JUNE 11 - Back to the train station (Gdańsk Główny) for a 30 minute ride to the southeast, to the city of Malbork. The day is sunny without any indication of rain.
The town of Malbork is quiet, dominated by the castle that dominates the skyline. Malbork Castle itself is an amazing construction, said to be the largest castle complex in the world by surface area of the walled perimeter, and it certainly the largest brick castle in the world. We get the audio guide tour, dishing out 190 złoty ($40) for the three of us. This turns out to be a good choice, as Odette really likes being able to listen independently as she walks around.
Malbork Castle was completed in 1309 by knights of the Teutonic Order, who were just starting to occupy Danzig (Gdańsk) to the north, as discussed in Day 68. While they eventually lost Danzig, their residence here continued unabated until 1457. The castle was considered important enough that it housed every Teutonic Order Grand Master, a total of 15 leaders, from 1309-1457.
The middle castle area houses several museums, one of which is dedicated to amber. Ready to hear why amber is such a big deal in this region? I’ve avoided amber museums so far, so I guess the time was ripe to end up in one.
Amber is fossilized tree resin. In the Eocene, about 40 million years ago, this region was covered in warmer climate forests. The sheer volume of trees produced a lot of resin, which washed down rivers and ended up being concentrated in soils. Fast forward to the Neolithic, and people were beginning to dig it up and fashion it into ornaments. It has a warm inner glow and is easy to shaped with tools, making it a coveted jewelry item. Poland has some of the best deposits of amber, in particular the region around Gdańsk, so it has been an important local commodity through all recorded history. So much so that the Teutonic Order made a special effort to control the production and sale of amber during their rule here.
After the removal of the Teutonic Order in 1457, the castle became the residence of Polish kings. It continued to be renovated and maintained for a few hundred years, until the partitioning of Poland in 1772 relegated it to being a storehouse for the Prussians. Enough interest was taken in it during the late 1800’s that much reconstruction and preservation was done. Unfortunately, a lot of this work was undone by WWII bombings and everything started over after 1945. As with so many other historic sites we’ve visited over the past month, it is a credit to the citizens of these countries that so much effort has gone into bringing them back to life.
Back to Gdańsk on the train. No one wants to visit the World War II Museum, so I go by myself. Like the Katyn Museum in Warsaw, it is underground and has that dark, enclosed feel, the intent being to throw the visitor into the dark memory of war.
Of all the nations involved in the war, Poland came out as one of the worst affected. Infamously, the German army crossing the Polish border on Sept 1, 1939 officially started the conflict. The German war machine was already huge, meaning that Poland was already at a serious disadvantage. If that weren’t enough, Russia was invaded on the eastern border, sealing its fate. According to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact discussed previously, Poland was divided along a north-south line between the two invaders. The location of this line may look confusing today, because in 1939, Poland extended much further east, into Lithuania, the Kaliningrad Oblast, Belarus, and Ukraine. Hence the line in some cases still defines Poland’s eastern border today.
The overt German character of Danzig made it a strategic spot for Germany in the opening month of the war. As such, no destruction was wrought as Germany took possession of their agreed-upon part of Poland.
Near the end of the war, however, the large German population was told to remain in the city, even as it became clear that the Red Army was approaching. The population, knowing very well what was coming, tried to escape to Germany anyway, even though the penalty for doing so was death. As predicted, the Red Army pummeled the city, reducing most of it to ruins, and on March 30, 1945, entered.
In the aftermath of Danzig’s fall, most of the German population was killed or exiled, and the Poles went about destroying much of the German influence of the city, including removing all the street names. From this point on, the city became markedly Polish, and lost for good its coveted Free City status.
After the museum, I wandered over to the Monument of the Fallen Shipyard Workers of 1970, which was unveiled in 1980.
The monument is oddly specific, but it hugely important, both in Poland and Eastern Europe in general. If you are old enough, you might remember the Solidarity movement in Poland that changed the country’s relationship with the Soviet Union in the 1980’s. Prior to this, it was Soviet policy that all workers, everywhere within the Soviet sphere, were perfectly happy and equal to their leaders. Since this was obviously false, it was a sort of irony that labor unions in Gdańsk resorted to strikes to make their case that the Soviet system was not achieving this happy paradise after all. The incident in 1970 triggered a decade of discontent in Poland, which was a nominally independent nation and therefore not subject to the same intensity of repression visited upon the Soviet Republics. Regardless, the strikes of 1970 resulted in at least 42 deaths. But the Solidarity movement was born, led by dissident leader Lech Walęsa. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, for heading a movement of passive resistance and negotiation that loosened the grip of Soviet power in Poland, and showed a way forward for other states behind the Iron Curtain. Lech Walęsa would become the country’s first democratically elected president in 1990.
I am old enough that I remember the Solidarity movement, and Lech Walęsa, very clearly, probably because that was always a big news item in the West.
