Below is an attempt to ramble on a bit about my visit to Poland last year. It’s not very lucid, and there’s a hell of a lot more that I did & saw that hasn’t made it to the finaly typed/made sense of stage yet, so bear with me.
Stutthof
I want to be back in Poland. Gdansk, big old city (a thousand years old if it’s a day) of brick and steel and concrete and mammoth Soviet-style flat blocks, ones with gaudy tacky but warm and cheery rooms that smell like fruit vodka and pickled herring and cabbage stew, colossal tombs of socialism in this land with strange rattly lifts that seem to me to be more dangerous than taking the stairs. It is always sunny in Poland, I have decided, and everything is in pastel colors. Nothing here is deep dark Red or bright strong Blue- there is no piercing Black or deafening White. Everything comes in muted and creamy pastel colors.
Seems that I usually work up the nerve to go somewhere every spring. I have two or three weeks off then anyway, times when there aren’t even any classes to skip, and the end of the year is close enough so I can spend what little money I have left on a cut-rate airplane ticket to a place yet unknown. Poland was my friend Marta’s idea, mostly because she wanted me to see where she lived and I could stay in the living room of the flat she and her mother lived in. So, pressing into my purple leather seat in an airplane full of Polish people, I leave Glasgow at midnight…
It is cold after visiting the concentration camp’s remnants at Stutthof, even though the sun is shining. Marta’s mother is a bit of a history buff, and has shown me all around Gdansk, a castle a few hours out of the city and now this, Stutthof. Strangely enough I can’t feel horror while walking from room to room, trying as hard as I can to recreate the evils enacted here some 50 years ago. When I make my way to the gas chamber though, and the crematorium though, everything stops. Here are those Blacks and Whites, Reds and Blues. Nothing is right, and everything is topsy turvy. The silence is maddening and I swear I can smell gas. I have nightmares.
How kind people are in this world, though. I am taken into a good friends house and put up on the luxury of a fold-out couch (I sleep like a rock for about 9 hours a night), waking up each day to that pastel sun fresh air on the balcony and breakfast. The Poles do a lot of things right; it is not uncommon for men to sport moustaches, they have this lighthearted sarcastic air about them, and they take breakfast seriously. In the UK one gets a trough of greasy potatos, slimy beans, tomatos, and some meat pressed into the form of sausages. I love that breakfast, but in Poland they do it better. Rolls, butter, ham, cheese, salads (salads?), pickled herring (a newfound delecacy), juice, fruit, coffee, pretty much anything and everything laid out on the table for you to pick up with your hands and eat until you’re fuller than full. There will be food left over.
After we leave the camp (wreathed in that endless sunlight, set in a idyllic forest that hides something we can never forget no matter how much we want to), we go to the seashore of the Baltic sea and have waffles. Even the candied strawberry goop coating mine seems to have lost its deep red hue (red of course being the color of passion and, naturally, blood) and has mixed with the whipped cream to become a kind of pink, a warm valentine’s “I love you” pink. Perhaps a more astute or Awake person could laugh at this, or cry. But I do neither and instead look out to sea.
