Published: 2 November 2022
Last updated: 5 March 2024
On his recent visit to Poland and Germany, ARNOLD ZABLE finds the victims of a new war intermingling with the ghosts of an old one. His journey begins in Krakow.
June 28, 2022. Melbourne airport. My first overseas flight since the start of the pandemic. I am back in touch with a random humanity. The first leg to Bangkok, the second, to Munich, the final, a one-hour flight to Krakow.
A veil of haze on a summer morning as we take off from Munich airport. Below, glimpses of Bavaria: tiled farmhouses, and fallow fields alternating with ripe-green paddocks. The landscape vanishes beneath the clouds. Nature throws up haikus: A strip of blue, cutting through billowing white: river of the skies. A stretch of cumulus, kilometres long: an elongated ribbon.
We cannot land, there’s a thunderstorm over Krakow airport. We circle above the clouds. There is no sound, no turbulence. Beyond the horizon, not far distant, towns are being laid to waste, cities bombarded. I start up a conversation with the passenger seated beside me: Dale Umetsu, a retired paediatrician, who lives in San Francisco. He has volunteered to work in Ukraine with displaced children cut off from medical treatment. We agree to stay in touch. He will send me dispatches from the frontline.
The storm is over. As soon as the plane taxis to a halt, the doctor grabs his overnight bag. He is travelling light. No need to wait at the baggage carousel. He is running late; he has a train to catch to the borderlands.
MY PARENTS WERE from the borderlands: my father, Meier, from the city of Bialystok, and my mother, Hadassah, from the nearby shtetl of Grodek. Born in 1905, Meier liked to say that by the time he was 12 he had lived in three countries, Russia, Germany, Poland, and gone nowhere.
THE DRIVE FROM KRAKOW airport; it drizzles, the aftermath of the storm. The ageing apartment blocks on the city outskirts are intact, though somewhat jaded: facades cracked, the stucco peeling. Nearing the centre, the streets widen into spacious squares and boulevards. I disembark in Kazimierz, the former Jewish quarters: Welcome home, the cobblestones sing.
