Warsaw's Golden Autumn

By David Gourley

Poland effectively disappeared from the political map of Europe for well over a hundred years as a result of three successive partitions, in the late eighteenth century, when the country was carved up between its three powerful neighbours, Prussia, Russia and Austria. The Polish region of Galicia, including Krakow, thus came under the rule of the Habsburgs. This was fairly benign and Austria's Polish subjects enjoyed a good degree of autonomy. Their compatriots fared rather less well. Warsaw ended up in the Russian part, following a redrawing of boundaries at the end of the Napoleonic Wars; initially it had been placed under Prussian rule.

Our weekend in Poland was something of a bargain, spotted by Cathy in an edition of the Travel supplement of The Guardian - which, as she likes to remind me, I was on the point of throwing out! For a very reasonable amount we had three nights at Warsaw's finest hotel, The Bristol. One of our two full days was used to visit Krakow, easily reached from the capital by express train. To maximize our time, we travelled out on an early, and returned on a late, flight. Our tickets were from BA so we were a bit surprised to find ourselves flying, thanks to a partnership arrangement, with the Polish airline, LOT. The old Communist era airlines had very poor reputations but things have got better and we had no complaints.

There is, conveniently enough, a bus which runs from the airport straight to our hotel, which gives its name to the nearby bus stop. On the way in we passed Warsaw's most controversial building, the Palace of Culture, an unwanted gift from Stalin. The Bristol, which is about five minutes from the Old Town, did not disappoint. This was one of the grand hotels of Europe but closed towards the end of the Communist era. It reopened its doors in the nineties. Margaret Thatcher, no less, presided over the opening ceremony. I am no admirer myself but it must be conceded that she is widely esteemed in the former communist bloc as the "Iron Lady". Labelling her such was an own goal by the Soviets: the intended insult was relished by its recipient!

Our first objective, once we'd had lunch in the hotel's Viennese-style café, was to get our train tickets for Krakow. This proved to be something of an initiative test. We tried to explain to the rather miserable looking lady selling tickets what we wanted; a knowledge of Polish would no doubt have helped. We let other people go in front of us whilst we pondered what to do. A helpful young chap who spoke English came to our rescue. He explained to the lady what was required and tickets were duly produced. Next problem: we did not have enough cash and credit cards were not accepted (I believe they might have been had we gone to the main booking hall but we had yet to discover this, being instead in a nearby pedestrian subway where there happened to be a ticket office). Fortunately there was an ATM not far away so we soon returned with the requisite number of zloty and at last got our tickets.

We now made our way to the Palace of Culture, which is almost next door to the main station. As can be imagined this has never been greatly loved by the inhabitants of Warsaw. It was the subject of much debate after the collapse of Communism. Many would have liked to raze it the to the ground but a skyscraper is rather less easy to pull down than a statue of Lenin, say. The Palace will no doubt remain a feature of the Warsaw landscape. It is not inherently unattractive but it is of course the associations that people don't like. Fine views over the city are to be enjoyed from the top.

Our journey to Krakow the next day went smoothly. The landscape was very flat: to the east, there are no significant hills until one gets to the Urals. The lack of natural frontiers has helped make Poland a target for aggressors over the centuries. The main station in Krakow is in easy walking distance of the historic centre, reached via the Planty, the parkland which surrounds it. We took an orientation trip on a pony and trap, which introduced us to three main areas: the old Town, which is centred on Market Square; Wawel Hill, with its Cathedral and Castle; and the formerly Jewish district of Kazimierz. We felt sad as we made our way round the last of these and thought of what had once been. The area was somewhat neglected under the communists, who were not themselves wholly untainted by anti-Semitism. In recent years there has, as a result of what has been described as 'Schindler's List tourism', been a revival of interest in this area and its history. We did not see the actual Schindler factory, which is located in the next suburb further out. Many visitors to Krakow travel out to Auschwitz, some forty miles away. This can hardly be a pleasant experience but it is important that people go there for we and future generations must never forget what WW2 was really about: it was a fight against Evil.

We then had a very enjoyable afternoon wandering around Krakow and visiting such attractions as we could in the limited time available. We lunched al fresco in Market Square which is one of Europe's largest squares and is surrounded by many fine buildings. It is virtually cut in two by the huge Cloth Hall but each of the halves is still sizeable. Unlike most Polish cities, Krakow survived WW2 more or less physically intact so this is still a medieval city and one of the loveliest in Europe.

Krakow, and especially Wawel, is regarded as the spiritual heart of Poland. Because of this the Communists viewed the city with a certain amount of suspicion and in an attempt to counter its traditionalism they built a large and rather ugly new town on its outskirts, Nowa Huta. The dominant feature here is the huge steelworks, which we saw in the distance from our train. Initially the authorities refused to allow any churches to be built but eventually gave in to the popular will. One suggestion, perhaps not meant seriously, for the future of the Palace of Culture was to move it to Nowa Huta, on the basis that the two deserve each other. Krakow was of course the Pope's bishopric before he became the first non-Italian pope for centuries. Some see his elevation to the papacy as foreshadowing the demise of communism, in his own homeland and elsewhere.

On the journey back to Warsaw we fell into conversation with a fellow passenger. She was a professional lady, so relatively well-off: she told us about her recent holiday in Canada. Like, I imagine, 99% of the population she did not want the Communists back. She volunteered however that the post-communist transition had not been without its problems and many were suffering from the effects of economic hardship. We mentioned the fact that the woman who had sold us our railway tickets had looked miserable: "she's probably unhappy", she responded, "they may not pay her very much". In her view two people deserved the credit for bringing down the old regime: the Pope and Lech Walesa. I did not disagree but ventured the suggestion that Mikhail Gorbachev deserved a bit of credit too. She was not very receptive to this viewpoint. But it was after all Gorbachev who discarded the Brezhnev Doctrine, whereby the Soviets felt themselves entitled to use brute force, as in Czechoslovakia, to preserve their Empire, substituting the "Sinatra Doctrine": the erstwhile satellites were now free to "do it their way". The conversation was not all political. She told us that the time of year - it was September - is known in Poland as the "Golden Autumn".

The next day was spent exploring Warsaw. I don't think I've ever a visited a city which is so immersed in its own history. Understandably so for even by the standards of the twentieth century Warsaw has had a terrible time. In WW2 it endured five years of Nazi occupation, during which the brave but ultimately tragic uprising in the Jewish Ghetto took place. Then, in 1944, the historic centre was razed to the ground by German troops as they brutally put down the Warsaw Uprising. The resistance had anticipated that the advancing Soviet forces would liberate the city but these stayed the other side of the River Vistula from the city centre. Stalin had his own agenda for postwar Poland: its incorporation into the Soviet empire. It suited his purposes for the resistance leaders, who would have provided a focus of opposition, to be exterminated by the Nazis. We saw the large and moving Memorial to the Heroes of the Warsaw Uprising which is in two parts: one shows soldiers defending a barricade, the other showing them descending into the sewers.

Of all the Soviet Satellite states, Poland was probably the least suited to the Communist experiment. Stalin himself complained that trying to impose Communism on Poland was like trying to put a saddle onto a cow. Communist rule in Poland was never quite as harsh as elsewhere, even during the Stalin area. There was always an alternative power centre ie the Church. In due course there was a third such centre, the Solidarity trade union. In the eighties this was legalized, then banned, then relegalized. At the very end of that decade Poland became the first East Bloc country to have a non-communist Government. The Berlin Wall fell within a few weeks and the rest, as they say, is history.

The Communists are responsible for a lot of fairly dreadful architecture in Poland but they do deserve credit on one count. They meticulously restored the Old Town of Warsaw, brick by brick. Today this looks once more like a medieval city and, in common with the centre of Krakow, it is a UNESCO heritage site. A good proportion of the postcards on sale in Warsaw are of the 'before and after' type, depicting the same places in ruins in 1945 and as they are now, restored to their former beauty. Similar success was apparently achieved in Gdansk, though most other large Polish cities are, according to our guidebook, somewhat dreary with their utilitarian architecture.

Most of the morning was spent exploring the Royal Palace, on the edge of the Old Town. This too was completely destroyed at the end of WW2 but has been completely restored. After lunch, we had a very enjoyable time ambling around the Old and New Towns. We had purchased, at a very reasonable price, a ticket which allowed unlimited use of the city's very good public transport and towards the end of the afternoon we decided we'd better get more value from it. We travelled on the city's metro, which is quite new and at present comprises a single line, running south from the city centre. Then we boarded a tram and went right out to the terminus in the western suburbs.

Some might think it a bid sad to travel to the end of a tube or tram line. Naturally I don't agree and in any case I think this is rather a good way of seeing a city. Certainly we saw a very different Warsaw, the one where most Varsovians actually live, an unglamorous place of high-rise flats, though we noticed some that seemed to have been spruced up. On the way out there was the irritation of a rather badly behaved small boy, whose mother made only fitful attempts to control him. We were pleased when they alighted a couple of stops before the terminus - and dismayed when they jumped back on again at the same stop on the way back. This time however the young lad was as good as gold. What, I wondered, had been the purpose of their trek out into the suburbs - does someone there do 'quickie' personality transplants?

As we were booked onto a late afternoon flight, we had much of the following day in Warsaw as well. We used our time to visit the Wilanow Palace. This entailed another trek out into the suburbs, this time to the south of the city. This looked a rather more prosperous part of the city. Located as it is some way from the city centre, this former royal residence survived WW2 largely unscathed. Not only is the Palace itself interesting but it lies amidst some beautiful parkland. We would have appreciated more time to explore but an eye was now having to be kept on the clock.

Back in the city there was time for lunch in our hotel's Viennese-style café and a quick stroll into nearby Saxon Gardens, another of Warsaw's beautiful parks. Here there is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. An unknown victim of the defence of Lvov (then a Polish, now a Ukrainian, city) in WW1 is interred there. Various battles involving Polish soldiers are commemorated, including those fought as part of the Allied forces in WW2. There is a permanent guard, which was changed whilst we were there. It was strange to think that these soldiers were part of an Army which is now allied to us through NATO; for most of my lifetime Warsaw had, involuntarily of course, given its name to the opposing military Pact between Communist States.

Poland is hardly a country without problems. Yet its people have found freedom. The country is peaceful and democratic. Indeed it has passed the ultimate test of a democracy - both the last general elections produced changes of government. They are nowadays threatened by no other country; they are at peace with all their neighbours. It was a glorious day. Truly we were witnessing Warsaw's Golden Autumn.

First published in VISA issue 51 (summer 2003)