POLAND – Kerk Boon Leng Photographs & Notes

jewel in kraków

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Kraków (or Cracow) is a real European Jewel.

For centuries Kraków was Poland’s most important city – a place of artists, scholars and kings. Its magnificent town square, atmospheric cobbled-stone streets, ancient buildings and medieval castle on a hill replete with stories of a resident dragon are stuff on which Gothic fantasies are dreamt up.

Kraków is also a lucky city. It could easily have ended up after the Second World War like Warsaw, Poznan and Gdansk – Polish cities that were vandalised, mutilated and destroyed either by the Nazi occupiers on their way out or the Soviet invaders on their way in.

Some historians say that in January 1945 Konev the Soviet Commander purposefully liberated Kraków in time to save it. Most people now believe that, in truth, the Nazis were simply just too busy running for their lives to have time to lay a dynamite in every house.

Whether by dint of fate or a miracle, Kraków was left unharmed. The beautiful city you see today is authentically old and original.

Sadly not everything about Kraków survived the German Occupation. Kraków’s large and important Jewish population did not. It was entirely wiped out. The Jewish citizens of Kraków were herded like cattles and taken to concentration camps and killing factories in Bełżec, Plaszow and nearby Auschwitz to be murdered on an industrial scale.

S0290075 — The genuinely eccentric Krakowian charm

S0489121 — Beautiful Olga at her coffee kiosk

S0188064 — Poland has a population of about 38.6 million. The population growth rate stands at a paltry 0.02% a year but at least, unlike most of Eastern Europe, it is not falling by much despite high emigration.

S0998322 — Striding past a traditional Polish restaurant

S0760209 — Krakow has a tradition of learning. Young people from all over the country come to study at the Jagiellonian University, the second oldest in Eastern Europe, founded on 12 May 1364 by Casimir the Great

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S0159032 — Youthful commuters at a tram stop

S0938299 — In 2013 Krakow was made a UNESCO City of Literature in recognition of the city’s reading and scholarship tradition. Other cities awarded around the world include Edinburgh (2004) and Baghdad (2015)

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S0140034 — Although Poland in November 2010 finally followed Europe in banning smoking in public areas, the country remains moderately smoker-friendly.

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S0447191 — The Krakow Barbican built around 1498 is the remnant of a system of fortifications and defences that once encircled the city

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Ci, co wiedzieli
o co tutaj szło,
musza ustąpić miejsca tym,
co wiedzą mało.
I mniej niż mało.
I wreszcie tyle co nic.

W trawie, która porosła
przyczyny i skutki,
musi ktoś sobie leżeć
z kłosem w zębach
i gapić się na chmury.

Those who knew
what was going on here
must give way to
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass which has overgrown
reasons and causes,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.

From “The End and the Beginning” by Wisława Szymborska, translated by Joanna Trezeciak

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S0242060 — Graffitied-shop front in the old Jewish quarter of Kazimierz

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S0582163 — Electric trams were introduced in 1901 when Krakow was part of the Austrian Hapsburg Empire.

S0692203 — Polish comfort food – pork fat spread or *smalec* on crusty bread

S0752238 — Club owner cum jazz saxophonist piping before the gig

Words and Pictures Copyright Kerk Boon Leng May 2016

May 1, 2016May 3, 2016 by dkwts Categories: POLAND, UncategorizedTags: Cracow capital of Poland, Jews of Krakow, Krakow Travel Blog, Street Photography Krakow 3 Comments

the view from stary pudłów

Measured by percentage of population, Poland is less rural than at least a dozen other countries in Europe. Richer countries like Finland and Ireland have proportionately more people living out in the countryside, yet the cherubic image of Poland as a pastoral land of priests and peasants lives on, often in a powerful, magical and romantic way.

When Pawel asked if I would like to spend a weekend with his family at their home on a farm about 40 km from Łódź I jumped at the opportunity and quickly said yes to the invitation. It was for me a rare chance as a stranger from Asia to get close and personal to the real soul of an important and resurgent nation at the very heart of Europe.

As a nation, Poland is an authentic European hybrid.

Despite being Western in culture, religion and politics, Poland is by geography and recent history an Eastern European country with a language that sounds like a rustling swishing variety of Russian but written in Latin alphabets like French and English.

Present day Poland may not be rich or even stylishly influential in world affairs but with its homogenous society rooted in a decisive role in history and Roman Catholic tradition, the country has pressing lessons for a Europe facing a crisis of divided societies fractured by the issue of mass mainly male muslim migration.

The first lesson learnt is in the heart-melting kindness felt by travellers, including non-white people, to Poland. Such experiences are signs of a people largely at peace with their identity, faith and conscience. They also prove that Poland unlike Western Europe with its history of colonisation and slavery see no need to give out residency or passports on a huge scale to nationalities of people of different skin colours in order to be nice, tolerant and respectful of them and their cultures. After all, to cherish ones own heritage and wanting to protect it from a deluge by migrants of a different religion after centuries of foreign domination and subjugation does not equal racism or exclusion.

Indeed if Europe is today honest about defending what it considers to be its inalienable and inherent secular liberal values from the twin threats of terrorism and rising intolerance, then those values must also necessarily and urgently be enlarged to include Poland’s right to remain Catholic and Polish without being branded superstitious or regressive.

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All images and words Copyright Kerk Boon Leng 2016

Apr 17, 2016Apr 22, 2016 by dkwts Categories: POLANDTags: Kalczakowski Family Photographs, Pawel Kalczakowski, poland and migrants, Poland Catholic country, Poland Rural Heartland, Stary Pudlow photograph, Stary Pudlow travel, travel in rural poland 9 Comments

Łódź in the middle

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Getting lost in Łódź (pronounced “wootsh”) is an entirely easy thing to do. Although Łódź is strategically situated in the middle of Poland where long distance railways and roads intersect, the city does not have a central railway station or one within walking distance of its urban heart.

Long distance trains use the Łódź Kaliska or the Łódź Widzew stations. Both stations are in non-descript surroundings looking more like suburban stations of a college campus than a transport hub for the country’s third largest city. I remember arriving south from Krakow in one of the stations and departing north to Warsaw from another.

Łódź was actually at one time a great industrial centre in Eastern Europe famous for its textile factories. Like Manchester half a century before,Łódź’s textile industry declined and workers lost their jobs and purpose, pushed out of the market by cheaper imported clothes when communism ended in 1989 and Poland turned expectantly to Western-styled capitalism.

These days Łódź is taking steps to polish up its rust belt image of empty mills and silent chimneys. The old architecture has been spring-cleaned, refurbished and given a new use.

S0223089 S0343124 S0924221 S0065023 S0533177 S0443153 S0804185 S0043011 S0954229 S0383137 S0914213 S0864198 S0784180 S0884204 All pictures and words Copyright Kerk Boon Leng 2016

Apr 14, 2016Apr 20, 2016 by dkwts Categories: POLAND, UncategorizedTags: Getting to Lodz, Lodz Kaliska photo, Lodz People Photography, Lodz Street Photography, Lodz Train stations, Lodz travel blog, Lodz Travel Photos, LODZ WIDZEW, Textile Industry in Lodz Leave a comment

warsaw surprising

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Not yet a prime tourist destination but Warsaw is already a pretty famous spot on earth. This city gave its name to an international air carriage treaty, a Marxist military alliance and a romantic musical composition. But it is with less gleeful things and greyness in general that Warsaw seems to have a lingering association.

Warsaw’s tragic history is the result of its tensile geography. The city is a cream blot in the middle of a giant Polish pancake, part of the Great European Plains that stretch the entire extent of the continent from the Ural Mountains to the Atlantic shores. With no towering range or wide seas as shield against invaders, the lands where Poland has been were fought over and owned back and forth between two of Europe’s nastiest neighbours – Germany and Russia.

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For most of last century, fate has dealt Poland a particularly bad hand. Warsaw witnessed repeated wars, extermination and annihilation. Yet the city with its motto Contemnit Procellas (to defy the storm), seemed to had refused to just give up and die.

The Polish capital is remembered for not one but two large and ill-fated uprisings against German occupation in World War 2. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising that took place in 1943 was the single largest Jewish revolt against the Nazis followed a year later in 1944 by the Warsaw Uprising that went into history books as the largest military operation by a resistance movement in Europe during the war.

These historical episodes and their aftermaths not only proved that Warsaw was solely the city in occupied Europe that had the balls to defy the Nazis in large scale open outnumbered and outgunned rebellion, they also testified to the city’s desperate heroism and its indestructibility.

In fact, the Polish people’s defiance and unbreakable will to survive pissed Hitler off so much that he ordered their capital Warsaw to be razed to the ground. By the time the war ended in 1945 almost 90% of Warsaw’s buildings had been reduced to rubble and its population either murdered, expelled or both.

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The story of Warsaw’s resurrection is epic.

While the world has seen many war damaged cities rise from their ashes none had been so deliberately, completely and systematically destroyed yet meticulously and painstakingly put back together to be an exact copy of the original as Warsaw and its beautiful old city.

This, to me is reason enough to want to see Warsaw.

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