Sunday 22nd June: Krakow to Jablonec

A full day’s drive took us from Krakow to Jablonec, which stands 30 miles into the Czech Republic on the edge of the Jizera Mountains. These aren’t high peaks, more rolling, wooded hills with farms and villages, a favourite haunt of cyclists and walkers, and with some skiing in winter.

We are here in Jablonec because the town and its surrounding area is the most important centre in Europe for production of costume jewellery components. That is, the locality manufactures glass beads and items used with beads to make costume jewellery. As beading is Jane’s main hobby, we are here on a mission.

Production began in the 16^th century when Saxon glassmakers, from what is now Germany, began settling in the area. By the 19^th century the industry had brought such wealth to the area that many people were living in elaborate, large houses and the town sported many splendid public buildings.

At the end of the last war, the Communist dispossessed all the descendants of the original German settlers of their homes and factories, and expelled them, 100,000 in total. This was disastrous for the industry, but forced labour was brought in and some of the former trade gradually recovered. Many of the fine homes and buildings are now in decay or just shabby, but where they have been preserved and restored you get a good idea of how affluent the area was. This is the theatre, for example.

The central square also showcases the elegant lifestyle of the glass and jewellery entrepreneurs. A museum dedicated to the industry is located just off the back of the square.

The museum is where we’re going next. We’ll start with some amazing beadwork in the shape of a full size flower basket.

The collection is huge and I can only pick out a few examples, with Jane’s help, from the range. These are made from beads of jet.

This is an early beaded pen. Note that it’s a quill pen. I have a modern one done by Jane.

It’s the glitzy stuff that catches the eye, not practical at all for wear or use. This display looks like the Crown Jewels.

On the theme of impracticality, this is the longest necklace in the world and is in the Guinness Book of Records. It’s 220 metres long and was made by local art students in 4 hours. From a craft quality standpoint it has little merit.

The next exhibit is a much more wearable and beautiful creation, and just what a skilled beader might want to make.

 Some factories produced glassware as well as beads and here we have a superbly engraved glass from about 100 year ago.

More modern products were also displayed, for instance this designer vase, and underneath some intricate and delicate glass flowers.

These days production comes from large factories, but there is still some of the cottage industry that it started out as. The next photo shows a typical glass producer’s dwelling. The work was carried out in the attic room, and you can see a large vent in the centre of the roof to extract the large amount of heat generated, and the tall pair of chimneys to draw the fires for the glass making and shaping process.

Below is a model of the modern Preciosa Bead Factory, and it’s made from 200,000 beads. The little electric train and trucks are also beaded and run round the building on pressing a button.

I stop at a final exhibit. It looks to my untrained eye like a beaded bikini. I can only hope that they used strong thread.

We’ve also been to several bead shops out of the many here. The product ranges were large and the prices cheap with good but not top quality beads apart from Swarovski beads but these weren’t much cheaper than back in the UK. Our visit here was interesting and unusual compared to tripperland, but we’ll put that right in the next blog- we’re heading for Prague, one of Europe's most popular tourist destinations.

June 21st: The Polish Aviation Museum

Poland had a thriving aircraft industry before the last war and also a well-trained air force, although their front line fighter planes were no match for Hitler’s blitzkrieg attach in September 1939. 11,000 Polish airmen subsequently made their way to the UK where they flew with distinction during the Battle of Britain. Flying our modern Hurricanes and Spitfires they could fight the Luftwaffe on even terms which did very successfully.

There’s a Spitfire here to commemorate this significant Polish contribution, but the predominant number of exhibits is from the Communist period. This was of great interest because some of these planes are rare or non-existent in the UK.

The soviet aircraft show starts in the car park, before we even enter the museum, where several dilapidated MIG fighter air frames have been dumped. This one looks like it’s just burst through the hedge and landed on the car. Note the high-tec binbag protective cover.

The museum entrance is solid and rather forbidding in typical Communist style. 

 There were a staggering number of MIG fighters of all types on show within the museum. Jane looks as if she’s wandering around a used car lot trying to decide which one to buy. I think she’ll go for the one with the red nose. It will look nice in the front garden and much more classy than a garden gnome.

The one below is a German Junkers used as a transport before, during the war and after. This particular plane was operated by the French until 1960, then it went to the Portugese Air Force until 1973 when it was donated to Duxford, Cambs. It was restored there and sold to the Polish museum in 2012. Unbelievably, I would have see this actual aircraft in Duxford.

 This one is a real oddity: the only crop spraying aircraft ever made to be powered by a jet engine. Its quirky name suits it, the Belphegor. You can see the chemical tanks joining the two wings.

The Pope’s helicopter. The Poles still adore their local lad who reached the top even though he died in 2005. Images of Pope John Paul II are seen on hoardings and buildings everywhere; he was born not far from Krakow and lived in the city when he was a cardinal. Maybe it’s no bad thing to have a hero that isn’t a football star/popstar/filmstar.

 How would you fancy flying one of these? It’s a Polish training glider from the 1950’s. Interesting point- there’s no cockpit, in fact nothing much at all. You are sitting on a wooden seat fixed to a narrow wooden strut. You’re presumably strapped in, with some basic controls, but it's completely open to the elements: it looks like a self-assembly kit with half the parts missing.  

This was the top Soviet fighter, a MIG 29. Top speed 1,500 mph. East Germany kept their MIG 29’s when Germany united in the late 80’s, and in 2002 they sold them to Poland – for 1 Euro each, because they needed major overhauls. The example here was operational until 2007 when it was retired to the museum. We weren’t told for how much the museum paid for it; perhaps they didn’t want to admit they’d paid over the odds and parted with 2 Euros.

Last picture is what the pilot of the MIG 29 would have needed to wear. It’s a G-suit that inflates on tight turns to stop him blacking out . It looks vaguely spooky, the sort of thing perhaps issued to a skeleton crew.

It was an interesting museum, especially so because many information boards were in English as well as Polish. However, it was sad that most of the open air exhibits were noticeably decaying. On the other hand,  I don’t suppose the country can afford costly preservation for these aircraft with so many other demands on public funds and especially so in times of recession. 

Wed 18th June: Ojcow Park

Ojcow is the smallest of Poland’s national parks and is only 20 miles from Krakow. It’s basically a gorge running through small hills providing a network of footpaths through mixed woodlands. This is the typical sort of scenery, not spectacular but very pleasant.

You see so much more walking than driving; Jane’s discovered here some unusual large trumpet shaped fungus. So if you know of a trumpeter that’s looking for his fungus, we know where they are.

There’s a chapel with a strange story in the park: the Chapel on the Water. This part of Poland was controlled by the Russian Tsar at the end of the 19^th and early 20^th century. The Tsar wanted to limit the influence of the Catholic Church and decreed that “no religious structure should be built on solid ground”. So in 1905 the Poles built their chapel here “on the water” i.e. not on solid ground. Let’s hope the Tsar had a sense of humour.

We had local food for lunch, veal goulash with potato cakes, and meat filled dumplings, again at bargain prices. These were very tasty and seemed to use good quality meat, always a concern with cheap prices and unfamiliar dishes.  

There was more to the park than we had time or energy for, a ruined castle for instance, but we were pleased to have a day out in the country after so many city and high volume tourist places.

Krakow

Krakow was the capital of Poland and the seat of government for 500 years up to 1596. It was the only Polish city to have come through WW2 mainly unscathed so is able to present us with a beautiful and original Old Town.

The central square is the focal point where the Sukiennice, the medieval Cloth Hall, dominates the middle. There are shops and cafes through the arcade arches you can see, with a central mall of stalls selling a variety of reasonable quality tourist goods.

 On the opposite side of the Cloth Hall are the towers of the Mariacki church (St Mary’s). The taller, left-hand tower was used as a lookout station. Legend has it that a watchman spotted a Tartar raid approaching and put his bugle to his lips to signal the alert, at which point an arrow pierced his throat. Since that time, each day on the hour, a lone trumpeter plays the missing bugle call from the top of the same tower. He repeats it four times, once from each direction. He’s probably also been issued with an arrow-proof  vest.

The church itself is described as one of the finest medieval churches in Poland. Inside, the alter is a masterpiece by German carver Stoss. The whole church, but his work in particular, is awe-inspiring.

The Town Hall Tower is all that’s left of the 14^th century town hall pulled down in 1820. A pair of lions guards the entrance. The right-hand one is wearing an Ena Sharples hair-net and looks totally bored. There’s got to be more to life than watching tourists.

 Walking from the central square to Castle Hill, called the Wawel, we pass many elegant buildings and smaller squares. Some were designed by brought-in Italian experts. We could have been back in Italy where we spent the winter. They do good ice-creams here too, just like the Italians. Mama Mia! (In Polish).

The Wawel was the seat of government when Krakow was the capital.  It comprises a castle, administrative buildings, museums  and a cathedral that contains the remains of nearly all the Polish kings.  We went in the cathedral- no photos allowed- and then walked around the courtyard and garden area. All beautifully preserved and nicely presented. This is the cathedral from the gardens.

South of the Old Town is the Jewish Quarter, the Kazimierz. We explored this on an organised walking tour with a guide. The Jews first came to Krakow in the 11^th century and their numbers had risen to 25% of the total population by the eve of the last war, around 65,000. Some came back after the war to try and restart their businesses but found Communism hostile. A single one has succeeded in reopening the family business, and that since Polish independence in 1988.  

The original name is etched in the stonework under the top row of windows and is the same as the garish modern sign. Difficult (impossible?) to see in the small blog photo. The shop is the same business, painting and decorating, and It has to be said that their building might benefit from a pot or two of what they sell. 

Schindler’s List was filmed in Kazimierz and we saw several of the locations used. Schindler’s factory was actually close by and was in production until 2004 as an electronics factory. It’s now a museum associated with Krakow Jews in WW2 and was included in our tour. It’s difficult to move away from the tragedy of 1939 to 45, but that was the subject of the Auschwitz blog.

Our guide was a mine of information. The Jews and Catholics integrated well and helped each other- the Jews even provided funds for the upkeep of Corpus Christi church! The Jews also believed in keeping to the city rules however arbitrary, for example that their synagogues should not exceed any Catholic church in height. Guess how they got round it in building the synagogue below.

Where there’s a will there’s a way: they excavated the floor to get the extra metre of internal height they wanted.

We also went inside a synagogue and Jewish cemetery where the guide explained the details of their religious practices. It was a very different and interesting tour. 

Friday 13th: Auschwitz/Birkenau

In the Western World the Jewish holocaust represents the most extreme and reprehensible war crime ever committed. Exact numbers do not exist, but a minimum of 6 million people, mainly but not exclusively Jews, were systematically exterminated by the Nazi regime during WW2. Most of these killings took place within their network of concentration camps.  Auschwitz/Birkenau was the most productive of these, accounting for some 1.5 to 2 million deaths.

Having read some of this background beforehand, what do you expect this place of evil deeds to look like? We followed our guide into Auschwitz camp, through the gates with the infamous wrought iron inscription “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work Brings Freedom).

It doesn't look too bad, does it? A few blocks in, we turn right. Another view: it could be a 1960’s housing estate. Explanation: it wasn’t built as a concentration camp, but as a Polish army barracks in the 1930’s. It was commandeered in 1939 for use as a prison for opponents of the Nazi regime and for potential slave labour. This is that ‘down your street’ photo.

In a way, its ordinariness makes it more sinister. From early 1940, with the appointment of enthusiastic commandant Rudolf Hoss, the camp started taking in numbers of Poles and other ethnic groups; also Russian prisoners of war after June 1941. The regime was harsh and many died from beatings, overwork and undernourishment both in the camp and at their allotted slave workplaces.

There was a punishment block, Block 11, where summary justice was administered and where infringers from outside the camp were also brought to be tried. The verdict was almost invariably death, and they were shot against this wall. The total was in thousands. Dreadful punishments were also administered often with the same final result.

Block 11 also saw the trial of the use of Zyklon B (cyanide) gas as a killing agent in September 1941. It was used on 250 Polish political prisoners and 800 Russian POWs. After the war the empty gas canisters were discovered. It makes a chilling display.

There were so many Russian POWs by the summer of 1941 that it was decided to construct a further camp next to Auschwitz. This was Birkenau.

A conference of top Nazis in Jan 1942 decided that all the Jews in German occupied territories should be exterminated. A number had died already in ghettos and from random persecution, but this time it would be systematic deportation to specially appointed camps for elimination on an industrial scale.

One gas chamber only remains intact, at Auschwitz, because it was converted into a bomb shelter when production-line extermination work was transferred to Birkenau. The four Birkenau gas chambers were all destroyed.

This is the remaining one: the Zyklon B gas was administered through vents in the roof.

The crematorium was next to the gas chamber for efficient disposal of the unfortunate victims’ bodies.

At the new Birkenau camp the deportees were brought by rail directly into the camp. The tracks are still there. They came in sealed cattle trucks often for hundreds of miles, travelling without food, water or sanitation.

A photo taken at the time shows the de-training process. There was no panic for the people arriving  believed they were being resettled into work camps. In fact they were screened on this very platform by Nazi doctors as to their fitness for slave labour. About 25% were passed and the rest were directed straight to the ‘cleansing house’. This was a big room made to look like a shower block, but was in fact a gas chamber. The doors were locked. Nobody survived: up to 2,000 perished in each batch.

 The victims had been encouraged to take their portable valuables. These were now sorted by the slave workforce, even hair was cut off and gold teeth removed before the bodies were cremated. We were shown literally mountains of shoes, suitcases and human hair but were asked not to take photographs out of respect.

The slave workers were housed in wooden or brick huts at Birkenau. These were nothing like so well appointed as the Auschwitz ex-barracks. Up to 90.000 at any one time were accommodated. They slept on three-tiered bunks, about 7 or 8 to each compartment. With flimsy clothes and poor heating in minus 20 degree winters, starvation rations and constant brutality, the mortality rate was high.

The camp was liberated by the Russians in January 1945. Only 7,000 prisoners remained; the rest had been marched out to walk west towards Germany just beforehand. It was the coldest winter in living memory: few survived.

This mass genocide is often thought of a crime exclusively against the Jewish race. They were indeed the principal victims; for example 95% of Poland’s Jews were exterminated. But we should not forget that many other peoples suffered. The known, but understated, role-call for Auschwitz/Birkenau is shown below.

Our visit was a sobering experience. It’s an excellent idea to get people of all ages to understand what happened in these dreadful places in the hope that it may modify our treatment of other human beings in the future. 

June 9th: to Krakow

To get from Budapest to Krakow by the most direct route means crossing the full width of Slovakia. This was a surprisingly pleasant journey, on normal roads rather than motorways. The countryside was green and gently undulating to start, getting steeper and more picturesque as we crossed into Poland through the lower slopes of the Tatra Mountains.

Krakow itself was little more than an hour from the Polish border and we found our campsite quite easily.

Our first trip out was to the salt mine at Wieliczka near Krakow. The photo shows a typical underground passage from the total of 300 kilometres of galleries on several levels excavated in over 500 years of mining. The two hour guided tour of course covers only a small fraction.

You read that Stalin sent political prisoners to the salt mines, so it could be expected to be a terrible place to work. Not so; the galleries were wide and the salty atmosphere healthy. The wooden props are perfectly preserved by salt so don’t rot and become unreliable. Compared to coal mining, it’s much more pleasant, and here in Poland it was reckoned to be a good, well paid job.

But there were dangers from methane gas as in coal mines. Below is a reconstruction of how they dealt with it, by igniting the gas near the roof where it collected. This could itself cause a damaging explosion if the pocket of gas was bigger than expected. We were told that such an even happened in this very cavern, as evidenced by the still blackened roof.

The salt was shaped into cylindrical rolls weighing around one tonne and dragged or winched to an assembly point before being hauled to the surface. The reconstruction here shows a worker dragging a cart of salt, called a dog because of the noise it made. The guy looks like he’s wearing a space suit from a 1950’s sci-fi film about mining on Mars.

The mine has a unique feature: a church carved out of salt in a huge cavern. A few photos will illustrate but can’t really convey its size. The first is the pulpit.

Next, a copy in relief of Leonardo’s The Last Supper, size about 12ft by 6ft.

These chandeliers are also made of salt, approx. 6 ft across.

I always thought rock salt was too soft a material for carving but the guide said it’s as hard as marble and hard work to excavate. So watch out you don’t lose a filling with your fish and chips.

The next photo, near the end of the tour, shows a small underground lake where tourism in the mines first began. The plaque says early 19^th century. The visitors, wealthy, prominent people, were ferried down the tunnel to disembark in a grotto. One day one of the boats capsized trapping the occupants underneath. Because of the very high salt content of the water they could not dive out from under the boat and suffocated when the oxygen ran out. So the trips stopped and tourism went into mothballs until recent times.

The usable space in the mine is vast. There are shops, a cinema, a health farm- even a concert hall. We had lunch down there too in the big cafeteria where you would perhaps expect pay higher prices, but was actually very reasonable, for example tomato soup + roll was the equivalent of £1.20.

We had climbed down to a depth of about 150 metres on wooden steps at the start and during the tour, but at the end gratefully returned to the surface in a small cramped lift.

It was an unusual and informative trip, and certainly well worth its salt.