ORDINARY HERO

As part of our trade mission itinerary, we had the opportunity to tour the Warsaw Ghetto on our way to the airport. Our guide and interpreter remembered how his family had hid a Jew during the Nazi occupation. This was an act that was punishable by death – yet his family knew it was the right thing to do. What a great example of ordinary people drawing that line in the sand and standing against evil. This kind of heroism was more prevalent than any of us could have known, but was beginning to emerge as normal behavior for these many ordinary people stuck in the throes of adversity. Our guide was old now, and thought himself so very fortunate that he was able to live long enough to see this day – this day when the Americans came to do business in Poland.

Warsaw was truly in a time-warp: It was like the Fifties (as one older gentleman in our group remembered his boyhood)just after the Forties. It was as though we had stumbled upon a hidden city from his memories, and was able to relive the sounds, tastes and smells of the good-old days (only it was the bad old days for the occupants).

Our next stop on the trade mission was Gdansk (known as Danzig when the Germans occupied it). We traveled to Gdansk by train. In March of 1990, the trains were still operated under the communist regime. This was probably a good thing for maintaining schedules and repairs. It also gave us an opportunity to experience how peasants that were given a bit of authority over-exercised it with anger and power, as they examined our tickets (just in case we were trying to pull a “fast one”), and constantly scolded us for taking video tape of the country side (they were afraid we’d discover their missile silos??).

Our bags were loaded on to the train, and then we boarded. It was an express train. In Poland at this time, there were express trains, and slow trains. Slow trains stopped in every single village, farm, outpost, or bench that happened to be next to the tracks. A slow train would take about 5 hours to get to Gdansk. Fast trains only took about 2 hours, because they didn’t stop until they got to Gdansk. There was a “diner” on the train, and some of the braver folk sampled the sausages that were being sold. I remembered reading in the trip material we were given before the mission that you could not buy a Polish ham in Poland. So I guess sausages would have to do.

We left early enough to see the beautiful countryside. There were vast fields of Saffron flowers that were accented with purple-flowering weeds. We could see old-world farms, very European gardens that city-dwellers owned and escaped to. There were a couple of castles along the way (the Poles pronounced “castles” as “cas-tells”). And there were huge Storks nesting on the roofs and chimneys of the little houses that seemed to cluster more and more as we got closer and closer to Gdansk.