Krakow

The great thing about our train trip to Krakow from Warsaw (about 3 ½ hours) is that it was on a really old fashioned train. Nothing whatsoever fancy; washroom as basic and unsightly as could be imagined; BUT: the car had separate compartments – a long narrow aisle along one side and compartments with glass doors that shut on the other. In theory each should hold eight people, sitting four to a side on the provided upholstered bench; luggage overhead on two racks/side. There were not a lot of people on board and since most were young, Polish-speaking kids, I figured they wouldn’t be keen to share with us. Right. And so I had an entire padded bench to myself to stretch out on and sleep much of the way here. It was quite heavenly.

Old Town Krakow is a world heritage site because of its preserved medieval character. It sustained little damage in the war, unlike Warsaw which was gratuitously pulverized by the Germans. We took a taxi to our hotel situated right around the corner from the enormous main square. I ought to have been, but was not alerted by its name: Antique Apartments. There is no elevator. It is a holdover from prehistoric times. What is more our room is on the 5^th floor – in Canadian terms that is the 6^th because Europeans call the ground floor zero. There are 26 steps per flight. That is a staggering 130 steps in total each time we brave the climb. We are really in the garret; it has that feel to it. But we are comfortable.

I had read of the beauty of the Old Town and must admit that it is quite spectacular. It is the largest medieval main square in Europe, I heard a young man tell his tour group. St Peter’s and St Mark’s are larger but they are 17^th century, not medieval. It is quite cold here right now, possibly as low as 10C degrees when we were walking about, but we enjoyed the sights and had some supper in the impressively high-ceilinged basement of one of the many restaurants on the square. Lots of people were sitting out at tables on the square enjoying their repasts despite the cold and the wind.

Tomorrow morning we will meet with another tour guide – Jakub – who will give us a 4-5 hour tour of Jewish Krakow. The next afternoon we will go on a group tour to Auschwitz/Birchenau. Oscar Schindler’s ceramic factory was here in Krakow. Since Spielberg made his movie about him in 1993, the site has been turned into a memorial, not just of Schindler, but of the history of the war and the Holocaust. We hope to visit it as well while we are here.

While travelling I have been reading Primo Levi’s last book, The Drowned and the Saved. He considers various realities of “Lager” existence within the whole context of Nazi aggression against those whom they marked as subhuman or in some fashion dangerous to their aims. “Lager” is the German word for camp. Writing of the trauma of the entry into the Lager, he recognizes that its brutality was a deliberately employed ritual used to annihilate the individual’s sense of personal dignity and to reduce him or her to a primitive state, shattering any germ of resistance. The entrance to the world of the Lager was marked by immediate kicks and blows, often in the face, a barrage of shouted orders, being stripped naked and having all bodily hair shaved, and then outfitted in rags, deliberately chosen to be too large or too small. The desire to find sympathetic co-prisoners was thwarted by Lager conditions that reduced most to sealed-off monads engaged in hidden and continuous struggles simply to survive.

Levi discards any notion of the “bad” guards and the “good” prisoners. The lived reality was far more complex. Levi insists that “It is naïve, absurd and historically false to believe that an infernal system such as National Socialism was, sanctifies its victims: on the contrary, it degrades them, it makes them similar to itself, and this all the more possible when they are available, blank, and lack a political or moral armature.” As in prisons or closed systems everywhere basic, base, one might say, elements rule the day. One thinks of The Lord of the Flies. “Privileged” prisoners, those who found ways to supplement the starvation diet of the Lager, though in the minority, were proportionately higher among survivors. Levi calls the moral ambiguity created by the imperative to live “the grey zone.” He distinguishes between the criminal activities of the system and its henchmen and those of the prisoners themselves. The latter he refuses to judge, knowing well the exact conditions of their quest for survival.