Day two broke quiet and cool, the turrets of St Mary’s looking astoundingly Cold-War-photograph through the grey haze. At a place on Tomasza street we found something calling itself Milkbar Tomasza and set out to wipe away the memory of the heinous bar mlecny in Poznan once and for all. With success: Sam’s pancake was exquisite and my full Irish breakfast very sound, with proper thick cut back bacon.

Thus fortified, we set about the city’s fortifications ourselves. Krakow upgraded its defences heavily at the dawn of the gunpowder age to a formidable set of concentric curtain walls, moats and thick-walled fighting towers mounting early artillery (quite a similar response to the Device Forts, in fact, a  few decades earlier). But it was never quite rich enough (or threatened enough?) to upgrade them to full-on trace italienne at any point and so staggered on with these picturesque-but-increasingly-worthless until the early 19^th century when the (then Austrian) authorities demolished most of them and made a lovely park around the Old Town. But some were saved, thus the Barbican: fantastic both in the sense of being good and in looking like it belongs in a fantasy film, a big horseshoe of red brick topped with pointy little mini-turrets and riddled with as many odd-shaped loopholes as the British tax system. A gentleman in a mauve jerkin taunted us gently from the courtyard, let us play with his swords and armour, and having fully equipped Sam proceeded to beat him up with a sword. (I had no cash so left the castle and headed for a cashpoint to get him a tip; on my return he gave me a replica 15th century coin “for being honest”.)

A refugee support station by the main station was giving out food and medical aid to displaced Ukrainians, and the handsome late 19th century theatre had a huge ДЕТИ banner in solidarity with Mariupol. We had pastries and coffee and observed that while there weren’t many people around going full goth, the background level of let’s-call-it “Hot Topic quotient” is much higher than home.

As well as the Barbican itself and a quick jaunt through a surviving section of city battlements (individual towers named for the organisations responsible for their funding and upkeep: Haberdashers’ Tower, Carpenters’ Tower, etc) the Barbican ticket got us into the “Celestat”. This is the guildhall of the Fowlers’ Brotherhood: in both its historic tradesman’s-cartel past and present-day drinking-society-with-custom-bling nature very much like other medieval guilds, but, rather than engraving or silversmithing, their trade was shooting things. Sharpshooters’ guilds like this formed an important part of many city-states’ defences in the days before reliable national militaries. At regular contests, the best shot in Krakow was declared the Fowler King and awarded a huge silver cockerel on a neck chain. The club was full of decorative targets, antiquated marksman rifles, and paintings of various satisfied-looking men in Renaissancey getups with a big silver cock hanging round their necks (with gaps for the many years when the club was being repressed by one of Poland’s various authoritarian occupation governments). Outside, the Park Strzelecki – I know enough Slavic military vocabulary to work out it meant “Shooters’ Park” – seemed to be a sort of dumping ground for various recent and aggressively nationalistic statues about Polish history and Poland’s glorious yet endless struggles (in which Sobieski, his turban-mace-and-big-moustache iconography firmly established, features heavily).

Finding the bus station was easy (two American soldiers in uniform were wandering past as we approached) and buying a ticket for the coach we wanted even easier, especially by comparison with getting a drink out of the nearby vending machine. The “Lajkonik” coach rolled through the city’s clean outskirts to an open landscape, big box shops and wide sweeps of motorway giving way to boggy woods. Over the motorway sound barriers I could glimpse the odd cool modernist church, passing townscapes of church spires and tower blocks, the occasional striped factory chimney. Everything was cheerfully well-maintained, without the general weedy air of suffocating neglect and apathy in Russia. After around ninety minutes we arrived at Oświęcim, better known to history as Auschwitz.

I find it very difficult to write about any of this, or even think too hard for too long about it, and I do wonder how the guides manage. I don’t think I could in good conscience tell anyone to go to Auschwitz and at the same time it feels essential that everyone sees what was done here. Part of the horror of Auschwitz-1 is in how mundane and ordinary the fabric of it all seems: there isn’t anything intrinsically evil-feeling about most of the repurposed Polish army barracks and bunkers, their brick walls, cement floors, cheap old light fittings, and yet you stand in a room and are told that a hundred thousand people were murdered in it. And then: this is what two tonnes of human hair look like, shorn from murdered women to be sent to Germany to make carpet underlay. Here is a photo of a gaggle of confused children who will live for less time after the photo is taken than you will spend at the camp today. Here is a corridor of thousands upon thousands of mugshots of people who were killed, an incredible diversity of faces.  The guide moves from room to room, delivering each fact calmly and matter-of-factly; each horror sinks in but none can be dwelt upon for too long before another is described.

After Auschwitz-1 (with the “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign), you take a shuttlebus to Auschwitz-Birkenau (the building with the railway arch). Unlike camp 1 there is nothing improvised or extemporised about this: it is an enormous factory, carefully designed and purpose-built to kill and burn people. An infinity of barracks stretch away on both sides, many reduced to the brick chimneys of the double-ended stoves that kept a few “useful” workers alive a little longer. At the railhead a simple triage process established those who would go to the barracks and those who would be murdered immediately. It is then a very short walk to the gas chamber/incinerator complexes. These were dynamited by the SS and the postwar communist government built a memorial between the ruins of two of them: an abstract line of concrete shapes on a sprawl of cobbled steps. It is clumsy, awkward and almost meaningless, and conveys the sense that they felt a statement had to be made but had no idea what to say.

Poland 2022
The Lost Wawel – Barbican, Celestat, Auschwitz – From Wieliczka to Wrocław – Racławice, Ostrow Tumski – Książ Castle – Museums of Wrocław – Gdansk town hall, Westerplatte – Malbork

Krakow, again. The place hasn’t changed very much since I was last here, still a marvellous fantasia of medieval and early renaissance royal bling cocooned in lovely ornate 18th and 19th century urbanism and set in a coronet of endless marching socialist-era tower blocks. But the war was quietly everywhere, dark military trucks on the roads, Ukrainian flags and the trident of Volodymyr hanging from random buildings. I was sat by a British-Ukrainian lady on the plane, on her way to Lviv to see off a relative and look after a house she’s putting up refugee families in. She told me all about her family, the many ways in which this horror has been wrecking their lives for nigh on a decade. I gave her eclairs for the takeoff and landing, and told her dark jokes (“how do you stop a Russian tank? – shoot the guys pushing it”) which got barrel laughs. She bought me a cup of tea and refused all attempts to contribute to her work.

Landing was perfectly smooth, apart from Sam’s plane out of Bristol (“My flight is branded BUZZ and has a cartoon bee on it. I’m concerned. I hope they’re taking this seriously”) ganking my landing slot. A train and then tram to our quiet third-floor Airbnb aparthotel, through streets under exuberant regeneration and dozens of public parks filled with painted ironwork, Morris columns and bursts of bright yellow dandelions.

The Rotunda, then and now.

We had a late lunch of excellent pierogi and headed through the bustling parks that have replaced the city’s old bastions to Wawel Castle, still possessed of the same eclectic fiddliness and intimidating immensity as last time. This time the exhibition of choice was “The Lost Wawel”, through rooms built through the half-buried skeletons of previous Wawels, with a notable standout the ancient, strikingly simple and beautiful rotunda of the saints Feliksa and Adaukta, now literally buried inside the walls. There was lots of the eclectic, organic, pre-Baroque decoration, with a strong classicism probably partly due to general Renaissance Romanophilia* but, I suspect, mostly because all the decent architects on hire were Italian.

“This is the stuff that led to people going ‘alright, enough’?”
“Yes, as a result of which a third of Europe destroyed everything beautiful and the other two thirds decided to go in even harder on the bling.”

Down by the river we saw Smok again. An old Ukrainian man was playing the violin, with an album cover featuring a much younger him in front of St Andrew’s in Kyiv. I took his bank details, and said “slava ukraini” – he took me for a Pole and responded “chwała polsce.”

We walked to the National Museum, a big chunky thing like a Stalinist version of the Doge’s Palace, but although on the door the museum claimed it was open til 7, disappointingly they actually closed at 1845 and passive-aggressively stopped me from going into the Decorative Art gallery  more than half an hour before close – another day, I suppose. So we only had time for the the top floor, home to some really striking bits of painting, sculpture, stained glass and other crafts both modern and pre-war (unlike Warsaw, the collection here has either been much better reconstituted or wasn’t as badly looted and burned in the war – I suspect the latter).

Google maps thought the Barbican was open until 10 so we headed there – but upon arrival it was obviously closed. We wandered back to the town square for a wander (attracting the usual dusk chorus of touts offering us titty bars and, possibly, drugs) and a stout (which turned out to be 9.5% – oh well) and then, at Dan’s recommendation, a huge and wonderful meal at a place called the the Black Duck – Georgian house wine, pork schnitzel for me and stuffed cabbage for Sam, the whole coming to perhaps £18 a head. Poland remains a marvellously hospitable place.

Poland 2022
The Lost Wawel – Barbican, Celestat, Auschwitz – From Wieliczka to Wrocław – Racławice, Ostrow Tumski – Książ Castle – Museums of Wrocław – Gdansk town hall, Westerplatte – Malbork