Lublin Old Town and other locations

Wednesday was cool and clear, good weather for our last full day in Lublin. We had university business earlier. Here’s Gary striding purposefully to school . . .



. . . and standing beside the photo of Marie Curie-Sklodowska (as she is known here).

We prevailed on a passing student to take our picture by the statue. This might be our favorite portrait of the trip.


En route to the university we passed their tennis courts—indoor (sheltered by a plastic bubble), and red clay!

After the university business was finished—and Poland is still the land of bureaucracy--we took advantage of the late afternoon light to take some pictures of the pedestrian street and Old Town in Lublin. Gary has to have a physical, get enrolled into the Polish equivalent of the IRS, etc. He plans to pay union dues to get his Solidarity card—maybe they have a T-shirt?

As is the case in Warsaw, the street leading away from the Old Town is called Krakowskie Przedmiescie or Krakow suburbs, and in Lublin it’s lined with banks, fashion shops, and (especially) beer and coffee stands. It’s a good place to stroll in the evening.



The entrance to the Old Town proper is the Krakow gate, the base of which dates from the 13th century.

A little before the gate is a church, which (as many do) posts funeral notices, pieces of paper with thick black borders.


The main square in the Old Town is not open as is the case in Warsaw, but has a court building in the middle. Nonetheless, you can find brightly colored, recently renovated buildings, some of which have pubs and clubs and restaurants, next to buildings in bad need of renovation. To the right is the Jewish restaurant where we ate dinner Wed. night, one of the best meals we’ve had on the trip.


This view shows the Lublin cathedral spire.


This passage is the narrowest in Lublin, perhaps the narrowest in Poland. The picture shows the typical cobblestone streets.


The castle exterior was built in mid-19th-c. because of the wall’s disrepair. However, the castle itself is medieval, with splendid Byzantine mozaics inside. During the war the Gestapo took over the castle as its headquarters.





Two views of the plaza in front of the castle.




On our way back to the Old Town and the Mandragora Restaurant, we stopped by the ruins of St. Michael’s church to take note of the moon, two or three days short of full. A good place to leave our travels for the time being. Thursday we leave for Warsaw, Friday morning Wendy leaves for the US, and Gary starts his work at UMCS in Lublin.


Another view of the front.

Majdanek

Sept. 29
Tuesday was the only bad weather we have had for this whole two week trip. After glorious warm sunshine in Kazimierz Dolny on Monday, we stepped out of our unfortunately cold apartment into a steady rain shower, Wendy with her rain gear and me with my umbrella. The apartment is cold because, as we are told, our apartment is heated by a common system, and they do not turn on the heat until it has been 11 degrees C. (52 F.) or below at 6 p.m. for three consecutive nights. So we find ourselves rooting for continued cold weather—last night we qualified, at 10.5 degrees C.

The part here about Majdanek is pretty depressing stuff, so feel free to skim and skip.

The rain did not continue long, so after a visit to a local mall and some business at UMCS, we made our way to the concentration camp SE of Lublin (at the time), Majdanek. Majdanek was not on the scale of Birkenau – Auschwitz, with the death toll being 78,000. But the exhibit offers an effective illustration of the inhumanity nonetheless. It’s one thing to know about the Holocaust from articles and books, even the first-person narratives such as This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen and Drohobycz, Drohobycz, or the histories, the photos and web sites, and even the museums such as the Washington Holocaust Museum. It’s another thing to walk on the grounds themselves, to see the mausoleum built over the mountain of human ashes, to walk through the crematorium (we decided not to include that photo) and surviving barracks which housed 500-800 prisoners, to see the large grounds now occupied mostly by Polish crows with a few magpies and incongruous partridges, and to get some feel of the enormity of what went on here. Collective insanity. I hope.






The memorial built here in 1969 is based thematically on Dante’s Inferno—“Abandon all hope ye who enter here.” Better metaphor than the outright lie which greeted prisoners of Auschwitz, “Labor macht frei,” work makes [you] free. All the work done here kept human beings on starvation fare until typhoid or exhaustion or some kapo’s whim brought death, the last cash value of their bodies, and their bodies’ disposal. I can think of nothing more depressing than the cold texture of the concrete walls where so many were snuffed out. The memorial doesn’t show it at that distance, but it has something of the same crumbling stone texture.





We returned with relief via electric bus to the city and normal life. Maybe that’s all you can do, with the enormity of the war 65 years past, to return to ordinary life. We had the remains of a kebab sandwich with us, and gave that to a forlorn dog on the grounds. He seemed discouraged and didn’t show much interest in it.