Mark Leonard

I entered the former Solidarity stronghold of St. Brygida’s Church just as Mass was starting, and immediately noticed the music: it wasn’t just an organ or a choir but an entire brass band that was playing up in the loft. The church was packed and I found a space to stand in the back with the other latecomers. It was Friday evening, the 31st of August, and we were there to commemorate the 27th anniversary of the Gdansk Agreement, when, among other concessions, striking shipyard workers had won the right to form the first independent trade union in the Soviet bloc: Solidarity.

A double row of union members carrying banners progressed down the aisle along with a bishop, several priests and altar servers. I was struck by the union members’ dress: while some of them wore navy blue uniforms like the band members, others simply wore clean blue coveralls or smocks and a white hardhat with the word “Solidarnosc” written in crimson letters on the side. In the pews there were more uniforms, as well as many older people wearing their faded Sunday best.

During Mass I watched the grizzled, tough looking men that held the banners in the aisle (there were a few women and younger members too) and thought about how many of them had been in the gray industrial scenes I vaguely remembered from television footage and news photos I’d seen as a child, when the Cold War was still in effect, and sometimes, before falling asleep at night, I would wonder if the world would be destroyed in a nuclear war. Listening to the emotional tone of the bishop’s homily and the music from the band, I choked up: I was in the presence of heroes, the men and women who had struck the blow that created the first crack in the communist bloc; the ones who had done so much to create the new world order, the new Europe, and the new Poland of today.

After Mass, the new Poland was in evidence as I followed the march from the church to the Plac Solidarnosc (Solidarity Square): while the union band played, we passed by kids handing out promotional flyers in front of shiny new boutiques and malls, while young Polish men and women dressed in the latest fashions walked by on their way to night out on the town.

At the Plac Solidarnosc, the shipyard cranes loomed in the background like the legs of an enormous arachnid. I have never seen them moving: the shipyards have not been able to keep up in the free market economy, even though they have been subsidized by the government, and the workforce is down to less than a fifth of what it was during their heyday. Now that Poland has entered the European Union, the Polish government has been told that the yards must be privatized. Lech Walesa, former Solidarity leader and later president of Poland, likened it to “liquidating your mother”.

The speeches at the square sounded more like political harangues than commemorations – the union has a political arm, although it is now a marginal player in Polish politics. The crowd was thin, the applause was tepid, I was hungry, and it was getting cold and dark, so I decided to leave. The last thing I saw, as the band heralded another speaker’s approach to the podium, was a group of Polish kids off to one side: one of them, wearing fashionably distressed jeans and an expensive sweater, was aping the Solidarity members, marching in time with the music while his friends pointed and laughed. Then – like others have done, in other ways – I turned away and left the union there behind me.

Sunday, August 26^th, 2007:

This morning I went to Mass at Saint Brygidy’s church, a block away from the building where I’m renting a room. The famous Gdansk shipyards are close by, and the church was a stronghold of the Solidarity movement back in the communist days — Lech Walesa regularly went to Mass there. The church has plain walls, made of brick; the inside is unfinished, with high, vaulted arches overhead.

After Mass I looked around the niches along the sides of the church: one has a memorial to a martyred Solidarity priest with red and white banners overhead: “God, Honor, Homeland”; another has some sort of reliquary made out of gold and amber; next to it there is a memorial to the thousands of victims of the Katyn massacre: black roses and barbed wire made out of wrought iron.

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Ten minutes walk to the north, the memorial to the dockworkers slain during a protest in 1970 is similarly grim: three gigantic crosses made out of distressed concrete and aluminum, rising eight stories above a mound of concrete fragments that have been mortared together again. An enormous anchor is nailed to the top of each cross. Around the base of the crosses and on a wall nearby there are black metal plaques showing scenes, names and ages: the oldest victim was 61, the youngest was 15. After a millennium of invasions and occupations by everyone from Genghis Khan to Hitler and Stalin, it’s a strong, dark brew of politics, religion and national identity here in Poland.

The first thing I noticed was a strong smell of alcohol. It was Wednesday, August 22^nd, 2007, and I had just found my seat on the train in Prague’s main station, ready to take my first European train journey. I looked over the seatback in front of me and saw that the two Russians sitting there had already finished a bottle of vodka before the train began to roll. During the next hour, they each drank a liter or more of beer; then decided it was time to get serious and went back the dining car – no need to waste all that time walking back and forth. When they got off the train four hours later, at the last stop in the Czech Republic, I saw them walking off – amazingly, with firm and purposeful strides.

Shortly after that, the Polish conductor and border police came on board. “Prosze o bilety . . . . Prosze o paszport.” My ticket was stamped with a flourish, while my American passport was glanced at with a negligent air that suggested that this bureaucratic necessity was beneath the dignity of the citizens of two brother countries such as ourselves; but some Russians who were still on the train had their passports closely examined before they were allowed to proceed, and it seemed that the conductor stamped their tickets with undue violence.

At Katowice, most of the tourists, including the remaining Russians, got off to change trains for Wroclaw or Krakow, and a bunch of Poles got on as we headed north to Warsaw. I felt like I was back home, as nearly everyone on the train looked like an American, which reminded me how many people in the States are descended from Polish immigrants. The atmosphere became more convivial, and the men seemed to make a point of offering to close or open windows, curtains, etc. for the women – something that I hadn’t noticed with the tourists. Several of the Polish men began to knock back can after can of beer, but unlike the Russians they seemed to prefer to accompany their drinking with a paperback novel instead of an argument.

In Warsaw I had to change trains, and as Gdansk was not the final destination of the next train I was taking, I had trouble finding the platform since it didn’t say “Gdansk”. In the end, I went up to a group of Polish women, pointed at my ticket and said, “Pszepraszam, gdzie to jest?” Excuse me, where is it? They seemed to think it was wonderful that a clueless foreigner who barely spoke their language had interrupted them. After checking and double-checking that I had understood them, I was satisfied that I was on the right platform – and realized that the train had rolled in and I had not been watching for my car number. In the end I found my compartment. It was too small to lay my monster duffel bag on the floor, and there was no way I was going to hoist its bulk up to the overhead rack – even if everyone had moved out of the compartment to give me enough room to do so, it would have slid off and killed us when we came to a stop. I ended up leaving it on the floor outside the compartment; then put my other bag and my laptop up on the rack, mashing someone’s feet beneath my boots as I came through the door: “pszepraszam, pszepraszam.” I sat down, sweating, and took a look around the compartment: by the window, a middle-aged man and an elderly woman, while across from me there sat a man — wearing sandals. I noticed that, beyond just the look of saintly patience on his face, he bore a strong resemblance to John Paul II during the early days of his papacy.

Shortly after that, a drinks cart came down the aisle and I was told I had to move my bag into the compartment. “Pszepraszam, pszepraszam.” I ended up standing the bag up on one end, leaning it against an empty seat between me and the Polish man by the window. I shrugged my shoulders – sorry, what can I do?

He smiled and said, “capitaliski bag”. We all laughed, then he patted it and said, “cash.” More laughter all around.

“Nie, nie,” I said, smiling and shaking my head.

“Deutsche?” he asked me. German?

“Nie, nie, jestum Amerykaninem.”

“Aaah.” Significant looks were exchanged, and suddenly I felt like part of the group. The gentleman whose feet I’d mashed turned out to speak a fair amount of English, and he said that hopefully Poles too would travel with such large bags after a few more decades of free-market economics. Then, since my bona fides had been established, all three of them joined in on a half-hour session of trashing the Germans, including impersonations of Germans ordering Polish “swine” about. Later, when they asked me about my roots, I definitely played up the Scotch and Irish, mentioning that I also had a little – just a bit — of German ancestry; I may have claimed some Polish ancestors too, just to offset the taint.

The conversation moved around to my reasons for visiting Poland. I told them that I was looking for a job, and hoped to live here for a year or two. “You don’t have a job here already?” John Paul clarified.

“No, I’m going to start looking when I get to Gdansk.”

He translated, and the man by the window said something. “He says you’re a brave man.”

Then they asked me where I was staying, if I knew which stop to get off at, and how I was getting from the station to the hotel. I told them I was taking a taxi, and they warned me not to get taken advantage of – the ride should be about 10-12 zloty, I was told. Then I asked if the station would have an ATM, as I hadn’t had time to change money in Warsaw. They were horrified, and John Paul insisted on giving me 20 zlotys. I finally accepted: “Djienkuje bardzo.” Thank you very much.

As the train rolled north, we got involved in a conversation about the highlights of Polish history (invasion after invasion, from Genghis Khan to Hitler and Stalin), then an impromptu language lesson with the day’s papers. The lesson continued when we were delayed for half an hour because the locomotive had mechanical problems: after they announced the wait for a new locomotive, a man started shouting angrily out in the corridor. John Paul helpfully pointed out a few of the choicer phrases on the “Colloquialisms” page of my phrase book.

The train continued north, and the man and woman seated by the window got off at Malbork. It was getting late, so John Paul and I dozed off. The last thing I remembered seeing before I closed my eyes was some lightning flashing off in the hazy distance.

I woke up as the train was slowing down. “Here it is,” my companion said. I grabbed my bags off the rack, struggled to put the duffel on my back, said one last “dzienkuje bardzo,” and stumbled down the passageway and off the train. Outside the station I found a taxi. The driver took me straight to my hotel and charged me exactly 10 zlotys. Just after I got inside, thunder cracked and a tremendous downpour started: the storm I’d seen earlier had caught up with me. Up in my room, I opened the window and looked outside, wondering where the stranger was getting off and if he’d make it to his home without getting soaked. Only then did I realize that I’d never learned his real name.