August 28, 2015
Malbork, Poland: A castle and a massacre
I TALKED to Jasch last night. He was helping at the hostel reception, a lean man in his 50s with flyaway, peppery hair. He'd just finished checking in a couple of German cyclists in their 20s when he came back with a mug of coffee to resume our conversation.
"It's difficult for me when I see Germans," he confided. "The two I've been talking to, there's no doubt they're very fine men. But I can't forget that they turned my country into a killing ground. Six million people in Poland died during the war. Not only because of the Germans but the Russians as well, but mostly the Germans.
"I can't go anywhere in Poland without seeing signs that the Germans came that way. A dozen people, a hundred, a thousand. It's... [long pause] ... it's difficult."
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The weather when I left Gdansk was just right for thoughts like that. The morning was dark, the clouds low, rain falling. I rode past the castle mound, on through housing and then light-industrial areas and eventually into bland, open countryside and a grubby track beside a canal. On the other bank, heavy traffic was pushing its way into Gdansk, windscreen wipers working, heaters and blowers turned up to clear the mist.
I've said before that unexpected delights lie along the smallest roads. But the roads are small because they're used only by people who live along them. And those people claim squatters' rights.
I had an example of that this morning when my road ran straight to a house in which the owners had subsumed the right of way into their garden. There was a hint they acknowledged that, at least for those not driving, in a half-open wooden gate that led into the grounds.
The worst people can do is tell you to go away, so I pushed through. I walked up to the house, round two sides and past wheelbarrows and water butts and empty bottles, then through the gate in the far fence and on to a narrow metal bridge across a river or drain. Nobody stirred. Nobody objected. Nobody knew. I felt smug. I had scored one for the common man.
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Narrow bridges have been a feature of the day. I must have been over six or seven, some leading to cobbled lanes untouched for a century. And all the time it rained.
Now, I don't think I noticed the name of the village but I was suddenly struck by a large, rusting and ugly sign that took me back to Jasch's comments last night. Although this referred not to Germans - although initially it was blamed on them - but to Russians.
The sign said "Katyn".
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It sounded so familiar. But was I in Katyn? No, surely not. I'd have noticed. And then, slowly, so slowly, I remembered that Katyn was a forest not in Poland but in the USSR where the Russians killed 22 000 Polish officers and blamed it on the Germans. Britain turned a blind eye.
The Russians killed Poland's military élite to weaken the country and make it easier to rule. They put the Poles into a cage, then led them in groups to pits, where they were shot in the neck one by one. The Russians hadn't completed the job when Germany turned against them. Stalin suddenly needed as large an army as he could get and those left alive were drafted into it.
Churchill knew but did nothing, wanting to keep Stalin in the war and allied to the West, his uneasy partners. Russia kept blaming the Germans. But in the 1990s, Mikhail Gorbachev admitted the NKVD had done it. And Boris Yeltsin sent the Poles the notorious memo signed by Stalin that ordered the slaughter.
Why there was a sign for Katyn, I don't know. There was a religious monument of some sort to one side but nothing beyond it. I peered over the fields for signs of... well, something. But there was nothing.
I still don't know why the sign was there. But it reminded me not only of Jasch's comments about Polish suffering but that in 1939 the west went to war for six years and that 14 million people died and yet, after all that, it still hadn't liberated Czechoslovakia, which it betrayed, or liberated Poland, the country it had fought to defend in the first place.
Tonight I'm on a campground across the road from the castle at Malbork. I got here soon after noon. I have a cyclist as a neighbour, a German, thin and dark and road-weary, who works with senile old people and says, quite reasonably, that "it's sometimes frustrating." He is riding from Berlin to St-Petersburg, much along the Iron Curtain that Laura is following in the other direction.
He says he has had tailwinds almost every day and that it hasn't yet rained. I wish I could say the same.
Today's ride: 72 km (45 miles)
Total: 5,030 km (3,124 miles)
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