APRIL 17, 2022 – It was a Sunday in Gdansk, and from my contacts the day before I’d learned about the dedication of a memorial at Stutthof, a Nazi concentration camp 21 miles east of Gdansk. I learned what bus route would take me there, and hiked to the bus stop a short distance to from the youth hostel where I was staying.
By the time “my bus” arrived at the stop, there was standing room only. I boarded with several others, and to make room for the people behind me, I joined in the general compression of passengers standing in the aisle. When the gentle pushing and side-stepping stopped, I grabbed the handle of the back of an aisle seat, and looked around. From my standing position, facing the rear of the bus, I had a good view of people—men, women, kids, and old folks. All looked pensive; no one said a word. They were on a pilgrimage.
About five minutes into the 30-minute ride from my stop, a man who looked to be in his late 60s shouted out two or three sentences. I naturally thought this was odd, even out of order, and I was surprised that no one else flinched. If the outburst itself wasn’t enough, the man then broke out in song. Still, no one smirked or smiled or turned to see what odd character, out of his mind, was carrying on. Then came the bigger surprise: people joined in! Soon everyone aboard—including the driver—were singing. “Polska” (“Poland”) occurred repeatedly in the lyrics.
As the only outsider aboard, surrounded by a busload of Polish patriots (all of whom, to boot, could sing on pitch), I reveled in those unfolding moments. The experience reminded me of the foreign journalists I’d encountered the day before at the steps to the abbey. None was present to capture this spontaneous expression of national unity and Polish patriotism—still the “story of the day.” Yet, again, an improbable foreign vagabond was there to witness it . . . and to remember it over a long passage of time.
The emotional bus ride was prologue to the sobering nature of our destination: site of the first Nazi concentration camp established outside of Germany (September 2, 1939) and the last camp to be liberated (May 9, 1945). As I reflect on this today, I think of the prisoners of the war years who were transported to Stutthof aboard cattle cars, juxtaposed to the Poles of 1981 aboard that bus singing a patriotic song on their way to a memorial dedication at Stutthof. In the end, it wasn’t about who won or who lost the war. It was about the unspeakable horror of humankind’s inhumanity to humanity—and the imprint of horror on history.
I had read about the camps, of course, and seen them depicted in movies, and watched film footage shot by liberators (Soviet and American), but I’d never before set foot on the ground of hell on earth (I’d not yet been to Auschwitz in the south of Poland). As I walked the grounds where an estimated 110,000 people had been imprisoned, an estimated 64,000 of whom had perished during imprisonment, I understood better the psychological links between WW II and the present political climate.
Tightening this link was my encounter with “Lech,” a 61-year-old Pole who’d been a prisoner in Stutthof for five months. He’d watched his father and his fiancé die there. Lech had been a member of the Polish Resistance, and after the war and liberation, he’d fled Europe altogether (he was anti-Communist) and emigrated to Australia. In March 1981, heartened by the Solidarity Movement, he’d returned to Poland to remain there. I had sufficient imagination to know it was insufficient to understand fully, the scars on Lech’s heart and psyche. In that place, however, surrounded by the remains of a black chapter of history, I came to understood full well that his scars were on all of humanity.
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© 2022 by Eric Nilsson
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This post is so good.
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