I love browsing in bookstores, especially in Poland, where I can read the titles of the books much easier than the writing inside them. Also, seemingly every Polish bookstore has a large section devoted to the literature of travel, mixing books about journeys, usually to little-known places, with those of reportage. This is the legacy of Kapuścinski, of course – the rare travel writer to have been considered for a Nobel prize – and it’s heartening to see it continues, especially for someone who comes from a country with little interest in writing about the world beyond its borders.
Poland this year was so warm and sunny – the opposite of last year – that we ate many of our meals al fresco. One evening, eating pierogis (me) and liver (Hania) in the Old Town, we got talking to the man at the neighboring table. He was an architect from Vilnius who had driven down to Warsaw – about a five-hour journey on good, EU-financed roads – to watch his son play in a soccer match. Hania asked how Poles were received in Lithuania; a friend had told us she had experienced some resentment when she'd visited Vilnius a number of years ago. The man claimed that no tension existed between the two neighbors. Then the conversation turned to the war in Ukraine.
“Now we understand,” the man said, “why there was a Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.”
In Poland last month I saw many signs of support for Ukraine - a sign in our local subway station read "We are with you" in Polish and Ukrainian - and Ukrainian flags. In Gdansk, every city bus flew a small Polish flag and a small Ukrainian flag, and in Warsaw, a souvenir stand on one of the main streets sold Ukrainian flags and toilet paper stamped with a picture of Putin’s face. As a Polish friend explained: “[There is] a strong sense of this being ‘our war,’ happening so close to our borders and – a sentiment shared by great numbers of Poles – being fought at least partially for our sake, if not in our name.”
The old saw about history repeating itself seems especially true when Russia is involved.
Forty years ago today I set off from Warsaw, with thousands of Poles, on the pilgrimage to Częstochowa. Martial law was still in effect and we walked through the capital like a liberating army. Citizens lined the streets to cheer us on, some of the older faces streaked with tears; workers in coveralls sat atop walls and gave us the V sign. As a foreigner, who had spent two and a half years in Poland, I felt a bit unworthy of the adulation, but at the same time it made me feel a part of the country as nothing else had. I walked in a kind of ecstasy.
Today marks the 78th anniversary of the start of the Warsaw Uprising - a brave and, according to many, foolhardy fight against the occupying Nazi forces during World War II. Today in Warsaw, streets are decorated with Polish flags. Writing about the country during the period of Solidarity, the New Yorker correspondent Lawrence Weschler observed that when an American says "that's history" it means it's old, unimportant, worth forgetting. When a Pole says "that's history," he observed, you see the veins in his forehead pop out.