The daughter of a former communist functionary who served as Poland`s deputy minister of forests during the Brezhnev era likes to recount to friends how her father had to entertain visiting dignitaries from the Soviet Union and other fraternal countries with hunting parties in the Bialowieza Forest.
Bialowieza, sprawling on both sides of the Polish-Soviet border 125 miles east of Warsaw, is the one remaining tract of primeval forest left in Europe. It`s a dense, overgrown wilderness whose massive trees have never been cut and whose natural cycle is as unchanged through the ages as polluted air wafted over from elsewhere has allowed.
A large tract has been preserved as a national park. It is a refuge for many forest creatures, including one of the last herds of the near-extinct European bison, zubr in Polish, a victim of civilization that became rare as long as 400 years ago, after roaming for centuries through vast stretches of woodland across the continent.
The daughter of the former deputy minister recalls that despite or because of its rarity, the bison was the favorite game of favored visiting dignitaries. It is grand and rare and special, and its horned and furry head looked magnificent stuffed and mounted on a wall. To bag a bison was a real coup, not to mention a political necessity. But it was scarce and very shy;
there was little chance of finding, much less shooting, one on a normal hunt. The solution was easy and not unlike methods used by autocrats of earlier years and other political regimes. The deputy forestry minister merely arranged for assistants to capture individual beasts and hide them among the trees along the hunting route. When the visiting dignitary drew near, a bison would be propelled into his path and-bang!-good neighborly relations were preserved for at least a little while longer.
Bialowieza is in the heart of the curious, little-known and little-trafficked region making up Poland`s northeastern borderlands across from the former Soviet Union. Here last summer, I made a meandering journey through a 80-mile-long slice of territory bounded by the old Soviet frontier on the east and Highway 192 on the west, a two-lane artery running north-south through Siemiatycze and Bialystok.
My fascination with borders dates back to my childhood, to the memorable time in the summer of 1959 when my father drove us straight through the night from Brussels to Denmark, crossing Belgium, Holland and West Germany in one single dash.
Memories of the war were fresh; my father simply did not want to stop in Germany. I can still, after more than 30 years, remember how we finally crossed into Denmark at about 3 a.m. The Scandinavian sun was just rising, a red egg on the horizon. My father pulled over to the side of the road just past the border checkpoint. It was quiet and very cool outside. He got out of the car, stretched luxuriously, climbed back in and, with a sigh of relief, slept.
Borders are not just boundaries, they are separations. There is always the hint of the unknown on the other side, of things being kept out as well as in. And Poland`s eastern borderlands hold a particular fascination: They used to be heartlands but became borderlands when consigned into far fringes by the misfortunes of war.
Polish filmmaker Janusz Kijowski recently described the region as
”bizarre” because, he said, ”it is the one part of the country where things are the way they used to be; a mixture of peoples, ethnic groups, religions.”
Within today`s borders, drawn by Stalin and sanctioned by the Allies at the end of World War II, almost all Polish citizens are ethnic Poles practicing Roman Catholicism. But throughout most of its history, on or off the map, Poland was a multinational state or, at least, a multinational concept.
For centuries it was formally united with Lithuania. Poland stretched for hundreds of miles into what was the Soviet Union, and in its various incarnations encompassed a colorful mix of peoples whose presence in that part of Eastern Europe bespoke century upon bloody century of invasions, conquests, slaughters, settlements and mass movements of populations.
The resulting mix-Poles, Byelorussians, Lithuanians, Tartars, Ukrainians, Germans, Jews and others-was a tossed salad rather than a melting pot. Its various elements, speaking different languages, practicing different religions and following different traditions, coexisted uneasily instead of fusing into a whole. There was toleration rather than tolerance, as historian Norman Davies put it, and often not even that.
An area that once was at the very center of what historically were Polish lands, the borders now are a sparsely populated backwater of small towns and isolated villages-flotsam and jetsam washed up by the tide of history, where the isolation from dense forests and bumpy dirt roads, gasoline shortages and sketchy telephone networks has permitted remnants of earlier times to live on largely as they always have.
Entire villages speak Byelorussian; Russian Orthodox nuns chant ancient prayers on a sacred hilltop; a handful of Moslems, descendants of the Tartar hordes who six centuries and more ago poured out of Crimea and devastated the area, pray, facing Mecca, from a tiny wooden mosque in a remote meadow. Everywhere, there are the ghosts of once-thriving Jewish communities and reminders of the brutality of the Nazis who destroyed them: abandoned cemeteries slowly sinking into the bosom of nature, ruined synagogues, a Star of David built into a decorative window frame.
A digression: The near-extinct bison, the zubr, has given its name to one of the country`s famous vodkas-Zubrowka. The drink is flavored with strands of the long, tough grass the animals either graze or urinate on, depending on whom you ask. In Warsaw, one can buy kosher Zubrowka, produced by a firm run by a man whose relatives, like 3 million other Polish Jews, were victims of the Holocaust.
A century ago, a native of today`s borderlands-then part of Russian-occupied Poland-came up with an idea he hoped, in effect, would save the world, or at least the world he knew.
Lazarus Ludowik Zamenhof was a Polish Jew, an oculist born in 1859 in Bialystok, then one of the leading towns within the so-called Pale of Settlement, the tightly limited region of Western Russia, including Russian-occupied Poland, that Catherine the Great set apart as the only place in the empire where Jews were allowed to live. Here are my own roots: a village somewhere between Grodno and Vilna, which gave birth to my great-grandfather, a peddler who ended up in Texas.
In 1887 Zamenhof, convinced that the national and racial hatred he saw around him were exacerbated by linguistic barriers, published his famous opus, ”An International Language,” under the pen name Dr. Esperanto-the hoping one-which became the name of his new language.
Esperanto became the most successful of the artificial languages, and there are Zamenhof streets all over Poland and other East European countries. Its impact was negligible, however; a language without cultural evolution or background is simply a collection of words.
Zamenhof died in 1917, the year of the Bolshevik Revolution and four years before Poland reappeared on the map, a country of bitter political and ethnic confrontations, economic chaos and other woes that were the legacy of 120 years of partition.
Zamenhof`s son, Adam, also an oculist, was the inventor of a device to check blind spots in the field of vision, and he eventually became the manager of the Jewish hospital on Czyste Street in Warsaw. In 1939, in the first days of the German occupation of Warsaw, as Martin Gilbert notes in his book ”The Holocaust, A Jewish Tragedy,” Dr. Zamenhof, son of ”the hoping one,” was arrested and ”never seen again.”
Today Bialystok is the largest town-the only real city-in Poland`s northeast. Twenty-five miles from the old Soviet border and 125 miles northeast of Warsaw, it sits on the rail line to Grodno, Vilnius and St. Petersburg. There are no Jews left. A hideous, huge war memorial stands in the center of town, on the cemented-over site of one of the six Jewish cemeteries that existed before the war. The site of another cemetery is now a vast open market, where Russians, Gypsies, Romanians and Poles buy and sell food, flowers and every other commodity imaginable.
At the center of the one remaining Jewish cemetery, an overgrown expanse of 10,000 graves outside of town, stands a black stone monument to a pogrom of 1905.
”It is a miracle that it still exists,” says Tomasz Wisniewski, bearded and jeans-clad, a non-Jew who discovered the Jewish history of his native city while jailed for nine months for dissident political activities during the early `80s and now devotes his time to making a detailed record of what is left. ”This whole area,” he says, gesturing to include everything in this corner of Poland, ”is one big cemetery. Its history is only wars, invasions, pogroms. There is no place else like it.”
When he hears that we are setting off for Krynki, a remote hamlet on the old Soviet border 28 miles from Bialystok, he warns us, ”Be careful.”
The road to Krynki cleaves straight through dense forests. Before the war, it was a thriving little town of about 13,000 people, more than half of them Jews, who ran a large leather industry and carried out widespread trade. ”I don`t know exactly how many Jews there were, but the cemetery is large,” says an old man, shaking his head over his garden fence. His home in the village center overlooks a vast pile of rubble, the foundations of what had been the settlement`s main synagogue, a mighty neoclassical edifice that must have been the most important building in town.
The village itself is a ragged sprawl of weather-beaten wooden houses clustered amid potato fields two miles from the Soviet border. Half a dozen drunks glare at strangers from the steps of the local restaurant, a boxy greasy spoon where men looking as worn as their houses prop up half-full bottles of vodka in the middle of the afternoon, even in the separate dining room displaying a sign prohibiting alcohol.
Krynki`s low-eaved, salmon-pink Krokus cinema was once a synagogue. It is offering a double feature: ”The Witches of Eastwick” and ”Greystoke, Legend of Tarzan.” Next to the posters advertising the movies, someone has scrawled one word in English: ”Slayer.”
We take pictures, and an old peasant man, his face as brown and wrinkled as a walnut shell, calls us over to his house, the rickety wooden building next door. He has a book in his hands and he motions us to take it. It`s the book of the Psalms, in Hebrew, and it bears the publication date 1845. It`s in terrible condition, its leather binding cracked and falling apart.
”Here,” he says, ”take it, I don`t understand anything about this.”
He tells us how he and his family were from that part of Poland that became Soviet territory after the war. As part of one of the biggest mass movements of people in Europe this century, he fled across the new, artificial frontier in 1948, settling here as close as possible to where he came from, taking over the home of one of the thousands of Krynki`s slaughtered Jews. He found the book of psalms in the attic.
In the Jewish cemetery, a beautiful horse grazes in the tall grass on a peaceful hillside covered with tilted, eroding tombstones. ”The tombstones pulled down, their epitaphs blurred out speak of the extermination of people,” wrote Anna Kamienska in her introduction to Monika Krajewska`s moving book on Jewish cemeteries, ”Time of Stones.”
In a potato field near the edge of the cemetery, a peasant who has always lived here, whose father lived here, whose grandfather lived here, shows us the foundations of a pigsty built by the Nazis. He pries away a building block. Like the other blocks, it is a tombstone, a Jewish mazzevah, beautifully carved with Hebrew letters.
Outside the restaurant, one of the drunks approaches Stanislaw, our Polish friend.
”Are these people with you Jews?” he asks. ”If they are, you know, we are going to torch their car . . . .”
Six miles south of Krynki, the paved road stops at another tiny hamlet, Kruszyniany. Little distinguishes the weathered wooden houses from any other remote settlement in the region. In the hillside cemetery, however, the neat gravestones are inscribed in Arabic, not Hebrew. And on a dirt road just outside the village, the low twin towers of the tiny wooden house of worship support a golden crescent moon, not a cross.
Moslems have lived in Poland continuously for six centuries, since the time when Tartars, many of them prisoners of war, began settling in Polish lands. They were descendent of the ”Golden Horde” of Tartars who thundered out of the East during the Middle Ages and who, in their first conquest of Poland, reached as far west as Legnica, only 137 miles from Berlin.
To this day, every hour on the hour a trumpeter blows a plaintive call from each of the four corners of the Church of the Virgin Mary on Krakow`s Old Market. The call, known as the Hejnal Mariacki and broadcast on nationwide radio at noon, ends in a high note that is cut off abruptly, in memory of the original trumpeter who was felled by an arrow in the neck at just that point of his trumpet call warning the city of a Tartar attack.
The artificial frontier drawn by Stalin cut through a cluster of Moslem villages, leaving on the Polish side only Kruszyniany and the equally remote village of Bohoniki nearby. Many Moslems-as did Catholic Poles-fled from the Soviet side into Poland immediately after the war; many of those who remained in the Soviet Union were deported to Siberia.
Today about 3,000 Moslem Poles continue to form what they say is the world`s oldest such community in lands never ruled by Moslems.
The tiny, dark-green mosque at Kruszyniany, like that at Bohoniki, dates to the late 17th Century and is in beautifully maintained condition, largely through donations by Arab and other Moslem pilgrims who sometimes flock to pray here with many as 1,000 people a day.
Only two Moslem families still live in Kruszyniany. Seventy-seven-year-old Ali Popluwski, a sprightly gnome of a man crippled and crooked from a German bullet that lodged in his leg when Nazi occupiers turned the mosque into a field hospital, serves as caretaker and shows visitors the simple interior decorated with views of Mecca and prayer rugs, and has them leaf through his stacks of massive guest books to see the good wishes written down by people from all over the world.
On the hillside above the mosque, gravestones bearing typical Polish names are inscribed in Polish and Arabic and bear the crescent-moon symbol. As witnesses to the repression under the Russians who occupied this part of Poland during the partitions, the graves of those who died in the 19th Century are inscribed in Cyrillic.
Grabarka is a holy mountain, a sacred place of pilgrimage amid rolling farmland that looks like a postcard of an earlier age. Dirt roads cut through villages of weathered wood and thatch, black and white cows graze at the roadside, storks perch on chimneys and peasants slowly till their fields with horse and plow.
The sacred mountain has an unusual feature that you begin to notice as you go up the rutted track leading to the low summit and the clearing around the church and nearby convent. All at once you realize that not all the sturdy uprights in the woods spreading down the flanks of the hillside are trunks of trees. Many, astonishingly, are the shafts of lofty crosses, hundreds of them, thousands of them, planted into the earth around the chapel to form a forest of crosses.
The crosses are of all sizes, some as tall as trees, others as tiny as flowers, and packed so closely together it impossible to walk between them.
Pilgrims, the thousands of them who for decades have been flocking here on the Feast of the Transfiguration in mid-August, have brought them and planted them, as they prayed, into the earth.
The nuns` voices whisper out into the hushed stillness of the afternoon, miles from any other habitation. A black-robed figure of a young nun, her stark black eyebrows like a continuation of her flowing robe and head-hugging cape, swishes through the shadows.
A tin-roofed well at the foot of the hill beckons pilgrims to drink the holy water, and we do. A pair of hobbled cows lumber clumsily down the dusty track and pause to quench their thirst in a stream.
Postscript: Less than two months after our visit, word came that the little wooden church at Grabarka had burned to the ground, the victim of arson.
At first there was concern that the fire may have been a violent manifestation of ethnic intolerance. Investigations, however, showed that it was the frustrated action of a common thief, who, unable to gain access to the church or to the locked car of a priest, threw gasoline against the door and set the building afire.
According to reports, the forest of crosses was unharmed, and a new chapel is being built.
