What Every American Should Know About Europe

by Melissa Rossi

  After the regime had entirely crumbled and the country was an independent democratic republic yet again, Poland was slapped by uncomfortable political realities. Kindly Walesa was a charismatic protest leader, but he was clueless about running a government: he sacked prime ministers almost annually, and his administration was haunted by scandals.

  In 1995, running for a second presidential term, Lech Walesa lost to former Communist Aleksander Kwasniewski. That race was close, but when the two faced off again in 2000, Kwasniewski was reelected and Walesa picked up less than 1 percent of the vote.

  Meanwhile, the Catholic Church wanted paybacks. Among other things, the Church demanded that religious education be taught in school and sex education be banned. More controversially, religious forces successfully pushed through a 1993 bill to outlaw abortion, which had been legal under the Communist regime.

  The good news was that, on paper at least, Poland was vastly improving economically: in the decade between 1989 and 1999, when Poland was selling off many of her state-owned industries, the Polish economy grew by 25 percent8 and the international media cooed about the Poles’ increased wealth. Many people, however, weren’t sharing the enthusiasm: a Polish government study showed that in 1995 a whopping 40 percent were living in poverty,9 and even now plenty of houses in the countryside don’t have running water.

  THE BISON WITH WANDERLUST10

  After the First World War, Polish bison were nearly extinct—a result of over-hunting by bison-happy Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand and others, who shot them down with machine guns—but thanks to intervention by animal biologists, the beasts now roam the Carpathian Mountains and nearby forests, perhaps too freely in the case of the mammoth beast known as Pulpit, a bison said to stand nearly seven feet high. As a young bull, Pulpit and a pal wandered off the reserve, reportedly crossing southern Poland and making it to the Ukraine—where apparently there wasn’t much action, since the two turned around and came back. Upon their return to the reserve, their friendship was poisoned—over females, as is so often the case. During the mating season, his traveling companion, not wanting competition, booted Pulpit out of the reserve. On his second trek, which lasted nearly a year, Pulpit’s behavior was indeed beastly. He trampled over fences, destroyed crops, knocked over fruit carts, rammed down shacks, and, once, crashed into a funeral. His obnoxious behavior prompted the death wagon’s horses to shoot off, knocking the corpse from the wooden hearse, while the bereaved scrambled up trees. A special committee tracked Pulpit down and successfully returned him to the reserve—but come the next mating season, he was pushed off again. This time, orders were to shoot him if he posed a threat, and, as if sensing the danger, Pulpit was on his best behavior, so gentle that children fed him sweets and biscuits as he re-visited his former haunts. Apparently, he was eating far too much sugar; worried about his health (bison, too, have to watch out for tooth decay, obesity, and indigestion), the authorities had to intervene. Realizing that, like so many a wayward male, Pulpit needed a female to keep him in line, they brought him to a different reserve, where perhaps he found the love of his life. He never strolled off again. (The reserve was fenced in.)

  Since she came galloping out of the gates in 1989, Polska has mostly been stuck: the great dreams that fueled independence have faded, Solidarity has sputtered, former leader Lech Walesa is out, the initially promising economic performance has stalled, and unemployment is spinning out of control. In short, Poland appears to be at her most painful moment in post-Communist history, but hopefully EU membership will eventually numb the pain. And a dash of decent leadership would certainly help.

  Hot Spots

  Warsaw: Hitler ordered the Polish capital demolished, ordering “Leave no stone standing atop another.” The Nazis succeeded in the mission, demolishing 85 percent of Warsaw; it’s said that only a few thousand people survived in the city that was formerly home to millions, a third of them Jewish. The Old Town was (surprisingly) rebuilt by the Soviets. With buildings painted in golds, pinks, and reds, and the clomping of horse-drawn carriages (now carrying tourists) across cobblestone squares, some say it’s prettier than before. The Royal Way that stretches from the Royal Palace to the royal summer home is thick with culture—museums, galleries, churches, and palaces stretch out along this passageway that would still please a king—and the once-seedy nightlife is slowly giving way to slick clubs and chill-out lounges; there’s even a growing fashion district.

  The Big Screen: Warsaw is the setting for The Pianist, a movie about the April 1943 Ghetto Uprising. The film, which took the Cannes Film Festival’s highest prize and garnered Roman Polanski a Best Director Oscar, is based on the true story of pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman (1911–2000), former musician for Polish state radio. Forced into the Warsaw Ghetto, he escaped to the Aryan part of the city and lived to write Death of a City, first published in 194911 and later republished as The Pianist.

  Krakow/Cracow: Hub of education, industry, and culture, Krakow holds Poland’s regal and rebellious past: site of two 1790s uprisings against Russia and Prussia, which led to Poland’s demise, she’s now starring on the tourist map as the setting of Schindler’s List. Believed to have been founded after legendary Prince Krak slew the resident subterranean dragon, Krakow is one of the prettiest cities of Europe. Nearby salt mines are dripping with elaborate crystalline sculptures, including glimmering chandeliers and even a chapel of salt; some say trolls used to live there.

  Krakow: The setting for Schindler’s List

  Auschwitz: The most potent symbol of the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust, this concentration camp’s brick buildings and ovens still send chills up the spines of the half million people who visit each year. In 1940, the Nazi-occupied Polish village of Oswiecim had her name changed to Auschwitz and her history altered forever when she became the site of a camp that held up to 20,000, usually their last residence before death. First housing Poles, then Russians, then gypsies, then Jews, the original Auschwitz was expanded to include several other sites, including Birkenau (Auschwitz II) a few miles away, where the majority of Jews were sent. Here, in the complex of buildings with room for 90,000, most were gassed and their bodies thrown into crematoria that could incinerate more than 300 a day. The exact number of Jews, gypsies, gays, and other Poles who died here isn’t really known, but it was at least 1.5 million. In 1996, plans to build a shopping center right outside its gates were halted.

  SHINING UP THE RUST BELT

  The smoke-belching factories in Poland that produce low-quality steel, blacken buildings, and clog the air with brown clouds require major renovation and are often shut down. In 2002, Poland put the bulk of her steel mills up for sale. U.S. Steel was interested in taking over 70 percent of Poland’s steel production, but Anglo-Dutch firm LNM Holdings secured a deal. Poland is under the gun to clean up environmental damage lingering from the Communist years; European Union funding is helping the process along.

  Gdansk: The port city where Solidarity first rose up in 1980, Gdansk was one of Europe’s great cities when she was part of the fifteenth-century marine trading group the Hanseatic League; hard-hit during the Second World War, she was rebuilt and today is thick with domed churches, spires, and medieval design. Called Danzig by the Germans who held her until 1918, Gdansk was snatched by Poland during the post–First World War redesign of Europe. Reportedly a hotbed of neo-Nazis today.

  Hotshots

  Lech Walesa: President, 1990–1995. The former electrician led the union that snowballed into an independence movement. Incarcerated in 1981, he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983 (he wasn’t allowed to leave to accept it) and donated his $200,000 Nobel Prize money to redeveloping the country. Out of politics for the moment, Walesa now heads his own foundation.

  “In 1905, when Poland did not appear on the map of Europe, Henryk Sienkiewicz said when receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature: ‘She was pronounced dead—yet here is a proof that She lives on; She was declared incapable to think and to work
—and here is proof to the contrary; She was pronounced defeated—and here is proof that She is victorious.’”—From Lech Walesa’s 1983 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, delivered by his wife

  POPE JOHN PAUL II: KAROL WOJTYLA (1920–2005)

  No pope was more visible than Polish Pope John Paul II, who came to holy power in 1978. While most popes spoke from the balcony, John Paul II made appearances in his papal chariot around St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican. In 1981, the pope was shot four times during one of his Vatican spins. Didn’t slow him down much, although his pope-mobile was soon covered in bulletproof glass.

  Never has a pope accumulated so many frequent flyer miles. he personally spread his word, traveling all over the world from Cuba to Croatia, Mexico to Canada—over 100 countries in all—speaking out against the Soviet Union, birth control, abortion, and the horrors of war. The first pope to be so loudly heard in the global arena, he helped bring down Communism, but wasn’t so successful at stopping skyrocketing Western arms sales or preventing the U.S. from invading Iraq—both actions that he condemned. Controversially, he elevated the status of Opus Dei, and, after intensive lobbying from the U.S. Department of Agriculture in his last days when he could barely speak, he supposedly spoke out and approved genetically modified food. (During that time, he also supposedly endorsed nuclear energy.) As pope for nearly twenty-seven years, John Paul II launched more on their way to sainthood than any other—he canonized 476 and beatified 1,320—and is now on the road to sainthood himself. He was beatified mere months after his spring 2005 death.

  Jerzy Kosinski (1933–1991): He put Polish literature on the English-speaking map, but isn’t much loved by Poles. Born in Lodz, hawk-nosed Jerzy Kosinski, who moved to the U.S. after WWII, flapped to fame on the wings of The Painted Bird, a hard-hitting novel that casts Polish peasants unflatteringly as violent anti-Semites who, like hens in a chicken coop, attack those who stand out. A Polish Jew who escaped Nazi persecution with a birth certificate showing he was Catholic, Kosinski initially palmed off the novel as being based on his Second World War experience, but that claim was shot down by his many detractors. Dogged by accusations of plagiarism—among them a claim that his popular novel/screenplay Being There was a knockoff of a Polish novel—the man who won the National Book Award in 1969 responded to critics by penning a footnote-heavy novel, The Hermit of 69th Street, a parody of overfastidious citation. Brilliant but unstable, Kosinski pulled a plastic bag over his head and suffocated himself in the bathtub in May 1991, leaving a note. “I am going to put myself to sleep now for a bit longer than usual. Call the time Eternity.”12 Nobody accused him of plagiarizing that.

  CULTURAL STANDOUT: CHOPIN (1810–1849)

  “Poet of the piano” Chopin, considered the world’s finest composer for that instrument, is a Polish national hero, despite spending nearly half his life in France. His parents met in the home of a Polish count, where his French father was tutor and his mother a housekeeper. Fryderyk (or Frédéric) was born outside Warsaw, when his father became French professor in the Warsaw Lyceum. Chopin began composing at seven, and was performing internationally at eighteen; by twenty-one, he was living in Paris, hobnobbing with painters and poets. At twenty-seven, he began a decadelong love affair with female novelist George Sand. Weak from tuberculosis, worsened after a winter holiday in a damp monastery in Mallorca, Chopin composed some of his greatest works, including the 24 Preludes and Polonaise in C Minor while deathly ill. The TB soon after killed him. “The world is suffocating…” he said, drawing his last breath, “swear to make them cut me open so that I won’t be buried alive.” Most of Chopin’s body remained in Paris, but, as he’d requested, his heart went to Poland, the country he hadn’t set foot in for eighteen years.

  Roman Polanski: Son of a Polish Jew and a Russian émigrée, Polanski was born in France in 1933, but his parents brought the toddler to Krakow, an unfortunate move: during the war both were hauled off to concentration camps, where his mother died. Escaping the Jewish ghetto, young Polanski spent the war on the run, sleeping in barns. After the war, he studied at Lodz Film School, made several short films, and garnered international recognition for Knife in the Water, which was nominated for an Oscar. In 1968, he moved to California and horrified the world with psycho-thriller Rosemary’s Baby; shortly thereafter, his life became something out of his films when minions of Charles Manson brutally murdered his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate. Polanski went on to make Chinatown and Tess, and returned to Poland to film The Pianist, which won numerous awards and is considered his finest work.

  ESCAPING MEMORY: MICHEL SEDZIWOJ (AKA SENDIVOGIUS) (1556–1636)

  The life of alchemist Michel Sendivogius is cloaked in legend: was he an escapologist (disappearing from flaming towers and dungeon chains), a form-changing wizard, or simply a man of medicine who tended to royals? What is certain is that in the late 1500s the scientist worked for the Polish king in launching Poland’s metallurgical industry. Sendivogius’s most important contributions were his books about science and alchemy. On the Philosophers’ Stone (also called A New Light on Alchemy) went through dozens of printings in six languages and was devoured by the era’s thinkers, including Sir Isaac Newton. Sendivogius is credited with first writing that air was a mixture of substances, although it wasn’t until the eighteenth century that it was figured out what that mixture was.13

  Marie Sklodowska Curie (1867–1934): The Polish-born scientist who discovered the nature of radioactivity—she coined the term—Madame Curie died of leukemia as a result. Before doing so, she became one of four people ever to win two Nobel Prizes: she shared the 1903 Nobel in Physics with her husband, Pierre Curie, and colleague Henri Becquerel, and took the 1911 Nobel in Chemistry for discovering two new elements, including polonium, named after her homeland. As her work was done in Paris, the French claim her too.

  DRINKING MATTERS

  Poles and Russians argue over who invented vodka, but Poles win in quality. Ultimat is the priciest, but Zubrowka is most beloved; each bottle’s strand of bison grass, a turn-on to the beasts, imparts a vanilla-like taste; some say the secret is that it’s coated in bison secretions. Gdansk’s 300-year-old specialty: sweet ‘n’ spicy firewater Goldwasser, flecked with gold flakes. Also novel: pink rosewater liqueur Rosaline, prepared from an eighteenth-century secret recipe in a castle distillery.

  Closing time? Many of Poland’s vodka distilleries are doing badly and may soon fold.

  News you can understand: There are plenty of interesting papers in Poland, but few in English. One exception: The Warsaw Voice: www.warsawvoice.pl

  18. HUNGARY

  (Magyarorszád)

  Lost in the Past

  FAST FACTS

  Country: Republic of Hungary; Magyar Koztarsasag

  Capital: Budapest

  Government: Parliamentary democracy

  Independence: 1001 (unified); 1920 modern Hungary formed; 1989 independence from Soviet Union, which had made it a satellite

  Population: 9,982,000 (2006 estimate)

  Head of State: Laszlo Solyom (2005)

  Head of Government: Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany (2004)

  Elections: President elected by parliament for five-year term; prime minister elected by parliament after public votes in parliamentary elections

  Name of Parliament: National Assembly; Orszaggyules

  Ethnicity: 92% Hungarian; 6% unknown or other; 2% Roma (some say closer to 10%) (2001 census)

  Religion: 52% Roman Catholic; 16% Calvinist; 14% unaffiliated; 11% other; 3% Lutheran; 2% Greek Catholic

  Language: 94% Hungarian; 6% other

  Literacy: 99% (2005) (dubious claim)

  Famous Exports: Medicinal liqueur Unicum, high-octane palinka, billionaire George Soros

  Economic Big Boy: MOL (oil and gas); 2004 total sales: $10.82 billion1

  Per Capita GDP: $16,100 (2005)

  Unemployment: 7.3% (December 2005 Eurostat figure); Roma unemployment: 60%2