Warsaw, Poland: Down on the tracks

August 31, 2015

Old Warsaw, rebuilt after the war not as it had been but in an image of how it was a hundred years earlier

THE MOST dangerous place you can be on a railway is down on the track. Between two carriages. And trapped there by the platform. And that's where I was this morning.

In the days when freight trains were coupled by chains, it was not not unknown for the coupling men to make their adieu when the train moved. The driver set off without knowing, or the train moved of its own weight. Squashing the coupling man.

I wasn't a happy man down there on the track. As anxious as a nudist on an ants' nest. But...

Torun station was a few hundred metres from my hotel. Passage from one platform to the other was by a ramp in the platform to a cement path across the rails, then up again on another ramp. Not the way railways do it elsewhere but safe enough if the staff close a barrier when trains are due.

Polish trains have trains of different vintage and my pale blue inter-city to Warsaw dated, I'd guess, from the 1980s. That meant an old design and the way in was up four steep, steel steps and a door. It would be hard to get on with suitcases and a bike looked even more tricky.

I lifted the front wheel and struggled. I was about to give up, take off the bags and try again, when a kindly man in his 50s joined in. He would lift the bars, he gestured, if I lifted the back. He got on to the lowest step and began to lift. It was then he found the bike was heavier than he thought. He fumbled and knocked off the computer.

It fell with a bounce down to the platform and then to the ballast of the track.

He heard it go and looked down as I pointed. Thinking fast, he called to the train guard, who was watching us struggle. The guard could see the problem, which by now had become far greater in my mind than the cost of a computer, and he began talking solemnly.

The lack of link between Polish and western European languages makes it harder to guess the tone of what's being said. He was talking to my guardian angel, because he spoke Polish and I didn't, and I guessed what he meant was: "Sorry, but nothing can be done."

But the angel understood and he gestured for me to climb down beneath the train.

My childhood love of steam trains reminded me that this was not unlike a mouse sniffing at a cheese trap. I looked at the guard and raised my eyes quizzically. "Go ahead," he gestured. And no man has been down on the track and back up again in less time.

I shook hands all round and said dziękuję and the world turned again and the guard waved his flag and I was on the way to Warsaw. With my computer.

Jan explains that it wasn't him - it was the Russians

WE MET Jan five years ago. He'd ridden up America's Pacific coast and now he was on his way to New York. We were going the other way and we met on a campground at Binford, in North Dakota. We were the only campers there.

It was the afternoon we'd been deep into a missile control centre left as it was when troops abandoned it with disarmament. We'd touched the key which, with one turn, could have brought the end of the war.

"It was all because of you," we teased Jan, who was from Poland and therefore on the other side.

He saw the teasing but there was sadness, even bitterness, in what he said next.

"Not us," he said. "The Russians."

He summed up Poland's sad history in a touching phrase. "We were always in somebody's way," he said. I reminded him of that after he met me at Warsaw's main station. It has the novelty of being under ground and the benefit of being kitted out with bike lifts and with escalators.

He's a lovely guy, Jan. Proud of Poland, proud of Warsaw and determined that I should see the best of both.

"In the communist era, all the money went on guns and weapons," he said. "We had the same economy as Ukraine. They still have it; we're now a modern, prosperous country. They wonder how we did it."

Among Jan's many kindnesses was to talk his daughter, a city tour guide, into giving us a personal tour. Margaret speaks fluent and fast English with a hint of American accent. Easy to understand when you know that she and her brother grew up in New York state.

Jan's wife, Ania, is a world authority on the brain and the family went to America to continue her post-diploma research there. They remember it as a good time and it fostered, in Jan especially, a love of the country.

"But," Ania confesses, "I'm a determined person and, when the time came to go back, we went back. The children hated me for it."

She recognises Jan's love of both America and of cycling. And he recognises the warmth of family love, so he makes his long journeys only every other year. He's crossed America several times, calling himself Jan with a soft J - "Shan" - because that's how Americans read it.

"They're puzzled, because it's a woman's name, but..."

Little remains of the ghetto, largely destroyed by the Germans. Some buildings have been restored but a few still wait for the former owners to claim them

Detail of a monument to Jewish suffering

In a bigger and separate uprising, the people of Warsaw rose up against the occupant, taking on far greater odds. The Russians waited across the river to see who would win

Surrounded by the Germans, the last of the Poles escaped through the sewers (see the figure starting to descend). The Germans took their revenge by destroying the whole city

The Palace of the Arts: a gift from the Russians. The Poles didn't want it then and they don't want it now. But they don't know what to do with it

You do get a view of the new city from the top, though

Today's ride: 27 km (17 miles)
Total: 5,338 km (3,315 miles)

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