Krakow

When I left Auschwitz, I had to double-back to Katowice, going the wrong direction – that was the only way the train would go. It seemed the place did not wish to let me go; the ticket machine was broken. I was nervous about trying to buy a ticket on the train, speaking no Polish and being generally shy and very self-conscious about always following every rule, at least when abroad. Fortunately, I had met a young Bulgarian on the tour of the camps, who was in the same boat as me, only more at home on eastern European trains, and together we made it back to Katowice. He seemed a very nice fellow, and he explained to me that he controlled the stoplights in some midwestern city (I think maybe Oklahoma City, or perhaps Omaha) from his office in Sofia – a funny reminder of how tightly interlaced our planet is today. I wish him well.

               From Katowice it was only a short ride to the east to Poland’s ancient capital, Krakow. When I arrived the city was grey, under November clouds, but as the light went out it became a place of high contrast – pitch black side streets opening onto brilliantly lit thoroughfares crowded with streetcars and buses, and lots of people walking here and there, eating street food in the subway underpasses.

               In the morning, I rose and went out, and it was a bright and sunny day. I was staying on the southeast side of the city, in Kazimierz, what had been the old Jewish quarter of the town. The first sight I saw going down the street was the Remah cemetery, quiet and overgrown with green, even in autumn.

               From there, I walked up a path that climbed the Wawel hill, the ancient castle of the kings of Poland, wrapping around it like a spiral. From the bastions, the view of the Vistula, one of the great rivers of Europe, was incredibly peaceful, and the brick towers were clomb with ivy, like some New England university.

               Inside the castle was a hodgepodge of buildings of different ages, all run together around a grassy courtyard where the garden was planted among archaeological ruins. The crowning jewel was the cathedral, and over the gate hang the famous bones of the Wawel Dragon, which have decorated the cathedral for centuries. Dragon or not, the bones themselves are quite real, and are probably the fossils of either a whale or a mammoth.

               Unfortunately I could not photograph the interior of the cathedral, a gorgeously baroque space of green marble and gilt decorations. I did climb the belfry, up ladderlike stairs squished between the gargantuan wooden trellis of the bells – and I’m glad those bells were silenced with wood beams, because they would have deafened me. Each bell was bigger than my car.

               Then I passed down into the city, past the statue of Poland’s favorite son, John Paul II, and up the many cobbled streets, past ancient churches and vendors selling tourist knick-knacks, to the great market square and its famous cloth-hall, the Sukiennice.

               There in the grand square, perhaps the greatest I had seen in Europe, a group of Ukrainians held vigil by a fountain, extolling their country’s plight, and, I presume, asking for aid (unfortunately I do not speak Polish or Ukrainian). These countries, once frequent rivals, are now knit together in solidarity. From time to time, as I wandered the square, I would hear them play music, echoing off the colorful facades, lamenting.

               Then I walked to the north end of the city, to one of its many narrow gates. The wall is beautifully intact, the towers still high and proud, and the barbican stands before the gate in the joggers’ park that was once the city moat, no longer warding but welcoming.

               Slowly, I made my way south again, past a group of vans behind the train station which seemed to be intended to help Ukrainian refugees in some way, perhaps with document processing – I could not be certain. I crossed the Vistula on a bridge flecked with frozen dancers, and there, on the south side, I stopped at two pilgrimage sites. First, the Apteka pod Orlem, a pharmacy whose owner and staff did all they could to aid the persecuted Jews in the ghetto there during the occupation. Then I went to the famous factory owned by Oskar Schindler, which served as an ark for many lives.

               At night, the great market square, the Rynek Glowny, became a place of unsurpassed beauty, as the streetlights flared off the cobblestones.