CAMPING
IN POLAND 2010
- SE Poland, Ukrainian border and City of Lublin:
Poland is a very big country, and leaving Ustrzyke
Górne in the far SE corner, we had already completed 1,500 miles within the
country; it felt like the trip's pivotal point. The scattered villages of this
remote region were depopulated by the 1947 forced
evacuations of Operation
Vistula in the early communist period (see last edition). Many of the beautiful
wooden churches built by the Boyk people were now either abandoned or converted
from the original Orthodox or Uniate faith to Catholic usage by the Polish
settlers implanted by the communists. Along the Wołosate valley, the wooden
church at Smolnik classically told the tragic story: built in 1791 with its 3
pyramidal domes, it served the original Boyk village of Smolnik as an Orthodox-Uniate
church (Photo 1 - Former Uniate wooden church at Smolnik);
in 1947 the people were deported to the Soviet gulag, the village demolished and
land handed over to a collective farm, and the church used as a hay barn. It was
restored in the 1970s and handed over to the Catholics of the modern village.
Only part of the original iconostasis, the screen bearing the holy icons which
divides the sanctuary from the nave in an Orthodox church, survives together
with some polychrome murals. Much effort had been devoted to restoring the
wooden church which thankfully survived the destructive communist period;
regrettably the congregation had not.
Click
on 3 regions of the map for details of South-eastern
Poland
The next wooden churches took some finding
tucked away along a minor lane close to the post WW2 Ukrainian border at the
villages of Michniowiec and Bystre, where storks were still in evidence perched
on power poles (Photo 2 - Stork on power cables at Michniowiec). The
church at Bystre with its 3 large onion-domes was totally abandoned after the
1947 deportations and now stood semi-derelict; it was indeed a sad sight (Photo 3 -
abandoned wooden church at Bystre). The village of Krościenko near to the
border-crossing into Ukraine had been home to a small community of exiled Greek
communists who had fled their home country when the West-backed right wing
government took over Greece after the brutal Civil War in 1949. This Greek
diaspora had settled across many of the East European communists countries with
one outpost here at Krościenko. By the village hall, a decaying monument in
Greek and Polish commemorated a local hero of the KKE, the Greek communist
faction (see left). We visited several more surviving wooden churches in the
region including the oldest, dating from the early 18th century, at Rownia. Set
on a hillock 200m from the road, this originally Uniate-Orthodox church was
abandoned in 1951 and restored as a Catholic church in 1975. The squat church
with its 3 cupolas was one of the most attractive we had seen (Photo
4 - 18th century Catholic wooden church at Rownia).
Sanok
is an attractive town set on the River San, and home to the Autosan bus
manufacturing plant whose distinctively shaped vehicles can be seen all over
Poland. Its more cultural attractions include an excellent skansen where
examples of SE Poland's traditional rural architecture have been gathered, and
the Sanok Icon Museum. The skansen is set amid meadows on the north bank of the
river and approached by a rickety bridge, and we spent a rewarding day examining
the preserved examples of the different styles of rural architecture from the
region's main ethnic groups, the Boyks, Lemkos and Polish peoples of the
Carpathian foothills (Photo 5 - Lemko wooden farmstead
buildings at Sanok skansen). As well as agricultural
buildings, the skansen also includes wooden churches rescued from decay after
abandonment from both the Orthodox faith (Photo 6 - Greek-Catholic wooden church at Sanok
skansen) and Catholic religion (Photo 7 - Catholic wooden church
at Sanok skansen) all beautifully preserved in a
realistic rural setting.
We
camped at the straightforward but hospitably welcoming Camping Biała Góra set on
the hilltop above the skansen, where every car crossing the rickety bridge
sounded like a drum roll. The next day we walked across to the town, pausing at
the Orthodox cathedral where mass was being chanted, and visited the Icon Museum
which is set in the town's 16th century Zamek (castle). The museum displays
Poland's largest collection of Orthodox icons rescued from Lemko and Boyk
village churches abandoned after the 1947 Vistula deportations. Most of the
Orthodox icons are from the 16~17th centuries in traditional Eastern style and
subject matter, with later ones showing the increasing influence of western
Catholicism with the founding of the Greek-Catholic Uniate Church in 1595. Many
showed the traditionally styled Orthodox Christ Pantocrator and Madonna with
Child though a number showed other saints particularly St Nicholas customarily
dressed in luxurious robes (Photos 8 & 9 -
17~18th century Pantocrator and Madonna icons at Sanok Icon Museum). It
was a unique collection and particularly pleasing that non-flash photography was
allowed.
Just beyond the Zamek, Sanok's delightful
pedestrianised Rynek (market square) provided a range of good value lunch venues
of which the Karszma with its shady terrace offered a traditional regional menu
(Photo 10 - Pavement restaurants in
Sanok's Rynek). The TIC at the corner of the Rynek was
particularly helpful, dealing with our enquiries in a friendly and efficient
manner in fluent English; if only staff in other TICs were as helpful as at
Sanok.
Crossing the Góry Słonne Hills, we followed the
San valley to Przemyśl and, after a long day, were looking forward to settling
into the town's only campsite. But disaster: when we arrived at gone 7-00pm, the
campsite no longer existed. We pulled into a car park to ask the attendant about other options.
There followed one of those serendipitous encounters where the help we received
was way beyond the call of duty: yes, he thought the campsite had closed, but
would telephone and check for us, and even produced a list of hotels in case
this would help. Our words of thanks in our limited Polish seemed inadequate for
the help he had tried quite unbidden to give us. Another 30 kms drive braving
the speed cameras brought us to Przeworsk and a rather pretentiously expensive
but mediocre campsite, but at least it was open.
On from Jarosłow across the broad agricultural
plain of the San valley where harvesters were busy at work, we reached Bełżec,
a farming village some 12 kms from the modern Ukrainian border which would be an
otherwise unremarkable place were it not for what happened here between 1942~43.
The village's very remoteness and its links on the main
eastern railway line
with Lublin and L'wów commended Bełżec to the Germans as 1 of 4 sites
for implementing Operation Reinhardt, named after Reinhart Heydrich, the
assassinated author of the Endlösung der Judenfrage (Final Solution of the
Jewish Question) - the total destruction of the entire 11 million European
Jewish population. Under Operation Reinhardt, 4 camps were built in Eastern
Poland at Bełżec, Treblinka, Majdanek and
Sobibór, explicitly designed for one single purpose, the systematic and
efficient mass murder of Jews transported by rail from the ghettos and the
seizure of all Jewish property, valuables and belongings; even their hair and
ashes were to be put to German economic usage. Responsibility for the camps'
construction was assigned by Himmler to SS police leader Odilo Globocnik who had
perfected the technology of mass murder using exhaust from diesel engines piped
into gas chambers when between 1939~42, 70,000 handicapped people were murdered
under the perverted German euthanasia programme. Operation Reinhardt marked the beginning
of the most brutal phase of Jewish genocide. Previously concentration camps had
been used for imprisonment of political opponents and for slave-labour; from now
they were specifically designed solely as killing factories. The 4 Reinhardt
camps murdered 1.5 million humans, and Jewish property valued at €500 million in
today's worth was recycled into the German economy.
Between early 1942 and November 1943, 500,000
Jews were transported in railway cattle trucks to the unloading sidings at Bełżec.
The tried and tested routine was to deceive the deportees that they were
arriving at a transit camp; SS guards in white coats gave semblance of
medical supervision to avoid uncontrollable panic; victims were forced to
undress and
their belongings and valuables taken, and women's hair shaved; they were then
forcibly marched along a narrow path between barbed wire, crammed into gas
chambers and the diesel engines switched on to deliver the lethal carbon monoxide;
this suffocating death took around 20 minutes; bodies were either thrown into
mass graves or later burnt in open pits to conceal evidence of mass murder; by
this means, a train load of 3,000 humans beings could be efficiently 'processed'
in 2 hours with systematic German thoroughness. When the death camps completed their evil
business in late 1943, attempts were made to destroy all evidence of what had
taken place here. Mass graves were exhumed and decomposing bodies burnt; camps
were razed and Ukrainian guards settled on the site to give the impression of a
farm. But local people were aware of the continuous one-way mass
transportations; news of the extermination camps was passed to the Allies by the
Polish Home Army, but nothing was done. After the war, some SS guards were tried
for war crimes but most escaped justice. No apology is made for detailing here
in matter of fact terms these inhuman facts of German systematic process of mass
murder: we believe that no sensitivities should be spared to ensure that the
world continues to remember the savagely barbarian crimes committed by Germans
on fellow human beings.
Just
beyond Bełżec railway station, the 2004 memorial can be seen spread
across the hillside where the extermination camp once stood. You approach the
camp by crossing the very rail sidings where transported Jews arrived for
extermination (Photo 11 - Railway sidings
transported 500,000 Jews to their death at Bełżec).
The memorial takes the form of piled grey clinker covering the area of the
former camp, symbolising a mass grave of the 500,000 who were murdered here (Photo 12
- Symbolic mass graves
memorial at Bełżec). A white path surrounding
the 'mass grave' is inscribed with the names of towns and cities from which Jews
were deported to their death at Bełżec, giving an emotionally charged personal feel since the list included so many of the places we had
visited, including Narol where we had stopped for lunch that day and Zamośź
where we should camp that night. There were places in Czech Republic like České Budĕjovice,
Poprad, Plzeň, Pardubice where we had spent time last year. We walked
around viewing these familiar names with an overwhelming feeling of sorrow and
seething anger; surviving trees stood as silent witnesses to the murderous
events of 1942~43. This stark and sombre memorial very effectively conveyed the
sense of utter evil of what had been so systematically contrived and committed
here by barbarous Germans - never to be forgotten or forgiven.
Another 40 kms brought us north to Zamośź
to camp at Duet Camping, just 15 minutes walk from the town's attractive central
Rynek (market square). Zamośź had been founded by the enlightened
Renaissance Chancellor Jan Zamoyski. The Polish 16th century aristocratic ruling
classes were obsessed by Italianate designs and a Paduan architect was
commissioned to create a model town with a wide piazza-style centre and
surrounded by solid defence ramparts which withstood 17th century attacks. The
town prospered as a trading centre, attracting a sizeable Jewish population.
Somehow Zamośź survived WW2 damage, but as with all other Polish towns
and cities, its entire Jewish community and many of its Polish citizens were
eliminated in the death camps; all that now remains of the once thriving Jewish
communities are their neglected and decaying cemeteries with no one now left to
care for them. The Germans erased surrounding villages and implanted German
settlers to create an Aryan bulwark against what was seen as contamination by
Jewish and Slavic untermenschen. Zamośź's Rynek is still
dominated by Zamoyski's Italianate town hall and surrounded by the
pastel-coloured frontages of wealthy Renaissance merchants' houses (Photo 13 - Renaissance Rynek and
town hall at Zamośź); it's a delightful place
to sit under the sun umbrellas and enjoy a glass or 2 of the excellent local
beer, Zwierzyniec brewed at the village close to what was Zamoyski's country
estate.
Resuming
our journey across flat agricultural countryside, we approached Hrubieszów,
Poland's most easterly town. The road on from here runs parallel with the
shallow, meandering River Bug which forms the Ukrainian frontier, creating a
small salient of Poland projecting into Ukraine. The marshy river flats
clearly provide ideal feeding grounds for storks since every village we passed
through had several occupied nests, and down in the flooded meadows flocks of
heron and storks stood feeding. The lane ended at Zosin, Poland's most easterly
settlement, and just beyond, the sign indicated the Granica Państwa (national
border) where traffic queued for the tediously lengthy process of negotiating
the crossing into Ukraine; we turned safely back into Poland to drive north
through remote border villages. The busy Route 12, rutted by constant Ukrainian
and Polish trucks, leads to Chełm, another modest and unassuming eastern
Polish town with a helpful TIC, long history and delightful Rynek. Needing
somewhere to camp near to Włodawa, we found by chance a small agroturist run by
an enterprising Pole who had spent several years driving trucks in USA to earn
money to bring up his family back home. He was one of those 'nothing was a
problem' characters who bemoaned those not prepared to work to improve their
lot, and provided a welcome place to camp behind the family home.
Our
reason for visiting this corner of Poland where the Polish, Ukrainian and
Belarusian borders meet was to visit the 2nd of the notorious Reinhardt
extermination camps near to the farming hamlet of
Sobibór. This location suited the Germans' evil intentions perfectly: buried
deep
in the birch and pine forests, its very remoteness would help conceal the crimes
against humanity to be committed here; it was served by a railway line
with
sidings by which to deliver the Jewish victims from eastern Poland but also
from France and Holland. In May 1942, mass gassing began at Sobibór using exhaust fumes from static diesel engines. At the railway sidings,
prisoners were forced from the cattle trucks which had brought them here,
stripped, shaved of their hair and hastened along the barbed wire corridor which
led to the gas chambers. The killing process continued until October 1943, and
an estimated 250,000 were murdered at
Sobibór. The camp was manned by just 30 German SS officers and 200 Ukrainian
guards, killing people in batches of 1,200. In October 1943 in an uprising of
Jewish prisoners, 300 managed to escape, but many were shot or killed in the
surrounding minefields; 50 of the escapees managed to survive the war and later
emigrated to USA or Israel. The memorial site of the camp takes some finding
hidden along an unsurfaced road through the forests, eventually leading to the
surviving railway sidings (Photo 14 - Railway sidings at Sobibór extermination camp).
A small museum describes in horrific detail the history of the camp and lists
the names and photos of both the German and Ukrainian guards responsible for the
crimes committed here. One of the names is that of
Iwan (John) Demjanjuk, the Ukrainian guard known for his sadistic brutality as
Ivan the Terrible, and extradited in 2009 from USA to stand trial in Germany. A
court in 2011 found Demjanjuk, now aged 91, guilty of complicity in the murder
of 28,000 Jews at Sobibor and sentenced him to 5 years imprisonment; he was
freed pending appeal! The sense of injustice is heightened by the fact that, despite
the clear knowledge of names and faces, few of those responsible for the Sobibór crimes have ever been brought to justice. To
contribute to public awareness, Demjanjuk's wartime portrait displayed in the Sobibór
museum is reproduced here (see right).
The memorial site of the extermination camp had
been laid out on the 60th anniversary of the uprising with a grant from the
Dutch government whose citizens constituted the 2nd largest number of Jews
murdered at Sobibór. A pathway follows the route trodden by victims from the
railway sidings along the track which, with their perverted humour, the SS had
labelled the Himmelstrasse (Road to Heaven) leading to the gas chambers.
This path was lined with moving plaques donated by families in memory of
relatives murdered at Sobibór, giving grievously personalised identity to the
otherwise anonymous 1000s of victims who had trodden this path to their death.
What was missing was any reassuring sense of justice that those responsible had themselves ever faced trial and punishment. The path led past the now empty
site of the gas chambers where only the silent forest and smell of pines
survived as witness to the crimes committed here. The memorial concludes at a
huge cinerary mound: Photo
15 shows the size of heap formed
from the cremated ashes of the 250,000 people murdered at Sobibór.
Driving back to Włodawa, we paused in the
silence of the birch forests to contemplate the implications for humanity of
what had happened at camps like Sobibór and again reflected with anger that so
many of those responsible lived out the rest of their lives unmolested when
their names and faces were known to the civilised world (Photo 16 - Birch forests near
Sobibór). The entire Włodawa Jewish population had
of course perished at Sobibór, and today a museum in the former synagogue tells
their story. In the Rynek, a huge Soviet era
memorial stands; we wondered what destruction the Red Army had inflicted in
'liberating' the town in 1944. Before leaving the following morning, we drove
along the lane which ends at the unbridged River Bug, the border with Belarus:
no border control, no guard post, nothing other than the red and white Polish
border post. Belarus seemed an unwelcoming and xenophobic place (Photo 17 -
River Bug
forming the Polish~ Belarusian border at Włodawa).
Route 82 cuts a straight westward course
through the forests leading towards Lublin, which has only one campsite, Camping
Graf Marina, in the city's SW outskirts; it's a much neglected, sad and sorry
place which makes no effort to provide information for city visits, and is
certainly no credit to eastern Poland's principal city. Despite being only
mid-August, darkness was now falling earlier by 8-00pm and there was a real
feeling of approaching autumn with the ground having a thick covering of fallen
leaves.
Along with Kraków and Warsaw, Lublin had been
one of the major Jewish centres in Poland, and after independence in 1918, Jews
had figured prominently in the city's social, political and commercial life,
their numbers forming 50% of Lublin's population. After the 1939 German
invasion, the entire Jewish population was immediately confined to the Lublin
ghetto. In 1941, a huge concentration camp was built at Majdanek in the city
suburbs, initially as a forced-labour camp housing 150,000 Polish political
prisoners and Russian POWs, and the following year, it became the focal point of
Operation Reinhardt to eliminate the entire Jewish population. In 1942, 43,000
Jews from the Lublin ghetto were murdered at Majdanek either in the gas chambers
or by execution, 18,000 of them in a single day. Majdanek was the largest
forced-labour and extermination camp in occupied Europe, sited just 4 kms from
the city centre, and 250,000 are estimated to have been murdered there. The camp
was 'liberated' by the Red Army in July 1944 and immediately taken over by the
Soviet NKVD secret police to imprison members of the Polish Home Army opposed to
Soviet occupation of Poland.
Parts
of the former Majdanek forced-labour/extermination camp have been preserved as a
memorial museum, and the first impression on visiting is the overwhelming size
of the site which extends 1km from end to end. You are greeted at the
entrance by a monstrous 1960s monumental 'sculpture' entitled Gateway to Hell
(Photo 18 - Memorial at Majdanek). Along the length of the site,
you pass barbed wire fencing, watch-towers and some of the surviving
wooden barrack huts, and at the far end you reach a domed mausoleum shaped like
a concrete flying saucer which covers a memorial mound of ashes gathered
together after the war from the cremated remains of victims (Photo
19 -
Symbolic mass grave of 250,000 victims at Majdanek). The
inscription translates as Let our fate be a warning to you. Beyond a
watch-tower and barbed wire fencing stands crematorium building where a line of
5 ovens with Germanic efficiency rendered 250,000 victims to ashes (Photo 20 - Crematorium
at Majdanek extermination camp). We
walked through this building, totally bemused at the incomprehensible scale of
inhumanity in this place. It is with no salacious intent whatsoever that we
reproduce these photos, but again to remind the world what German ingenuity
devised in WW2 to further their barbaric intentions.
Some of the surviving huts are set out as an
exhibition on the history and operation of Majdanek and the fate of its
prisoners, with moving displays of personal belongings, camp striped clothing,
the mechanics of killing and bureaucracy which obsessed the Germans whose
records now provide evidence of their crimes. Over the 2 years of the camp's
operation, 730 kg (12 tons) of human hair shaved from victims was dispatched
to German textile manufacturers for weaving into fabric and victims' cremated
ashes were sent to SS farms as fertiliser, such was the German sense of value of
human lives. The film showed at the visitor centre was starkly frank but omitted
any mention of the fact of the immediate switch to Red Army repressive usage as
a prison camp for Poles opposing the Soviet take-over before their transfer to
gulags. For more on Majdanek and the other Reinhardt death camps, visit the
Majdanek Museum web site:
Majdanek Extermination Camp Museum
The terminus for the #1 bus into Lublin city
centre is 10 minutes' walk from Graf Marina Camping. The bus dropped us right by
the Kraków Gate, the medieval entrance to the old town and iconic Lublin
landmark (Photo 21 -
Kraków Gate entrance to
Lublin old town). Opposite the Gate,
the pedestrianised Krakówskie Prsedmieście leads to Plac Litewski, a large
park where in 1569 the Lithuanian nobles are said to have encamped when here to
sign the Union of Lublin under which Poland and Lithuania merged into the
Commonwealth of the 2 nations forming the largest state in medieval Europe
under the last of the Jagełłonian kings, Sigismund August. An obelisk in the
square erected in 1826 commemorates the Union with a gilded relief showing
figures representing the 2 states shaking hands.
Back
through the Kraków Gate, you enter the compact Rynek, now filled by the
oversized Old Town Hall, an unremarkable 18th century Neo-classical pile. Far
more impressive are the sgraffito-decorated burghers' houses surrounding the
square where we sat for a beer to admire the attractive setting (Photo 22 -
Sgraffito-decorated houses in Lublin Rynek). A cobbled lane leads down
to the Grodska Gate, traditionally the northern entrance to the medieval old
town and symbolic divide between Christian Lublin and the Jewish quarter. Beyond
the Gate, a bridge leads up to Lublin Zamek (castle). The original 14th century
fortress built by King Kazimierz the Great was destroyed in the wars of the 17th
century and replaced under the 19th century Russian Tsarist occupation by the
present castle to imprison Polish nationalists from the 1830 insurrections; the
post-WW1 Polish government used it to imprison communists, the Germans in WW2
used it as a place of execution for Poles and Jews, and during the communist
era, it was used to imprison political opponents of the regime. This was a sorry
recent history for a building that in 1569 had witnessed what was perhaps
Poland's crowning moment with the signing here of the Union with
Lithuania. The castle now houses Lublin's museum and art gallery, not it must be
said the most inspiring of collections, apart from one worthy exhibit: the
monumental painting by Jan Matejko, created in 1969 to mark the 300th
anniversary of the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania, portrays King Sigismund
August presiding imperiously over the Lithuanian nobles as they swear
allegiance to the Union of Lublin treaty. What the red- coated cardinal on the
left is indicating with his 'tone it down, boys' gesture is any one's guess (Photo 23 -
1569 Union of Lublin monumental painting by Jan Matejko).
The other feature of the castle worthy of a visit
is the Chapel of the Holy Trinity, a remarkable piece of medieval artwork. In
1416~18, King Władisław II Jagiełło commissioned Orthodox artists to line all
the royal chapel's interior surfaces with frescoes, created in the
Russian-Byzantine style combining the great Eastern and Western thematic
traditions of religious art. The frescoes are composed of panels, each
created in a single day, coloured with pigmented minerals rubbed into the wet
plaster before this base of the painting dried.
The frescoes decayed over the centuries, and when the castle became a prison in
the 19th century, they were covered over with rendering. Discovered by accident
in the 1890s, they have been subjected to years of unsuccessful restoration
attempts, only finally achieved by proper environmental control in 1995. The
frescoes covering the chapel's walls, ceilings and columns follow the principles
of Byzantine iconography with panels showing God the Father, the life of
Christ and the Virgin Mary, and saints and archangels. One panel shows
Władisław Jagiełło kneeling before the Virgin, and
a dedicatory inscription in Cyrillic records the date of completion as St
Lawrence's Day 1428 by the master painter Andrej. A detailed English language
commentary gave details of the many panels, and again non-flash photography was
allowed (Photo 23 - Medieval frescoes in
Holy Trinity Chapel).
This had been an artistically rewarding couple of weeks
touring the wooden churches of SE Poland, but feelings were inevitably dominated
by the overwhelming sense of incomprehensible inhumanity we had witnessed at the
Reinhardt extermination camps and the sense of outrage that so few of those
responsible had ever been brought to justice. Next week we move on to spend time
in Poland's capital city, totally rebuilt after the savage destruction wrought
by the retreating Germans in 1944 after the brutal suppression of the Polish
Home Army's Warsaw Uprising and the earlier total extermination of the city's
Jewish population. We shall then visit the memorial site of perhaps the most
destructive of the Reinhardt extermination camps Treblinka where the Germans
murdered 800,000 human beings, and conclude the next phase of the trip in the
primeval forests of Eastern Poland's puszcza native home of the European
bison, once hunted to extinction and now successfully reintroduced and
flourishing in their wild natural habitat. It's going to be another fulfilling
couple of weeks so join us again shortly.