again and spend some more time just hanging out there instead of chasing down tourist spots.  I’d like to see Gdańsk.  And I’d like to bring home more Zubrowka Wodka (the Zubrowka sold in the U.S. are different, given that the coumarin in the Polish-made vodka is verboten in the good ol' U.S. of A.).

So, yes, despite my misgivings, I did enjoy this trip.  There were emotional and spiritual challenges, as well as physical ones (95 steps up to our apartment in Krakow!....my parents, you may remember, are in their 70s), but Poland's rich history and our rich history in Poland gave me a better understanding of our roots and our place in this world.  Also, there was chlodnik and sledz, so I survived the cuisine as well:

Chlodnik, aka borscht.  This was delicious, though my favorite version is still at Zeidler's Cafe at the Skirball Museum.

Sledz, aka pickled herring.  Yes, I love this stuff.  Traditionally served with a shot of wodka, which is all right by me.

Giant Dwarf vs Poland, Part III: Mental Preparation

Let’s start way back, a little more than a century ago when my great-grandparents fled persecution and pogroms, and left their native countries of what is now Poland, Lithuania, the Ukraine, and Austria and headed to the United States for promises of what would literally become a better - and safer - life.

My mother’s grandmother Florence moved here in the early part of the 20th century, with her siblings to follow.  One of her brothers returned to Bialystok and joined his parents and another sibling who had not emigrated.  They all perished in the Holocaust.

My maternal grandmother was born in 1919 and her aunt Gertrude, who was maybe only a few years older than she (we never knew her exact age) arrived in the US several years later.  Because Aunt Gertrude was the youngest of my great-grandmother’s siblings, we all grew up knowing her quite well and spending a lot of time with her.

Gertrude lived in New York City her entire adult life and never married.  She was a garment worker from an early age and was a life-long member of the ILGWU.  She lived in union co-op housing, in a tiny apartment on 28th Street and Broadway, and most of my generation remember trips to the City where we all slept in her studio apartment on the sofa bed or the floor, while Gertrude slept on her day bed.

Gertrude retained her thick Polish accent,  but, as far as I know, she never actually spoke Polish in the United States.  She was fluent and literate in Polish, Yiddish and English and wrote to mysterious relatives in the Hebrew lettering of Yiddish.  

Gertrude remained afraid of Poles her entire life, even in the melting pot of New York City.  She had a basic (and likely self-protective) mistrust and fear of non-Jews.  When I lived in the City for a few months in 1988, I initially stayed with her for a couple of weeks until I found my own housing.  When my rather obvious WASP-y friend came to meet me so I could spend the night with her and her family on the upper Westside, my aunt profusely thanked them for “taking me in” and showed undue deference to my college friend in what later seemed a proactive gesture to both protect my safety and to compliment them on being open to accepting an “other.”

So with this history, you can only imagine how NOT excited I was to go to Poland.  In my frame of reference, this is the country that drove my people out and whomever was left was murdered.  I never felt any national alliance with Poland, never felt that Poles would consider me Polish.  Only once did I think about going to Poland, during my senior year in college when I was learning about contemporary Polish theatre and thought that this was the most exciting theatre at that time.  I talked to my grandmother about this and her response was a crisp, determined "you'll go to Poland over my dead body."  (By the way, she was right....she died almost 3 years ago.)

But my mom really wanted to go and for wont of a less expensive and more appropriate birthday gift, her children were willing to indulge her.  And, to our surprise, my father agreed to go as well.

For months I would tell people that I was going to Poland and their response was always either a hesitant "ooookay....." or an outright "why?"  Hence, the first two parts of this blog post. 

I honestly didn't know how to prepare for this trip.  I thought that it would be brutally hot, but it wasn't, actually.  Maybe we got lucky, maybe I just assumed that the weather would be like the East Coast in August.  I thought we'd experience outright anti-Semitism, but we didn't.  The only hate speech we heard was from some douchebag British guy on our last night, drunkenly trying to tell us how awful America was but not quite getting to the actual reasons (which we already know anyway). 

I did expect, however, to feel haunted.  And that was definitely the case.  This was a country teeming with ghosts.

Giant Dwarf vs Poland, Part II: The Planning Stage

My brother, my mother and I are control freaks.  My mom may know that, I definitely know that, but my brother, the Golden Child, has no insight into this at all.  Which makes it so much worse.  My control issues often manifest in procrastination, which opens the door for the Queen Mother of Control Freaks, the Golden Child, to completely take over any planning for any family activity.  The worst part:  we all let him do it.

So a month or two after our birthdays, and BEFORE my vacation request gets approved, my brother calls me to tell me that there is an unbelievably cheap airfare being offered on the Polish Airlines, LOT (What?  You haven't heard of them?  Neither had we.) and that we needed to act on it now.  My brother books the flights and only then do I notice that we are going to Poland for TWO WEEKS!  Two weeks?!?  What the hell?  I thought we were only going to go to Bialystok, look for our roots and go home.  What are we going to do there for two weeks?!?

Giant Dwarf:  "Why is this trip scheduled for 2 weeks?"

Golden Child:  "Mom said she wanted to go for no less than 2 weeks."

(I know how my mom travels; rarely does she go anywhere for that length of time.  This reasoning is suspect from the beginning.)

My brothers decide that renting a van would be the best way to get around Poland.  I don't like driving in foreign countries and I told them this from the outset:  if they want to rent a van, fine, but I won't be driving.  They were good with that.....at first.

Now, at this point, it is only my parents and my brothers and I who are going on this trip.  Just 5 of us.  The Spazz has school and cannot go; my brothers' wives are busy with work (though it turns out that the Prince's wife is going to Sicily while we go to Poland).

And then I get an email from my brother telling me that his wife and his wife's brother, an airman stationed at Rammstein, are coming in a few days into our trip and that the three of them are going on a via ferrata in the Tatras.  Wait.....What?!?

At this point, I email my parents and they are as surprised as I am to hear about this.  I offer to do a side trip with them during this time to Denmark.  I've never been and one of my coworkers talked up the Tivoli Gardens, so I felt like I had to go.  My parents were not interested, though.

My mom's response:  "Well, why don't we join them on the via ferrata?"

I had to explain to her what a via ferrata was and how she and Dad and I were not in any shape to do that (by this time in our travel plan, the Prince will have already returned back to the States).  Then Mom got mad.  She emailed the Golden Child about how this is a family trip so why is he planning something we all can't participate in?

The Golden Child responds with this:  We can all stay in Zakopane and we'll be together at night.  He instructed me to look up the town, thinking that I would find it charming.

When you look up Zakopane on TripAdvisor, the majority of the photos posted are those of the creepiest wax museum I have ever seen. 

(I think you can see how this was a hard no.  If not, look it up yourself and you'll find a wax figure of Hitler and another of a woman with breasts the size of a small dwarf.  I refuse to post those photos.)

Admittedly, I was already creeped out about going to Poland at all, a place where the remainder of my European family was murdered because they were Jewish, so taking one look at Zakopane and it's rural charm made me fly into a fit of fear and I vetoed the idea on the spot (vindication side note:  my brother and his crew cut Zakopane short by one day when they got there because, after their hike, there was nothing to do).  I talked with my parents and we decided to stay in Krakow while the Golden Child and his crew split off for the White People Excursion.

I tell this to the Golden Child and he seems perturbed.  He threatens me:  "Well, then, you can't have the van in Krakow, because we'll need it."

That's a threat?  No, that's a blessing.  Take the fucking van.

The next controversy (oh, you thought that was the end?  you haven't met my family):  Bialystok.  The Prince, who had been there 20 years ago (yes, you read that right...TWENTY) told us there is nothing there so we shouldn't spend any time there.  The Golden Child schedules us for only one night in Bialystok with that reasoning.  I'll just say this again:  Bialystok is where our family is from.

I remember calling my brother to lobby for more days in Bialystok; the guidebooks talked about the town making strides to be more tourist-friendly and not only was it the birthplace of the founder of Esperanto but it was the BIRTHPLACE AND HOME OF OUR GREAT-GRANDMOTHER AND OUR BELOVED AUNT GERTRUDE.  My brother finally relented, but tried to punish me by telling me I had to book accommodations for all of us there.  Fine.  I can do that.

Do you know how much hotels cost in Bialystok?  $70 a night.  And that was a fancy hotel....with a full breakfast that was off. the. hook.

So by the beginning of summer, we had fully booked and planned the trip:  Fly in to Warsaw, go to Bialystok the next day and stay there 2 nights, go back to Warsaw to pick up the Golden Child's wife and brother-in-law, go all the way down to Krakow, then the Prince leaves us from Krakow to return to the U.S. while the Golden Child's crew goes to Zakopane, we meet back in Krakow, then we go up to Warsaw.  No guide, no tour, all us.

Now the biggest challenge for me would be to check my control freakdom at the door and try not to argue with my brother for two whole weeks.

Giant Dwarf vs Poland, Part I: How It All Began

Preface:

My family worships birthdays.  We fall lock step under my mother's command and we all try to celebrate our birthdays as a family.  As we have gotten older, we don't celebrate every birthday together (however, my parents do visit each of us on our birthdays) but milestone birthdays merit required family attendance.  Until almost a decade ago, this was easier to do, with none of us married and our group being somewhat manageable in size.  Now, through marriage and procreation, we have nearly doubled our group size so this does get to be hairy at times.  Suffice it to say, we have found myriad ways to stay together in one place, if only for a few days.

So here's how this all begins:

My mother's and my birthdays are 4 days apart and my mother is almost exactly 25 years older than I am.  This means our milestone birthdays happen together, often.  And so, a couple of years ago, I get a call from my brother, the Golden Child, with his grand plan for our double-milestone birthday.  It went something like this:

Golden Child:  "Okay, so here's what I think we should do:  you find a place where you'd like to celebrate your birthday, find an airbandb and we'll all stay there and then we'll all fly out together to Philadelphia, so Mom can celebrate her birthday there.

Giant Dwarf:  (thinking to myself how fucking miserable and cold it is in Philly at that time of year)  "Are you sure Mom wants do that?"

Golden Child:  "Yeah, she'll love it!  We can take her to the Mummer's Parade too!"

Giant Dwarf:  "Dude, it's cold there.  And the Mummer's Parade is kind of racist.  Are you sure everyone is going to be okay with this?" (Here I am fervently hoping my sister-in-law has run interference on this terrible idea.)

Golden Child:  "Nah, everyone's on board.  Let me know where you are thinking of celebrating your birthday.....maybe we can stay at that place in the Palisades where we stayed during your wedding."  (Yeesh, who made HIM the boss of me?...this causes me to think about Hawai'i as a birthday destination.)

Great.  Now we have to plan some elaborate double trip that I'm not even sure I want to do.  I know these birthdays are big deals for me and my mom, but now I'm feeling pressured.

Fast-forward to:

Milestone Birthdays: T minus 8 months

We're all together in Phoenix, sitting around a table waiting for my parents to arrive.  The Golden Child makes this announcement:  "Okay, we're going to scrap the Philly idea for Mom's birthday."

I am overjoyed.  I love Philly, but not in the dead of winter, when most of the people we know there are in Florida or the Caribbean.

Golden Child:  "We're going to Poland instead.  Mom really wants to go to Poland and trace our roots."

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?  Can we put the Philly idea back on the table?

Giant Dwarf:  "So, wait.....you'd rather go to Poland in December?"

Golden Child:  "Of course not.  It'll probably be in the summer, when we can all get time off."

Giant Dwarf:  "I remember Mommom saying that we should never set foot in Poland.  Are you sure Mom really wants to go?"

(I'd like to add here that our youngest brother, The Prince, has not expressed any opinion.  And he is the only one at the table who has actually been to Poland before.)

Golden Child:  "Yeah, Mom wants to go.  She'll love this trip."

Now, since The Prince is saying nothing, I can't say anything because anything I say will be used against me in any family squabble in the future so I keep my mouth shut and hope that the Golden Child is experiencing a complete lapse in sanity and will come to his senses as soon as possible.

I was wrong.

At my mom's birthday party, we present her with a giant airline ticket to Poland.  She is beside herself with joy, actually weeping, which is a total rarity in my family.

We're fucking going to Poland.