Pages from a 50-year old photo album, seeing the light of day for the first time in a while. It wasn’t easy taking pictures back then, the not insignificant expense of getting them developed, realizing only long after they were taken how you might have improved them, disincentivized to take very many. It looks like I took 3 photos each in Warsaw and Kraków.
I was starting out from Warszawa. I bought one last bunch of grapes and started hopping trams for the outskirts of town. I had to transfer twice to reach the terminus on the road to Kraków. After about 45 minutes, I got down at the last stop with the word “Kraków'' chalked across my guitar case, a little apprehensive about my first time hitching behind the Iron Curtain. I had reached Warsawa on an Intourist arranged train ticket from Moscow, one of the conditions of my visa there, and this would be my first foray outside the capital.
I had heard that I was supposed to wag my hand up and down to solicit a ride, which turned out to be the correct procedure. However I stood there for over 30 minutes watching some of the most unconcerned drivers I had ever seen whiz past me. I had seen many horse-drawn wagons in Warsaw but here on the highway there was a constant procession in the slow lane. One of the waggoneers shouted back at me as he lumbered by. From his gestures, he seemed to be telling me to take a bus.
I took his advice. I wasn't sure I was in a good spot. I caught a bus at random, showing my sign to the passengers, who motioned for me to hop on. It cost me two zlotys to go a little further out the road. Back then a zloty was worth about 3 US cents.
Once outside the city of Warsaw, Poland began to take on a new aura. I was let out in a small hamlet at the border of a town surrounded by green farmland. There was a little tree shaded square alongside of which ran the highway, with its steady caravan of wooden carts piled high with coal or wood or produce driven by men dressed in black, with black berets, puffing occasional clouds of grey smoke from cigarettes, which they rolled at leisure as they plodded along.
I walked on out the highway trying to flag down cars. It didn't look too encouraging. The cars were few, each was over-crowded, and most of the gestures I got in response to my flagging seemed belligerent.
Finally I came to a fork in the road with signs pointing to Kraków and Katowice. I took the proper road and doffed my pack just beyond the intersection. About 15 minutes later a Polish van pulled to a stop behind a horse cart that had happened by at the time. “Kraków?” I asked the driver, as he motioned me to put my things in the back. “Kraków,” he replied. I smiled jubilantly to myself as I climbed aboard.
The man didn't speak English, so I went down my list of languages in which I could communicate. He spoke a little German, he said.
He offered me a cigarette and I accepted. I settled back comfortably for the ride which I thought should take about 4 hours. It was almost 2 o’clock at that time.
After a while we came to a little town. It appeared just like an old Mexican village populated with Frenchmen, if one can imagine the combination, or perhaps it was like a small French village. Somewhere, time had stood still for these simple people. We passed quickly through the village. At the edge of town there was a lady with her boy flagging down traffic. My driver pulled over and picked her up.
When she got off in the next town, she left him 10 zlotys. This man picked up several people in this way, and all of them paid him ten or fifteen zlotys. Later, he explained to me that these people flag down traffic rather than take the bus, which was slow. They paid a little more but they went in greater comfort with him. It was illegal for him to carry passengers in the back of his van, though I was legally riding in the front. After several passengers he had a nice pile of coins on his dashboard.
His name was Stanislav. His German was as bad as mine, which made it easy for us to talk to each other, since our vocabularies were about the same. He was paternally friendly, eager to talk to me. After we passed Radom, a smoke-belching factory city, he offered me an apple.
It was slow going on the highway because there were so many horse-drawn wagons on the road, often tying up the only lane in our direction. We passed houses of rustic simplicity, populated by peasants of a stock that had all but disappeared from Western Europe, such as the woman who sat beside the road with a bundle of freshly collected colored leaves forming a giant halo about her scarved head. We passed all this on the highway traveling over cobblestones in the bucolic villages themselves, underneath church spires and time-worn stone buildings. In distant villages spires rose serenely over the trees.
A little before sunset, Stanislav asked me if I wanted to eat. Why not? I said. He took a road through a small village, driving past old men wearing grey coats and black berets. He stopped alongside a wagon and inquired of some nuns sitting in back, their bare feet and faces the only signs of flesh exposed through their full black habits, how to get to his restaurant. "Prosto, prosto," they said, straight ahead, all looking and waving in unison, all at once, in one direction.
Stanislav maneuvered his van into a parking place and we walked across a walled courtyard and into a church which had been converted into this restaurant. It was a little chilly inside. I presumed all the heat was in the bare white arches high above. There was a bandstand and a dance floor and several rectangular tables with tall straight-back chairs in the dimly lit chamber. However the place had an oddly sterile atmosphere. When we got there it was quiet but for the murmur of conversation.
The waiter came and verbally recited the menu. Stanislav had not the words to tell me what there was, so he ordered something for both of us. It took a while for the food to arrive, during which we had a strained basic conversation.
When the food finally arrived I found it to be pretty good compared to Bar Mlesnzy, but it was standard greasy-spoon fare, a Polish fried chop, some french fries, and a dilled salad. During the meal Stanislav and I got into a better rap, about prices of things. workers' concerns. etc. When we had finished eating, we were comfortable enough with each other to linger over coffee. When we were ready to go, Stanislav insisted on paying with the pile of coins from his dashboard.
It had grown dark. As we drove on, Stanislav told me a little about life as a partisan during Hitler's reign. He had been shipped off to Germany early in the war to work on a farm near Bremen. After the war the Russians had taken many other young Poles to Russia, although he had managed to avoid that. He was 54 years old.
When we finally reached Kraków, about 8 at night, there was a problem of what to do with me. Stanislav drove me to the student residences where he knew of an international student hotel. We left the van in the parking lot and went to the building where he thought it was - a large dormitory. He inquired for me, but we learned that it had closed to guests when school had begun. I told him that I had friends in Kraków who could perhaps help, and showed him the address the girl had given me on the train from Moscow. He inquired as to where that was, and we discovered it was in the next building over.
So we went there to the Dom Olimpus, where in the lobby I happened to see one of the girls who had been on the train. She was one of the better looking ones who had sat in my compartment, where I had been ticketed all by myself to keep me from interacting much with the other passengers, and listened to me play guitar. But she spoke no English. She spoke to the driver in Polish, who told me in German that this girl I was looking for had not yet arrived at the campus. There didn't seem to be much she could do for me and she awkwardly excused herself. Someone pointed out to me that this was a lady’s dormitory.
It was beginning to look like Stanislov was going to have to leave me to the mercy of Orbis’s tourist hotel locator, which would undoubtedly please that organization immensely to have another capitalist to milk. We were talking together in our stilted German, trying to decide what to do, when someone behind me, a dark-haired young man with nearly Mediterranean features, asked me in English, “What is the matter?” I told him, relieved at finding someone with whom I could communicate, and asked him if he knew where I could find a cheap place to stay.
We spoke to his friend and they shook their heads. It looked again as if I was headed for Orbis, but at the last moment, they said that perhaps we could find a bed at the Dom Polytech. Stanislav offered to drive us there, and we all piled into his van.
On the way, I discovered that my English-speaking friend was named Zbiczak, and his friend, Ted. They were roommates. Stanislav let us out in front of their dorm, and I wished him a hearty goodbye. His head was very much in the right place. Although he had taken money from those who offered it to him, he wouldn’t take mine. He was by no means mercenary but in fact generous. He wished me luck.
So now I was in the hands of a couple of Polish students. I was to discover that those were good hands in which to be in Kraków. I was offered the room for one night, until I could find something else, but that invitation was soon extended to “As long as I wanted to stay.” One of the keys that unlocked that door was my guitar.
As in any dormitory, the flow of people through rooms was to provide my introduction to many students. Not many of them spoke English, but they were all eager to help, and they all wanted to talk to me. I could see English grammar books coming out all over, and I was to have many a long conversation, my having to be as patient with these people as I had been with Kryristyna, who had helped me circumvent the Orbus trap in Warsaw -- long spells of spoken discourse consisting of in the end of only one or two thoughts. But as with the Russians, lack of vocabulary never seemed to stop anyone from trying to express himself.
I think many people were glad to have an opportunity to speak English with someone, and a genuine desire to relate carried the rest of all our interactions, so that I sometimes would sit and struggle with words with someone even though there would often be an English-speaking student nearby
But that night, my first evening in Kraków, I began to assimilate myself into the loose web of friends which was itself just forming since school had only just begun, and these people were just beginning to get acquainted with one another.
One fellow, who dropped by our room after I had just arrived, played a rockin’ blues guitar, humming the words to American songs, since he didn't speak English. He, Ted, and Zbiczak and I went to another room with some girls, one from France and one from England, who were studying in Poland and teaching English. They fixed us some snacks and tea, although I wasn't hungry. The purpose of that visit was to find me someone who spoke English and perhaps allow the boys to meet the girls, as I noticed because the conversation soon became mostly animated Polish.
At about 10 or so we motivated ourselves to the center of town to explore the nightlife there. I got my first glimpse of the floodlit Sukiennice, the famous cloth market, which stands to itself in Kraków’s Renaissance marketplace, surrounded by other buildings dating from the 14th century. Even that night, shrouded in mist, the square exuded a medieval charm which I was later to find was characteristic of all of Kraków.
We went across the square to a club, a hangout for theater people and students, called the Klub Pod Jaszczurami. There was a jam in progress, a jazz session involving horns, bass, piano, and various drums. The crowd was young, there was lots of hippy hair on the guys, and lots of appeal in the faces and figures of the girls. I bought Zbiczak a glass of wine, since I was way under my foreign exchange quota for the day. In Poland I was forced to spend $3.50 in foreign exchange each day when my normal travel budget was only $3.
We met several girls at the Klub. There was an actress from Theater 38 around the corner who had one of the most beautiful faces I had ever seen. I also met three girls, a Canadian, an Australian, and a Virginian, who were studying in Poland. They seemed to think it was a very fine place to be.
We occupied ourselves getting into girls, music, and staying away from booze. Ten zlotys for a glass of wine was a lot by Polish standards. However there is always just so much you can do with a nightclub. Zbiczak and I spent another 10 zlotys each taking the actress home in a taxi cab. Then we went back to the dorm ourselves.
Cushions were found for me, and I spread them out on the floor. I was pretty tired from a long day and I had little trouble sleeping in my new environment.
The next morning, I woke up early, since the other people in the room all had classes to attend. Ted was the last one out, and I went with him to eat breakfast. We went to a place called Bar Mleczny and I made yet another discovery about Poland -- the pastry. I have always been a sucker for succulent cakes and breads. Before coming to Poland, my haven had always been Mexico, where I used to stuff myself with sweet rolls and cookies which always cost just fractions of a peso. In Poland I found cakes and brownies and sweet rolls going for 2 zlotys a morsel, and I was to frequent haunts along my routes from which wonderful smells of rising dough would emanate.
Ted left me alone to go to class, and I set out to start discovering Kraków. It was a town that was impossible not to like. I picked up a map from LOT Airlines and headed toward the Centrum. Throngs of people surged through the quaint streets with church spires silhouetted in the haze at the far ends of the narrow avenues, picturesquely visible through Gothic archways.
I came upon a market colored with the petals of 1000 flowers where peasant women hawked their vegetables for sale, or sat out of the way on wooden carts. I continued past remnants of castle fortifications into the bustling city centrum. Pigeons flocked around children with handfuls of feed and pecked at buckets of water which were filled from the fountain and set out for them. Now and then they would take flight together, filling the air with feathers and sound. My eyes followed their rise only to get lost in the Baroque and Gothic architecture of the surrounding buildings.
I wanted to first take care of my Polish visa extension so I wandered about until I found a travel bureau with a woman who spoke English, and who told me how to find the police station. it would be open for a few hours more, but it would be best that I go in the morning, she said. I took the jostling tram back to the student houses anyway because I had left my traveler's checks there and I would have to change more money.
But at the student house, many curious and friendly students gathered in my room. They asked me questions, although only one of them spoke English enough to communicate, and he was constantly coming and going. After about an hour they suggested we go to eat. We walked about town for about 45 minutes before we found a place with just the right atmosphere and few enough people. Then they bought me beer and a chicken dinner.
Afterwards they returned me to the dorms, where Zbiczak took over my entertainment while the others got the chance to relax. He and I went out into the night to Theater 38 where the girl worked whom we had seen the night before. We found her, but she was in a study session so we wandered about town poking our heads into bars and clubs, speaking occasionally to the one or two people we would find. It was a Wednesday night and there was really nothing to do. We walked all the way to Wawel Royal Castle and walked around it along the Vistula River and then back into town.
We stopped off at the Pod Jaszczurami and drank a Pepsi. Then we found our actress, but she was speaking with two other actors, and she was too sober to try to speak English. It was definitely a good night to try to get some sleep, so we went back early to the dorm.
The next day I took care of my visa extension. Zbiczak offered to go with me to the station, as I had been assured that no one there would speak English. However in our peregrinations the evening before, he had arranged to meet a girl at 10 a.m. outside the cloth market. He said we could meet her and then all of us go to the police station.
However she was not there and he wanted to wait for her. Plus he was thinking of breakfast. I, on the other hand, was thinking of taking care of my business, and I could see that it would be best that I go It alone, so I suggested we split up, and he agreed that it would be best. Besides, I wanted to explore more of Kraków on my own.
I went back almost to the university, having a couple of pastries before I went to the police station. In French I managed to get a form to fill out. Then I went to the corner Ruch, Poland’s dominant kiosk chain, and bought 84 zlotys worth of official stamps. I had to change 35 deutschmarks for a four-day extension into the zlotys, consuming my full quota of US $3.50 foreign exchange I was required to make each day. After I presented my form, my stamps, and my certificate of change, I was issued a new visa good until October 10th. So I was set to go to Szczebrzeszyn on Saturday.
Next I went to a bar down the street and had a lunch of cabbage cooked with vegetables and sausage. As I was sitting there eating, the girl who had given me the address at the ‘Olimp’ the Dom Olimpus where I had gone my first night in Kraków, came and sat down unexpectedly at my table. She had two Polish girl friends with her, neither of whom spoke English. We all ate while we attempted conversation. I told them I would probably go to the Pod Jaszczurami that night and suggested they go. They told me there was a dance at the Olimp and invited me to come. I was to do neither as it turned out.
Leaving them, I went back to Wawel castle and walked around inside the walls. It was indeed a beautiful place, with views from the parapets commanding the city in various directions, and the riverscape along the Vistula, although the opposite shore was occluded by smoke-belching factories. I had arrived too late to visit the museums or see the interior, but the architecture along the arched walls from which many a tournament had been witnessed in the courtyard in which I stood, had inspired several young Polish artists as I recognized the place from several sketches I had seen in the city. I hung around Wawel for a couple of hours trying to bring my journal update. It was a warm and pleasant day.
Towards three o’clock, I walked back into town, stopping for another couple of pastries, and then passing through St. Mary's Cathedral just off the town square. There I let myself be appropriately amazed by the colored glass windows, the 15th century Gothic alter, and the high arches of the ceiling.
I made one more stop by a modern art exhibition. Polish art was usually very impressive and this exhibit was no exception. Looking for the Fine Arts Museum, I sacrificed a zloty to see an exhibition of old astronomy books going back to Copernicus. It was interesting, though its presentation was in a language at which I was illiterate..
I went back to the Dom Polytech and spent the rest of the evening there. I picked up some bread, butter, and Bulgarian jam on the way, so I could contribute something to the community food chest.
Nobody felt like going out, so I ended up playing guitar all night. Somebody in another room found a second guitar, and we got into a jam that attracted a flux of listeners, if not a crowd. Soon, another young friend I had met earlier, from a town just over the border of Ukraine, was showing me some Russian folk songs, and he wrote down the chords for me to a piece by Chopin Prelude in C Minor. I asked him to write his name on the piece of paper and I told him that then whenever I played that piece I would think of him. Yes he said, deliberately thinking out each word before finally coming out in German with “Musik ist international sprechen,” a sentiment that I thought perfectly captured the zeitgeist of solidarity that permeated the interactions of all these young people in a world still polarized by the persistent sociopolitics of Russian dominance after World War II.
May 10th 1973
Finally I've got this damn journal nearly up-to-date. I suppose there must exist some coalescent elements of discipline in a life as chaotic as mine, and my journal is that discipline. It is not ‘work’ in the sense of something that I must do each day, but it is often a tedious task which must be performed before I can conscientiously rest. Whenever I finally find a stopping place, then will come the task of sorting the wheat from the chaff, adding the appropriate embellishments and descriptions, not to mention some research work with an atlas, a good encyclopedia, perhaps travel brochures, art books -- my knowledge of architecture for instance is deplorable -- and weeding out the stilted phraseology to make the work run together as a whole. But that stopping place is half a world away. I have no room for a typewriter in my knapsack.
This morning I thought, as I woke up at 8 a.m., that I would dash out to a couple of museums before I started hitchhiking to Jaroslaw, Zamość, and Szczebrzeszyn in the afternoon. However I ate a little breakfast with my roommates, the bread, butter, and jam I had bought with some hot sugared milk, a Polish staple. Then I took a shower and got my pack and bedroll together, and asked a couple of people down the hall if they had any suggestions as to where I should go to start my journey, with the result that since it was by now 2 in the afternoon, I'm thinking about taking the bus or train to one of those cities. Plus, it has been getting dark early lately.
Kraków is a city that grows on you slowly, until it grabs you, and you want to linger in her back streets and savor the classic flavor of her architecture from the museum in the Sukiennice, the cloth market on the second floor of the Trade Center in the center of the main Market Square, where the stalls downstairs still sell goods to the crowds of people below. I looked out over the book stalls in the square, an art exhibit at one end, while listening to the heavy sounds of Alice Cooper blaring over the throng below. Poland was nothing like I expected it to be before I went there.
I visited the Jagiellonian University, at 600 years old, the oldest university in Poland, and Copernicus's alma mater. It occupied an inconspicuous corner off the center of town. Wandering inside I found a cloistered courtyard whose staid beauty belied well it's age. Had I not been told to drop in, I would never have known it was there.
Growing a little hungry, I bought a couple of apples and a bag of vegetables from a small shop. It came to about five zlotys. I ate all that while wandering inside Wawel castle. In the cathedral I visited the underground crypts, wandered about in awe of the sculptures, then passed under the tiers of arcades to the chambers of the castle itself, walls lined with Arras tapestries. Besides the walls, the castle was a boon to ceiling watchers.; sculpted heads occasionally stared back from the buttresses.
Outside, sitting in the sun on the castle walls, I watched the beautiful girls file by, turning my head occasionally to watch the biplanes and skydivers in the clear skies over the Vistula River. A crew of movie makers had set up cinema paraphernalia, lights, cameras, extras, in the Market Square and in Wawel Castle.
I walked up old Grodzka. Kraków’s oldest street, one last time. It was a street I had strolled many times but only that morning did I learned that it was once the Kings Road from Warsawa to Wavel. Also unknown to me was a small church with frescoed walls and ceilings and a small gallery of religious art which I would have passed yet another time had my friends not told me of its existence.
I was going to the Czartoryski gallery, on a route which took me once again through the city center. Orbis had a railway and bus counter there and I stopped in to ask about ways available to Szczebrzeszyn. There was a bus going there in the morning but it wouldn't arrive until 3 pm. I wanted to get there earlier than that. Well, there was a train leaving at 9 that night that would get to Zamość at almost 7 the next morning. Two things were incredible about that, since it was a 300 kilometer distance. One was the price, which was only 100 zlotys, and the second was the time it would take, 10 hours to go 300 km. However, Zamość, I had been told, was a small Renaissance town, and the price of that ticket included my place to sleep, if possible in second class. I plunked down my 100 zlotys. In such ways, I went out of my way to spend money, since I was required by law to blow US $3 50 a day. I was working hard even then at thinking of how I would spend $7 a day in Czechoslovakia, which was the minimum foreign exchange requirement there. Mail a large package home, perhaps? Buy some shoes (my boots had sprung a leak in the leather at about the big toe). Stock up on canned food?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_with_an_Ermine
I went quickly through the Czartoryski, which I had wanted to see mainly for its Leonardo DaVinci painting, Lady with an Ermine. Even though I wasn't particularly hungry, I had been munching all day. I headed out the remains of the old wall and walked toward the market down the street from plac Jana Matejki, which was bustling with color and activity as usual. “Proszę, proszę,” people offered, as I walked along the stalls. I was tempted to buy some plums from them, but they were all rotten.
Across the street was a food bar, one of those standing-room-only arrangements, and crowded with bent-old peasants from the market. It was a filthy place, since the waitresses couldn't keep up with the tables, but the food sure looked good. I waited in line and pointed out what I wanted by indicating someone's plate piled high with meat cake, potatoes, and sweetened beets. And some herbata ekspresowa, I added. The register rattled off about 11 zlotys, just US $0.33 for all that, unbelievable.
I was stuffed when I left but before catching the tram home I bought a hot ear of corn for another 3 zlotys. I was going to hate to leave Poland.
My last couple of hours in the dorms I spent packing, writing, shaking hands, and affixing to my guitar some butterfly decals I had bought in Warsawa. Up to the moment where I had to leave, someone was playing Polish songs on his guitar for me. I was to come away from Kraków with Slavic melodies in minor key lilting in my ears.
At the station, it was pretty obvious where the train was. I bought one last scoop of ice cream and climbed on board one of the several second-class cars. They were all crowded with people standing in the aisles and I didn't even bother to look for a compartment, but set my pack down in the vestibule and set myself thereupon to ride out the first few slam-bang boisterous hours of my trip reading Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, an elucidation of Freudian concepts and how they pertain to social structures. A drunk tried to talk to me as we both tried to keep our balance in the wildly lurching car. Despite the queasiness in my stomach the following passage caught my attention.
The individual is not to be left alone. For, left to itself and supported by a free intelligence aware of the potentialities of liberation from the reality of repression, the libidinal energy generated by the id would thrust against its ever more extraneous limitations and strive to engulf an ever larger field of existential relations, thereby exploding the reality ego and its repressive performances.
Could that be a warning? Or just another phallic symbol in disguise?
I had already sat through a couple of stops when someone came up to me and, pointing at my guitar, spoke to me in Polish. I had to shrug my shoulders, but eventually he was dragging me off to his compartment where he squeezed me in, a seventh man in a 6 seat space (the seats were actually marked off at 8 per compartment, but surely that was a joke perpetrated by a whimsical bureaucrat). He and a friend started rapping out songs on their guitar, songs with a Spanish meter and rhythm. They were fairly good if you like to hear the same thing over and over again. They wanted me to play as well, but when I dealt up my music, they tried to get me into the same rhythm as theirs, so I let them have at it on their own.
Pretty soon most of the people cleared out of our compartment to go on foot to their multifarious destinations, and the conductresses, two fairly good-looking pannenicas sat outside our compartment between stops and listened to the music. One of the Poles started making passes at one and she warily accepted his advances. At one stop, when the three of us were finally left alone in the compartment, he made motions with his fist and arm back and forth into his cupped hand indicating that we should leave him alone at the next stop. When his conductress returned, his friend rather conspicuously got up and left, motioning for me to follow. So I gathered up my coat and my book, and went again to stand in the vestibule and finish a chapter. The curtain closed behind us, but about every 15 minutes the conductress had to emerge and step outside onto the platform to wave her lamp about. Then she always went back to the cabin. Every now and then, his friend, becoming bored with his cigarettes, would poke his head in the door to check on them. He always returned with a look as if to say nothing was happening, but we should wait. Naturally the whole scene was ridiculous. A little past midnight I found a compartment with an empty bench and I went there to lie down.
When I heard the guitar music stop in the next compartment I went in to get my things and found Don Juan sitting alone, staring out the window. He wanted to keep my guitar (hard pointed at my guitar) so he could seduce (fist driving through cupped hand) the girl with it. I told him to be quiet (finger at mouth) because I was trying to sleep (snoring sounds) in the next compartment.
I woke up again about 2 a.m and went in to fetch my guitar. Lothario was smooching with his girl, both fully clothed, while his friend slept on the opposite bench. When I returned to my own bench I spread my bedroll out and slept off and on. My roommate in that compartment kept getting up and switching on the light to look for the louder squeaks keeping him awake, but I don't think he ever found them. I finally got a couple of hours of good sleep after he left at about 4 in the morning.
When I awoke I saw the corridor outside was full of people who were riding a short distance and who were politely letting me sleep. As I was awake, I motioned for a few to come in and share the remaining 30 minutes to Zamość with a couple of Polish grandmothers and weather-wizened old men.
