Making our way to Slovenia – slowly.

Friday 28 September. An early start this morning – on the first of three trains at 5.55am to begin our day-long journey to Slovenia.  Chatowice (still in Poland) first stop, then change to an inter-city service for the nine hour trip to Villach, passing through the Czech Republic and Austria (with a short stop in Vienna), before again changing for the final two-hour run to Ljubljana, capital of Slovenia, arriving there about 9.30pm.

Poland is a fascinating country.  Perhaps the word that best describes the Polish people is resilient.  In centuries past Poland has been a conqueror and at one time was about three time its current size, however in the last couple of centuries it has generally been conquered and occupied, principally by the Germans and the Russians.  For many decades up until World War I Poland actually ceased to exist as a result of being partitioned between Germany and Russia.  Following the Great War it was restored as an independent sovereign nation, however it was again occupied by the Germans during World War II and then by the Russians as part of the carve-up of Europe by the victors.  It has only been free again since the early 1990s.  Through all this the Polish people have striven to retain their identity and their pride.

As we reported in our blogs on Warsaw, it is almost unbelievable that about 90% of the city was razed on Hitler’s orders after the 1944 Uprising.  It is not only remarkable that the city has been rebuilt; what is so poignant is the effort that has been put into reconstructing the city as it was before the war.  It is difficult to tell the “old” from the “new” and it is hard to get your head around the simple fact that the vast majority is “new”.

Our visit to the extermination camps at Auschwitz and Birkenau also provided evidence of the resilience of the Polish people.  For several centuries Poland had welcomed displaced Jews from around the world and these camps were to personify the attempt by the German Reich to eliminate all traces of Jewry from the planet.  It was a heart-wrenching experience to walk through the camps and visit the barracks and the rooms where men, women and children were deliberately starved to death, beaten to death or summarily executed; to look at the photographs that lined the walls, to read the stories of torture, torment, degradation and death. And yet the Jewish people again thrive in Poland and proudly display their heritage, and the Polish people overall have shown their resilience by rebuilding a strong, stable nation.  It is no coincidence that Poland has survived the global financial crisis much better than most other European countries.

Tomorrow: explore historic Ljubljana.