ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, September 15, 1996 TAG: 9609170048
SECTION: TRAVEL PAGE: 8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JUDITH SCHWAB SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES
MEMO: ***CORRECTION***
Published correction ran on September 18, 1996.
A caption on Sunday's travel page on Gdansk, Poland, should have said
the monument is in honor of the postal workers who defended the Polish
post office against the Nazis in 1939.
The dogs wear muzzles in Poland.
That is one of the significant impressions left from two weeks spent in Gdansk this summer as part of the 1996 NOTORO Art Symposium. Half a dozen American artists worked at the Art Academy of Gdansk, each creating at least one work of art that was shown at the end of the symposium and then left in Poland as part of the collection NOTORO is accumulating thanks to these events.
NOTORO was the ideal European experience as far as this artist was concerned. We were housed in a student pension called Angel House in the heart of the restored (from World War II German bombings) part of the historic city. Gdansk will be 1,000 years old in 1997. Accommodations were simple but clean and sufficiently private (two to a room). Food served in the dining room/restaurant was Polish and that meant fresh and plentiful. We ate like we were going to rake hay by hand, as we had seen people doing in the nearby countryside, yet some of us lost weight thanks to our daily walks to the academy, including the 74 steps to our studios, not to mention excursions to churches, markets, and a wealth of other historical sites.
But back to the dogs. It was clear that the Poles love their dogs, they seemed to be everywhere, on the streets, in restaurants, on trains. Where they were not, was in your face. These were well behaved animals walking on leashes and sometimes wearing muzzles. Although Gdansk is obviously a popular vacation spot for Poles (and quite a few Germans) with dancing in the streets some nights, those muzzles seemed to indicate an underlying sense of proper behavior reminiscent of American life in the '50s (when some American dogs wore muzzles).
Two weeks of immersion in one beautiful Baltic city with trips to the countryside left an impression of a country of hard working people who have risen from the ashes and rebuilt themselves a remarkable number of times. Postcards of the bombed cities of Gdansk and Warsaw show acres of rubble. The Poles rebuilt and restored these cities as soon as they could. They wanted their heritage back.
But they haven't forgotten the past. Hitler's world headquarters can be and is toured. It is the remains of what he called "Wolf's Lair," a secret city of bunkers that he and several thousand Germans inhabited for nearly three years. Allied forces never found the site and the Germans destroyed it themselves before retreating to Berlin at the end of the war. The remains are an eerily beautiful graveyard of concrete and twisted steel.
Unlike American historic areas, there was little information. We paid to get into the area, but outside of a model of the complex in a building and some post cards of kittens, there was little else. Tourists just walked through the forest looking and thinking their own thoughts. It is a strange place and I wondered what the Polish and German people who come there think.
Having survived wars, takeovers, and abuse for centuries, the Poles are being bombarded again. This time with Western words, sounds, and ideas. I heard more rap music in two weeks there than I heard since it was invented. Every day musicians set up in the main square to play American pop tunes for tourists and collect some coins. I thought I'd have to shoot a saxophonist who insisted on playing the Beatles "Yesterday" half again as fast as it should be played -- over and over outside my studio window. People are wearing lots of denim as well as more regular looking garb.
Both clothing and advertising use American sorts of phrases - "The American dream of ice" for an ice cream bar. Billboards advertise concerts starring Tina Turner, or Zee Zee Top. And the hair color of choice for women - as seen nightly at home on American television, is dark red. The extreme of this hue is appropriately called aubergine (French for eggplant).
As an artist I sometimes incorporate found objects in my pieces. This turned out to be a problem because Gdansk was clean as a whistle. Every morning people were sweeping the streets and washing cobblestones with a bucket and rag. Entrepreneurs picked up old cardboard for recycling. There were no idle newspapers to be had. The best I could do was a broken piece of tile from an alley, a pigeon feather and a German penny.
Just outside the beautifully rebuilt historic district people live in huge concrete apartment buildings that our hosts apologetically dismissed as "communist architecture." Although these structures were devoid of style, the residents livened them up with window boxes of flowers on the balconies and potted plants in the hallways -- clay pots of begonias and ferns as well as tomatoes. Apartments have double door systems. Going home means unlocking the front door, then unlocking the second door that is smack up against the first door.
Security seems to be a top concern, yet crime does not seem to be a problem. Car alarms chirp all day in the city. It's possible that owning a car takes so much capital that alarm systems seem a necessity.
Cars are small and Poles drive with enthusiasm. Arriving in Warsaw, we were taken by van to Gdansk, a five-hour trip. The road was two-lane with what seemed to be wide bicycle lanes on either side. When the driver got the urge to pass he started out into oncoming traffic and everyone in the vicinity just sort of scooted over into the bicycle lanes to let him squeeze through. There was no horn honking, screaming, or hand signaling. Poles don't need to wash their cars. Passing at the molecular level keeps the dirt off.
Phoning home, or anywhere can be an interesting event in Poland. Because our rooms did not have phones we had to use pay phones on the street. To do this required going to the post office and purchasing a plastic phone card with a metallic strip that was good for 17 zlotys' worth of phone time and that depended on whether you were calling cross-town or Virginia. The card is inserted into the phone, which swallows it. Once connected, a display on the phone shows the percentage of time left on the card. As soon as you run out of time or hang up, the phone spits the card out and a little boy behind you pops up and asks for the card in Polish. They said they were collecting them (the cards had different pictures on them) but I suspected a bit of entrepreneurship was budding and an unsuspecting tourist or two might have bought a used up phone card.
Gdansk displays a struggle between what must have been communist business methods and the economic opportunities of a new government. Delicatessen shop clerks insist on customers using the shopping baskets stacked by the door. This is so you won't be tempted to tuck anything away and not pay for it. Although clerks appear not to care if you come into the shop (I actually banged on a door only to be ignored), once inside, they hover closely if goods are openly displayed. If it is in cases, customers need to ask to see something. Then three or four examples are brought out for inspection. The major difference in this behavior, oddly enough was in the jewelry stores. Gdansk is to amber as Albuquerque is to turquoise. Jewelry cases were thrown open and customers invited to try things on. In some stores clerks were obviously trained in discerning what language would be best for them to speak to the customer. If English was not one of the two or three tongues at their command they quickly called the English speaking clerk to help out. The banks were a mix of the old and the new with computers and rubber stamps. Women tellers would click away at a keyboard then seize a stamp the size of a potato masher and smack some papers like they were snakes about to strike. Seemed like a satisfying way to work.
The open air market bustled everyday but especially on Saturdays. The Poles eat a lot of meat and the part of the market inside a large brick building contained many butcher shops. Outdoors there was everything - beautiful bouquets of radishes, boxes of red raspberries, strawberries and blueberries, sprigs of the ubiquitous dill and parsley used so much in the cooking, as well as the usual potatoes, beans and cabbages - we ate our weight in cabbage in the two weeks there. People sold large bunches of flowers, which shoppers carried home upside down, as well as jewel-like nosegays of roses and mixed flowers, including some flower so blue it sent something straight to the heart. There were also T-shirts, radios, wild looking socks, underwear, and shopping bags. To keep the shoes from being soiled while trying them on at an outdoor stall, the shopper is handed a piece of cardboard. That is placed on the street, the shoe on top. You stick your foot into the shoe and when you've finished, the cardboard is handed back to the vendor. Along the street leading to the market are people seated on little boxes with their wares spread in front of them on the sidewalk. These can be anything from traditional painted nested dolls to a neat row of only three or four onions.
Gdansk has many churches, only one (St. Nicholas) was not destroyed in World War II. The largest church is St. Mary's. It is the largest church in Poland and one of the largest brick churches in the world. It was built in several stages (about 1350-1502). You can pay two zloty and climb the bell tower, a spiral squeeze up 400 steps and then look down on all the other churches, the old as well as the new parts of the city, and the shipyards.
A trip to Gdansk would not be complete without a visit to the Memorial to Killed Shipyard Workers in front of Gate No. 2 of the Gdansk Shipyard. A large monument honors those killed during the worker protests in 1970. Those strikes led to the founding of the independent trade union, Solidarity. Containers of growing summer flowers are arranged in the shape of an anchor at the base of the monument. In winter evergreens take their place. This homage has the homey look of the window boxes on the apartment balconies and the potted plants in the hallways. Unlike the contracted and landscaped look of American monuments, this memorial is tended by people on their way to work.
Flowers and plants seem important in this culture. Houses in small villages have entire front yards planted in flowers. The time Americans spend cutting grass, the Poles spend tending their flowers. Cemeteries contain growing and cut summer flowers and in the evening, candles flicker on the graves like tethered fireflies. The real testaments to the Poles' need for plants are what appear to be horticultural shanty towns outside the cities. They are garden plots that are individually owned and misleadingly referred to as "allotments." Each plot is different and may contain vegetables, shrubs, flowers, even fruit trees. Almost every plot contains a small building of some sort. These range from tiny plastic tents acting as greenhouses, to small log cabins that can be used as weekend retreats. In between are tool sheds, pavilions, and little houses just big enough to sit in and have some tea; which is served hot in glasses.
Because half my family is Polish I was curious to find out if everyone would look familiar and I really wanted to buy a real Polish babushka (head scarf) like the ones I had worn as a child. Well, the scarves have either fallen out of use or are a staple of another part of the country. Only the babies wore scarves, and they were American style bandannas all tied up in the cutest way with a little topknot. As for familiar faces, apparently mine was. As soon as I stopped carrying a camera on the street, people came up and spoke to me in Polish. True, sometimes it was to ask for money, but it was in Polish.
Guess I found my roots.
LENGTH: Long : 192 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Judith Schwab. 1. The climb up 400 steps to St. Mary's,by CNBthe largest church in Poland, provides a stunning view of Gdansk. 2.
Once in rubble, the streets of Gdansk are kept sparkling clean. 3.
"Wolf's Lair" (right), Adolph Hitler's secret headquarters, was
destroyed by the Germand before the Allies found it. 3. Memorial to
Killed Shipyard Workers (below) in front of Gate No. 2 of the Gdansk
Shipyard honors those killed during the worker protests of 1970.
color. Graphic: Map. color.