Reclaiming home: walks in the ‘hood

I arrived home yesterday after 36 hours in transit. I slept through the night, under sheets, after a shower I could move around in, that wasn’t a bath I couldn’t haul myself out of – all delights I’d been looking forward to. I even slept through the 8am alarm.

Up the hill

I’m unfit and one of those travel resolutions (you know the ones: they arrive in the mental free-fall of travel, and often don’t go any further) was to walk, at increasing pace, up Potato Point’s one hill. I head off to do just that.

In the drive I notice things I probably wouldn’t see, except newly arrived: the fallen blossoms of the pittosporum; a discarded shell; the dog’s tennis ball; the seed capsule and flowers of the pittosporum; the fresh pinky-red of spring leaves of the blueberry ash.

I chat to a few neighbours – a couple I’ve known since my kids were little. Their daughter is married to an Argentinian, but they live here and visit there.

Having scrutinised my own yard, I feel entitled to do the same to my neighbours’ yards.

I reach the seat at the trig and sit, listening to the sound of the sea down below, a sound that was oddly muted during the night – apparently my bedroom’s on the wrong side of the house for last night’s sea-music. Behind me, the mountains, a beautiful blue line belying the danger they pose in fire season, already begun. Down the hill and there they are again, stretching along the horizon, beyond the beach.

To the beach

After a deep afternoon sleep, this day after I return from three months in Warsaw, I’m still on a mission to walk. I bump into another neighbour who tells me there’s a python coiled up beside the road. Sure enough, it’s still there, one of the resident emus walking past on the other side of the road. It seems that I am being welcomed home by all the creatures that make my beachside village such a pleasure.

The calligraphy of the beach says welcome and so do shells and shell assemblages.

Just in case I think my home turf can’t offer anything new, I see the northern end of the beach in unfamiliar light, and suddenly it looks like somewhere I’ve never seen before.

I potter round the rocks briefly

All’s well along the beach, but the creek is dry and fecky. There isn’t much respite from reminders of drought.

I’m returning to wordsandimages now that I’ve celebrated the transition from Warsaw to Potato Point. Some of the posts at that site will be password protected.

The journey home

I leave for the airport, unhugged by my grandkids, who are both throwing tantrums, Jaś in his bedroom cupboard, Maja more publicly on the living room floor. I can’t complain. I’m the one who gave them far too much device-time in the privacy of my own apartment. Now my daughter is reasserting house rules (only on Friday night), and they don’t like it one bit. Luckily I have many cuddles stored in that not altogether safe place, my memory.

My daughter drives me to the airport through peak hour traffic, the first pleasure of the journey home. We talk of death and education, and she says: “I always realise at this point that we haven’t really talked in all the time you’ve been here.” We arrive at the airport far too early for check-in, although 2 hours later than I initially planned. We find chairs with footrests and talk until the gate opens.

Checking in

We join the largest milling queue and discover that it’s for a flight to Nosy Be Fascene, not really where I want to go. The man on the empty desk to Doha is charming. What my daughter thinks is a problem is just relaxed wittering: not my usual encounter at check in.

Then it’s separation time: the turning every five steps for a wave as I approach customs, the final wave, and then an empty space instead of my daughter.

I find my gate – I’m never happy at the airport till I’m sitting looking at it. But on the way I discover a wonderful preoccupation. I’ve been three months in Warsaw without visiting an art gallery, and the departure lounge offers me a last chance. On pillars, in the midst of airport bustle, is are reproductions of portraits under the title “Polish family album”. I amble along photographing them against a background of airport busy-ness, fire extinguishers, cafes.

Then it’s time to board. As I present my boarding pass I’m greeted by the same young man who checked me in: “Hello! It’s you again”. That’s the beginning of the friendliest flight I’ve ever been on – and the emptiest. The flight announcement in Arabic sounds like poetry.

Initially I sit next to a young man returning home to Nepal. Then I’m ushered to the four empty seats in the middle row. First I slept as I usually do, head in arms on the table, but a concerned flight attendant tapped me and said “Madam, are you OK?” The places where it’s not wise to sleep as an elderly person who could be dead are multiplying.

So I pile the four pillows up, raise the arm-rests and wriggle into reclining comfort, thankful for the training in sleeping on the edge provided by bed-sharing with twins. I’m a bit conflicted: I could have a window seat with no one beside me – the plane really is empty – but there’s a long journey ahead, it’s past my bed time, I have a 5-hour wait in Doha, and so I choose sleep.

And I sleep pretty well all the way.

Doha

The moon over Doha is nearly full, a pallid terra cotta, as I walk down onto the tarmac, last on the crowded bus: just one bus. The plane was empty. I have to wait a long time before I know which gate to stalk. I sit, connect to the Internet, doze, wander around marvelling at the presence of Harrod’s in a gulf state. There are other incongruities, including a towering carved creature, dinosaurs,and a large yellow bear.

Not so unexpected are gold and French perfumes.

I cogitate on the aesthetic importance of font, as poetry and other wisdom scrolls hugely, too few words at a time, along a screen. The Arabic version lookS beautiful. The English is san-serif and quite ugly.

Other aesthetics, mirrored swirls and reflections, please me more.

A tall African man in uniform squirts French perfume from a tester onto his arm and torso. Elegant Arabs robed in starched white stride by. Motorised vehicles menace pedestrians.

Finally my gate appears on the board.

Full flight this time. I doze, toe-and-finger-tap to music of the 80s; watch the BBC version of the life of the Durrells on Corfu; and prepare for the return to Australia and it’s horrible refugee policy by watching Styx.

Sydney to Bodalla

Finally I arrive at an airport carrying a phone that functions. I change my pick-up point competently; buy a hefty fruit salad, and a wrap densely packed with chicken for lunch; and settle in for a 2-hour wait feeling on top of things. Then I try to force my way though a solid wall in the loo.

More dozing on the bus, until the Nowra lunch stop where I spot four murals worth a visit (not now) and buy a cappuccino with Australian money, which looks quite lurid after the drabness of PLN. I remember dimly my determination to photograph the old-fashioned gear in a bootmaker’s shop: the substandard images reflect my mind’s blurriness. I remember some of the tools from my childhood when Dad used to mend our shoes.

At Ulladulla the driver announces a mysterious bag that no one has claimed.

Nearly home. Only 60 km to Bodalla. But I have to endure the afternoon tea break in Batemans Bay. I strike up a conversation with a woman who asks where I’ve been. She’s reading a book about a Jewish family in Warsaw during the war, so we talk about Poland’s history, and then refugees. She tells me she’s 85. And then a tale about a recent ball in Bemboka where men and women cross-dressed – her in a tuxedo, her partner in gold lamé – joking about being pulled over. At which point they hit a wombat and had to call a tow truck.

When the driver announces stops between Batemans Bay and Eden, he misses Bodalla. I shout “And Bodalla, please.” Imagine sweeping past that longed-for turn off! We stop, at last, and there’s my son, and Cruz with his head out the window of the car.

The mystery of the Ulladulla suitcase is solved. It’s my bag, mislabelled.

And I’m home.

After the War

This is my eighth visit to Polin, Museum of the history of Polish Jews. Gallery 8 looks at that history after WW2. If I thought hard times were over, I was wrong, on so many counts.

Prelude

In the 1930s the Jewish community was strong. Artists were thriving, although they were also debating the nature of their art.

“We regard each work of art created by a Jewish artist as a Jewish work of art regardless of its content.”

“I had to abandon my purely Jewish search completely. My current objective is to create something European in spirit, something universal.”

The Jewish Touring Society enjoyed “a beautiful early May morning … Tossing us about, the car speeds down the road, raising clouds of dust, the sun’s rays streaming through,” as the passengers learnt more about Polish history, and the beauty of the Polish landscape.

These two glimpses hint at dilemmas of identity – Jewish? European? Polish? – exacerbated after the war.

Immediately after the war

“The hell was over, but now I was all alone.” Salomon Doliński

So many people with devastated lives. So many people displaced. So many people needing food and clothing.

The Kielce Pogrom of 1946 wasn’t reassuring: refugees gathered in the Jewish community centre there were attacked by Polish soldiers, police officers, and civilians. 42 Jews were killed and more than 40 wounded.

“I’m alive. I exist.”

There were 350 000 Jewish Holocaust survivors in Poland immediately after the war. There were big differences between groups of Jews, different dialects and different customs, but they were all bundled together in the Second Polish Republic.

Donations from abroad were distributed and Jews began to register, to testify to their survival and to seek support.

Bulletins, newspapers and letters such as this one proliferated, dedicated to finding family members.

Citizens courts were set up to cleanse the Jewish community of people who had collaborated with Nazis: their punishment was exclusion. Compensation was paid to Poles who had saved Jews. A booklet provided instructions for interviewing Jewish children.

As part of the obligation to those murdered, bodies were exhumed and given decent burial, and many artists and writers felt a moral responsibility to speak out.

“Until I carry the burden of this most terrifying subject in even a single word of poetry, I cannot feel free as a poet.” Julian Przybos

There was a sense of urgency to prove that Jews were productive workers in agriculture and industry, and “useful citizens of the new Poland.”

At the same time there was a sense of the need to maintain Jewishness: Ihud founded orphanages, clubs and kibbutzim to prepare for life in Israel.

Loss

This image encapsulates the scale of the loss experienced by Polish Jews.

Remnants

There are all kinds of remnants. The most powerful for me were these family photos found in an attic: all attempts to trace the family they represent have been unsuccessful.

Other remnants aren’t quite so emotionally freighted, but they are markers of great disappearances: tiles from a building housing a synagogue and a funeral home in Gęsia Street, blown up by the Germans after the ghetto uprising; and the plate of a dental practice, the original site of which was discovered through the telephone directory.

Commemorating

Natan Rapoport initiated a poster competition and the Jewish community began to collect money for a monument to the heroes of the Ghetto Uprising, which is now in the square in front of the Museum. A leaflet announced the fundraising …

… and certificates were printed to acknowledge contributors.

To stay or to go

The dilemma facing Jews in Poland after the war was stark: to stay or to go to Israel. All sorts of reasons shaped the decisions of individuals: these four people sketch some of them. Wera Lechtmann and her husband, a Pole, made a joint decision; Anna Trachtenherc left when her parents said it had to be done, but she knew some people who didn’t leave because their children said “no”; Tadeusz Kotarbinski expressed regret because his professor decided to leave; Maria Petrusewicz felt empty spaces among the guests at her wedding – “most of us were in prison or had already emigrated.”

Leaving wasn’t easy. Jews leaving Poland came under close scrutiny by secret police. They were only given one-way travel documents

Between 1968 and 1970, the communist authorities began harassing Jews and fostering anti-semitism. Jews were humiliated and deprived of Polish citizenship, although many Jews saw apoland as home.

Now

An increasing number of Poles are acknowledging Jewish roots, but they often find it difficult to balance Jewishness and Polishness.

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Cross-referencing

I love it now when I come across something I’ve already encountered in my seven-year exploration of Warsaw. Emmanuel Ringelblum, one of the archivists of the Warsaw ghetto, has woven his way through my visits since 2012. This time, in Gallery 8, I see footage of men pulling the tins containing some of the archives of the ghetto from their hiding place.

The second thread is more recent. At the Królikarnia exhibition Monument I saw the hands created by Alina Sczapocznikow for the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial: she appears again as one of the post-war Jewish artists. A survivor of the Holocaust, she sees her Jewishness as a private matter and her art rarely references those experiences. But she did enter competitions for commemorative monuments.

The third thread is from a few years ago, when I realised that the current site of Rossmans near Unii Lubelskiej used to be a movie theatre. The tanks moved in when the communists saw the screening of Apocalypse as a threat to their power during martial law. The lions survive.

Farrago 2

Warsaw extended time is nearly over. This time next week I’ll be en route back home after a totally family-focused three months. But there are miscellanies to order before that time comes, new oddities to record, and codas to other posts.

Reminders of the forest walk and circle theme

Always bikes – and wheels

Figures in the street

Shop windows

Botanica

Indulging a shoe fetish

Odds and ends

Looking high

Big school

Irresistible glass

Things on walls

(I knew I needed to be careful photographing here!)

Dilapidation

History by panel

Warsaw is very aware of its history and documents it frequently in outdoor panels. At the moment we’re commemorating the period of the Warsaw Uprising: the horrors of World War 2 are never far from consciousness. (For more about my Warsaw experiences of the Uprising see here and here)

Before and after the war: Szucha Street

Just before the busy intersection of Plac na Rozdrozu, intriguing panels show the before and after of one place. All you have to do is move sideways and the image morphs from pre-war thriving to post-war destruction. Jaś looked at these with us and offered the only possible commentary: “It’s very sad.” He also asked whether things like this happened in Australia. Yes, sadly they did: massacres of Indigenous people, and destruction of their way of life.

Not the easiest things to photograph: hard not to catch them mid-morph.

The Uprising

On the fence at Park Dreszera a series of images shows places nearby during the Uprising, the location of each photo clearly marked.

“Every bullet, one German”

A grand apartment

Our address is Bagatela. Our apartment is grand, a very generous upgrade by our AirBnb host from student digs in the servants quarters to a high-ceilinged 5th floor two bedroom space overlooking Plac Unii Lubelskiej.

The apartment from the corner opposite

The view from my bedroom window

Her Austrian family bought the building (built in 1912) in 1921 as an investment in luxury apartments. For many years it contained the offices of bureaucrats, who treated it very badly. After the end of communism the pre-WW2 owners fought to reclaim it and finally it’s back in the hands of the Austrian owners. I think it’s the same building Pani told me about at the Sue Ryder Museum, the one the communist regime stripped of its bourgeois mouldings.

You walk into the foyer past an open sleigh, shafts covered by boxing gloves, a detail not missed by Janek and doubted by my daughter until she came to visit. Hanging on the wall is a painting of a horse, and harness. On the couch inside the final door a jester reclines, and beyond the concierge’s desk is a glimpse of a courtyard. Past a Chinese chest is a painting and an old cash register. You wait for the lift near a gold figure draped with a scarf, and a fish fountain. The lift has a picture of Stalin’s gift on the back wall, but if you choose to walk up the stairs there’s a gilded mirror; an elegant pair, top-hatted and gold shoed; and a ghostly bike.

Inside the apartment are moulded ceilings, tall windows with a primitive form of double glazing, ceiling fans (thank goodness), an array of rugs all of which we want to roll up and take home, a glass-topped Singer sewing machine frame, and woodcuts and paintings.

The laundry is down two flights, near the stairs to the servants quarters, an odd mix of old and new – old door, and new pipes, our pipes clearly marked with our apartment number. The windows look down into the courtyard.

We leave our key in a silver dish at the front desk. Our rubbish we dump beside a great chest, and it is whisked away quickly.

Short walks on hot days

The temperature has been up to mid-30s and I’ve been flattened by it. At home, there’s nearly always a sea-breeze, and the ocean is only a few minutes away. So I haven’t been walking much, and I’m beginning to feel lack of input. My camera started playing up as we left Grójec (“Cannot read card”), so I haven’t even had the not inconsiderable incentive of photography.

The only way I’ll walk in such conditions is to do it at daybreak. Daybreak has shifted: when I first arrived, two and a half months ago, it was 4 am, this morning it was closer to 6 am.

Park Dreszera to Morskie Oko

Not a long walk this time, maybe a kilometre. I was drawn out by the need to follow up stuff I’d seen before, mainly photo-panels on the fence around Park Dreszera (featured in another post).

The sun was just lifting above the city and the light was luminous, but a red ball At sunrise doesn’t augur well for a cool day. The streets were just beginning to accommodate people in a rush; the odd homeless person lugging bags from wherever they spent the night; and me, an aging woman with a camera slung around her neck. A new camera.

The harvest of the morning was mainly murals, all in a side street. Vege Małpa made me smile for a number of reasons. Maja and Janek spent a long time coaching me to pronounce “małpa” (monkey) early in my stay and they delight in saying “Guess what daddy? Nanny Meg can say małpa.” What a linguistic triumph!

Next door was a bakery and the image of the rotund cook has now been appropriated by Joe for Pawel, the Polish chef in “Barry the frying pan.”

However, I revisited this street for a grand mural noticed on the way to one of the summer preschools when the sun was in completely the wrong place for photography.

In Shakespeare, spy novels and novels predating the 20th century, hollows in trees are often used for the exchange of secret messages. Not so here. The perfect place to nestle an empty bottle, or, as I’ve seen elsewhere, poke a wad of chewing gum.

The end-goal of this Short Walk on a Hot Day was the book exchange in a park, accommodated in a tree stump. It was here that Jaś found the cover of “Harry Potter and the order of the phoenix”, beginning a fascination with the series that gives him endless pleasure, and those who read to him practice in ruthless editing of endlessly boring unnecessities.

At turnaround-for-home time, I pass a decorated something, a memorial to an aspect of the Warsaw Uprising, and signifiers of Polish dry.

Ratusz Arsenal to Marymount-Potok

Another short walk in the early morning cool, in pursuit of a closer look at things glimpsed from tram or bus. In the early morning light, every aspect of the city has its charm. Except … What’s this? At 6am a huge police presence: roads taped, paddy wagons idling with flashing lights, men stationed every 200 metres. I later discover heads of state including Angela Merkel and Mike Pace, are visiting to mark September 1, the beginning of World War 2. Jaś later berated me: “Nanny Meg, you didn’t come and help when Poland needed help.”

I get off at Ratusz Arsenal, encountering the ghost of myself on my first visit, negotiating every aspect of Warsaw with so much difficulty. The fountain is sadly not working: maybe because Warsaw is water-challenged, maybe because it’s switched off at night, but it’s a lovely soft green and the cherub-like figures are winsome.

It’s a morning of arches, first the arcade arches around the Muranów theatre, where my son-in-law invited me to a movie on my first visit (I declined. Marcin, too, was strange at that point.) Then the arch at the top of the stairs above the theatre, and more arches along the street.

It was mainly murals that caught my eye from the tram, and I found more of them than I bargained for, with accompanying arches. Faces, a roll of film, pencils, and the eye poking out from Stalin’s Gift.

But there were other pleasures along the way: grunge, graffiti ghost, memorials and light playing with shadow.

Walking around Grójec Wielki 4

On the road to Nowa Wieś Zbąska

Family of four riding bikes. Joe embarked on a long walk. Ola and Jurek producing a gigantic apple szarlotka. And me? I follow a route parallel to my first village walk.

It’s hot, and I’m a bit reluctant. But I’m also mysteriously stiff and I know that walking will ease the stiffness. I should also know by now that every walk offers unexpected pleasure.

So I amble back towards the shop, noticing different things, as one always does covering the same turf.

I cross a busy rural road and walk past decorative concrete fences and bricks.

The road is deeply sandy, and quite busy. I pass a shrine, and an enticing track off into shade, but I leave it for another day.

I’m glad I didn’t yield to the seduction of a side track. Suddenly a deer leaps across the road, out of a corn crop into an open field, which is not to its liking, so it leaps back again.

Then, of course, there were more flowers, and irresistible dandelions.

This is a bike trail, marked by blue stencils on trees and discarded gloves.

When I reach a scattering of houses I decide it’s time to turn back.

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Walking around Grójec Wielki II & III

At Liny Lake

I watch the cyclists – Janek, Maja, Roza and Joe – disappear along the sandy track, heading for a swim in one of the many lakes in this part of Poland.

Marcin and I drive there later, but still not late enough. The cycling track is, in spots, deeply sandy and hard-going, so there are stops for tantrums and drinks and food. I have time to ramble around looking at moss and bark and the carved wooden figures that remind me of the beehive museum near Lake Bled and the wooden figures in the folk museum in Poznań. My favourite is a face deeply etched. “He’s obviously had a stroke” says my daughter.

I wander around the jetty, reading the signs – at least those composed of icons rather than words – and then lie down in the shade on the timber slats. After a while the lifeguard appears, checking that I still have life to guard. I thank him for his concern, and add something else to the list of things it’s probably better not to do as I age.

I join Marcin and discuss ratbags in the workplace, the creative process, and turning a heritage listed ruin into a restaurant, his current project as an architect.

A few phone calls to check on cycling progress, and finally they arrive, their beloved voices ahead of them. Food first and then a swim. Jaś is brave: he jumps into the deep water to join Roza and Joe and swims to the ladder to climb out. Maja and I walk in via the shallow water and then she swims between me and Joe using different variations of movement through water: dog, frog, log and the Australian crawl, her least favourite.

Then we all lie under towels in the sun, chatting in a desultory way. The kids quote loudly from Dogman, their favourite book of the moment: “Me go boom boom in my panties”, which is evidently what you get on the evening news when you withdraw all books from the world.

When it’s time to go home, the little bikes are put on the bike rack, and the little people confined to the back seat.

Towards Wąchabno

How is this different from home? Here, it’s spongey underfoot, there crunchy. Patches of ground, randomly selected, are covered in moss, the detritus of different trees, leaves of different configurations. Even the fact that trees are in regular rows, plantation style, doesn’t detract from my pleasure in difference: the flat white trunks with obtruding black patterns ; the russet trunks sun-illuminated; the lavish grasses; the flowers; and those berries shining so richly and arranged so elegantly.

 

 

 

Walking around Grójec Wielki I

We return to Grójec Wielki for another family holiday: Roza and Marcin, Maja and Janek, Ola and Jurek and Joe and Meg. Ten days in western Poland overlooking a jetty and a canal where Jurek fished, and an above-ground pool where there’s plenty of bombing and Joe transforms into a body board or a surf board for the kids to ride. There is a bit of bike riding (not me: I might break) and I have the chance for four solitary walks on sandy tracks in the country in a small farming community, once part of Germany.

Around the village

The family has gone to visit German bunkers, built in the early 1920s in defiance of League of Nations rearmament rules when this part of Poland belonged to Germany. There are no babcia requirements for a few hours – no cats cradles, UNO, crossword construction – so I take a stroll along to the shop to see if I can manage to buy butter. To my eye the shop only sells butter and ice-creams, and yet every morning Ola and Jurek return with a backpack of goodies: same shop, different shoppers!

It’s been raining and droplets are glimmering on every leaf, and pendulous from every berry. The road to the shop is salted with flowers, some of them recognisable as the roadside weeds at home.

I continue on over the bridge, looking back up the canal towards our house, to see what the village looks like. There’s an enticing bus-stop, but no bus number, timetable or destination. A deer leaps on a road-sign, prompting the first of many ear worms: “Doh, a deer, a female deer …”. A shrine is reached by a neat path which also gives access to bright berries.

Along the river are old trees with striated or plaited bark; reflections; and what look like overgrown seats for an amphitheatre.

I’m drawn further on by brick buildings. So many I’ve had to pass when I’m in a car. A newer classier, far from charming house withdraws beyond fence and gates. Unfamiliar cars are parked outside some kind of automotive shop. Some old brick houses have been saved from dereliction by plastering – saved by uglification.

The road is paved, and there are the enticements, old brick buildings with decorative brickwork, solid against a pale grey sky. I look up, and see a stork’s nest perched on a telegraph pole. No stork, but much smaller birds flitting around it.

There are signs of farming: hay bales, tractors on the move and parked, a patch of corn, and behind a high fence the contented clucking of many chooks.

I turn back at the end of the paved road into rain. A long time since I’ve walked in the rain. I’m unphased, because it’s warm, but mildly annoyed because I can’t take the photos I planned for the return journey. I take brief shelter by the river with a couple of German cyclists, and decide to keep walking.

I stop at the shop to buy “masło” so focused on that word and on negotiating my way between three large men retreating inside from their gossip-circle outside, that I forget the politeness of “poproszę”. However, when one of them says “Pada” I know they’re commenting on the rain.

I stride off, mission accomplished, past the hanging apples, windfalls from which end up purloined by Jurek and turned into compôte, just before the owner mows them into pulp.