Lubliners

It didn’t seem possible to come to Poland and not go to one of the death camps. For a number of reasons I went to Lublin, which has an existing camp (Majdanek) still randomly visible in what seems like a kind of back paddock of the city. I took a cab there from the 'Old Town' of Lublin, also the Jewish quarter I think. The Old Town is watched over by the benign looking Castle, a place with quite a sinister history as one would expect. The Nazis liked it a lot.

Normal methods of transport to Majdanek are a couple of commuter buses which pass alongside it (probably making it as routine a sight to Lubliners as the Dinmore cattle-yards are to us on the Ipswich line). But passing alongside is to put it loosely. In fact the buildings of the camp are a long walk from the bus route, there is little sign-posting and really the whole place looks miniaturised, and deflated of meaning. I didn’t photograph anything there, it all seemed so rundown it lacked 'content'. If the truth be told the death camp looks like a feedlot, but not a very prosperous one. There's quite a lot about it online - http://www.cympm.com/majdanek.html . It may have been the camp used in Spielberg's Schindler film. I imagined Speilberg turning a good book into his usual over-blown melodrama so avoided seeing it. Sorree for wanting something so important to have at least some sense of truth to it (not).



In Majdanek most of the huge population of Lublin’s Jews (about one third of the city) were vaporised. Among my pantheon of literary heroes is the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer who although not a native of Lublin wrote about it (‘The magician of Lublin’). Hence my particular interest in what happened there.

Singer left Poland in good time, knowing what was to come. He wrote a description of his departure journey across Europe by train, but I can’t remember what this was part of, so anyone who does can you tell me? I recall a kind of rumination on the natural artistry of the French people, that even their villages were designed around the disposition of trees and rivers, to give them maximum effect.

Getting to Lublin and back again were moments of triumph for me. My plan was to catch the train. I spent about an hour at Warszava Centralna reading the huge train movements board with all its numerals (both Roman and Other), trying to decipher these necessary things: destination, class, time, train, platform. This is information one must provide to the ticket seller, who of course doesn't speak English. The more I tried to make this exercise into something I felt capable of doing the more alarming it all seemed. So I did what any sensible 21st century tourist should do – I googled, and found there’s a much simpler alternative: the minibus. These little buses are cheaper, and faster, and phew… much easier to understand. You just go to the appropriate place buy a ticket from the driver and when the bus has its 16 passengers it takes off. By the time I got back to Warsaw I was ready to leap from a moving van to escape such confinement. Nevertheless, I went to Lublin and back and walked 'home' through the rain to my warm dry rooms feeling rather pleased.

PS I finally have a work-around for the image uploading problem, it's a bit messy for me at this end, but worry not, only I notice the pain.

PPS Relief is in sight dear reader ; although I have lots of time for blogging at the moment that will change once I am in Amsterdam/The Hague.