Notes from Poland

Recently, I took a trip to Poland with my girlfriend to visit relatives and see the country. We had been wanting to go for quite a while, and this August was a great opportunity: my lab was moving to a new building and I couldn’t do any experiments.¹

Anyway, I thought I’d tell share some of the more noteworthy things I experienced.

content warning: discussion of Nazi atrocities

Poland (mostly) looks like Iowa

Our flight was from Boston to Berlin, since it was much cheaper than flying directly to Poland. Upon crossing the Polish border, the first thing I saw was corn. Lots of corn. And wheat, and sunflowers.² Poland is a very flat country with good farmland, and not many big cities. Outside of Warszawa, Kraków, and Wrocław, it really does look like Iowa.

A wheat field being harvested (center), and a corn field (right)

Places we visited

Pokój: a peaceful village

For most of our time in Poland, we stayed with some relatives in a village called Pokój³. Word spreads quickly in a small village, so by the day we arrived, basically all of the ~1500 inhabitants already knew that Americans were coming.

This roundabout in the middle of Pokój is named for Pope John Paul II – basically every village has a street with his name. There used to be a small castle in the middle, but the Russians destroyed it during World War II.

Pokój was quite nice, but there wasn’t a lot to do there, so after biking around and exploring the local park, we took day trips to visit other cities nearby.

Opole, Brzeg, and Wrocław

These cities are all on the river Odra⁴, which runs through western Poland and Germany. We first visited Opole, and I immediately noticed a rather enormous power plant cloud factory that burns 4.1 million tons of coal per year! Perhaps this contributed to the 2022 Odra environmental disaster . . .

In an attempt to make this environmental nightmare seem more friendly, the cooling towers are decorated with rainbows⁵ and musical notes. This is because Opole is also notable for its music, and is home to the Polish Songs Museum and National Songs of Poland Festival. We visited the music museum, which was quite cool. They gave headphones to each visitor to allow listening to any of the songs featured in the museum – everything from Chopin to Disco Polo. We also got a tour of a medieval tower built by the Piast dynasty who used to rule Silesia (this region of Poland).

View from the tower, showing Opole and the Odra.

In Brzeg, we visited the old Piast castle which had been converted into a historical museum. We saw a lot of interesting historical artifacts and tombs.

Gotta love that winged Hussar armor!

Interestingly, in the museum there was also an exhibit about the people from the Eastern borderlands who had been forcibly resettled into the area around Brzeg. My girlfriend’s grandmother was one of these people. She still speaks Polish with a noticeable Ukrainian accent (saying l instead of ł, for example).

Wrocław was also quite nice. The highlight was visiting Wrocław University⁶, which had some elaborately decorated buildings and an interesting historical museum.

Imagine attending a lecture in a hall like this!

Wrocław is also famous for its bronze statues of dwarfs distributed across the city center. We saw quite a few, here is just one example:

The dwarf statues commemorate an anti-Communist movement in Wrocław.

Częstochowa

No tour of Poland would be complete without a visit to Częstochowa, the religious capital of the nation. The Jasna Góra monastery is a very important Catholic holy site, and contains a famous icon of the Virgin Mary claimed to have miraculous powers.

A wall displaying the crutches of people who experienced “miraculous cures” of their disabilities when visiting the monastery.

There were quite a few disabled people hoping for cures – it’s a shame medieval monasteries weren’t built with accessibility accommodations!

The statue, of course, is of Pope John Paul II, who gave a famous speech here.

We toured the monastery on a Sunday, and we were lucky to arrive just before a massive pilgrimage of approximately 10,000 people, most of whom walked for multiple days from various parts of Poland.

Pilgrims arriving at Jasna Góra. The blue+white flags represent the Virgin Mary.

Near the famous icon, there was a box for people to write wishes on pieces of paper and put them in to request aid from the Virgin Mary. I figured it couldn’t hurt to try, so I wrote down three personal wishes and put them in. One of them (related to my research) has already happened!

Regardless of whether I have been blessed, the monastery was quite beautiful, and this was definitely one of the highlights of my trip.

Oswięcim

Oswięcim is better known by its German name: Auschwitz.

This site represents one of the darkest chapters in Polish – and in human – history. Here, the Nazis murdered over a million people, most of them Jews. The site has been preserved as a museum to bear witness to this atrocity.

The scale of the camp (especially Auschwitz II - Birkenau) was huge. Here, on these train tracks, prisoners were selected to be sent to the gas chambers.

We had a tour with a Polish-speaking guide, and it seemed that she used the word “śmierć” at least once per sentence. At times, I was glad it took me some mental effort to understand the Polish, since otherwise I would have had even more emotional distress. Of course I knew the Nazis were bad guys before visiting. But I didn’t fully recognize just how unfathomably evil they were until now.

What really drove the point home was learning that the Nazis killed many prisoners who were too sick to work by giving them cardiac injections of phenol (a chemical which causes severe burns). This is one of the more horrific ways to kill someone, and it isn’t even particularly efficient. So the Nazis didn’t just want to kill the Jews, they also wanted them to suffer horribly.

How can humans do something so inhuman? I completely fail to understand what the Nazis were thinking. How could anyone justify to themselves that injecting someone with phenol was the right thing to do? Perhaps it’s a good thing that I don’t understand — if I did understand, I might be more like a Nazi.

At the end of that day, we were all emotionally exhausted. It took a while to recover from that experience.

Kraków

Unlike other Polish cities, Kraków mostly escaped destruction during World War II, and many historic buildings are well-preserved. We spent two days here visiting various museums, including Wawel Castle, the residence of the old Polish kings.

This lavish tent was captured from the Turks at Vienna in 1683. At that battle, Polish hussars conducted the largest cavalry charge in history.

Outside Wawel, there is a dragon statue (commemorating the Smok Wawelski). It actually breathes fire! This sort of thing would never be allowed in the USA, due to inevitable lawsuits.

We also visited the “Underground Square” museum, the National Art Museum, and Oskar Schindler’s factory (which was a very good museum, focused more on Kraków during WWII than on Schindler in particular).

The Wieliczka salt mine was the most amazing thing I saw here. The mine dates back to the 1300s, and during the medieval period salt was a valuable commodity. As the value of the mine declined, the miners carved sculptures into the salt and converted it into a set of beautiful chapels.⁷ It really reminded me of something from Lord of the Rings. I’m glad I didn’t come across any Balrogs!

St. Kinga’s chapel, the most impressive one.

As a souvenir, I got a bag of salt. Unfortunately, when I was coming back to the USA, luggage inspectors must have thought it looked suspicious and opened it up, but they didn’t re-seal it properly, so I got salt all over the inside of my luggage.

Warszawa

Towards the end of our trip, we visited Warszawa, the capital and largest city of Poland. This felt like the only truly modern city in the whole country, due to a combination of the old buildings being destroyed by the Nazis, and new skyscrapers being built post-1989. It was also the only place in Poland where I saw an LGBT Pride flag (compare this to Boston, where they’re practically on every block!)

The highlight for me was the Copernicus Science Center, which is a brilliantly done science museum full of hands-on demos of things like sound, light, and fluids. This was way better than any American science museum I’ve seen, including the one in Boston. The key was that it showed the phenomena interactively, instead of merely explaining them.

A demo showing resonant modes of a square plate.

They even had a talking Copernicus powered by speech-to-text and an LLM. It reminded me of something Trurl might have constructed, but to my disappointment, when asked “Ile jest dwa i dwa”, he answered “cztery” not “siedem”.

Later, he glitched out and switched to giving a description of the weather in English.

We only had 90 minutes there, but I wish I could have stayed all day.

Other places we visited included the Chopin Museum, the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Museum, the Royal Castle, the National Technical Museum (which had a cool collection of old devices), and the Warsaw Uprising Museum. I thought the uprising museum was especially interesting, because they had recorded interviews with survivors. Only after the fall of Communism could they be open about their experiences (since the USSR was definitely not on good terms with the Home Army).

This radio transmitter is a replica (built by the same person!) of one built from scavenged parts during the Uprising.

Observations

Poland and Ukraine

Poles definitely support Ukraine in the fight against Russia. Many buildings had Ukrainian flags, and one restaurant in Brzeg even had replaced “Russian pierogi” on the menu with “Ukrainian pierogi”.

There were also lots of advertisements in Ukrainian for job openings / employment agencies. I only saw one example of anti-Ukrainian graffiti (in Opole), compared with ubiquitous pro-Ukrainian graffiti. In several museums, we saw artifacts that had been temporarily removed from Ukraine for safekeeping in Poland.

These sculptures displayed in Wawel were originally from Lviv (Lwów in Polish).

That being said, Poland and Ukraine haven’t always gotten along. There were a few memorials to Poles killed by Stepan Bandera’s OUN during World War II, including one in Częstochowa.

In Warszawa, we had a taxi driver who was a Ukrainian refugee, and didn’t speak Polish very well. He asked if we spoke Russian, but we said we were Americans, and at the end he overcharged us (the taxi didn’t have a meter, which should have been a red flag at the beginning). Still it wasn’t that expensive — at merely triple the normal Polish taxi price, it was comparable to an American taxi price.

Polish economy

Basically everything we bought in Poland (food, housing, museum tickets) was much cheaper than I’m used to. For example, a night in a three-star hotel in Warszawa was only 325 złoty ($80), and Warszawa is the most expensive place in Poland. A nice breakfast omelet at a restaurant was 25 złoty ($6.10) – and there’s no expectation of tipping! The only thing that was more expensive than the USA was gasoline. Converting from 7.5 złoty/liter, it was about $7 per gallon. There are many American fast-food chains in Poland, for example KFC and McDonald’s are very popular. This enables calculation of the Big Mac Index.

Poland gets about 70% of its electricity from coal (and I even saw coal-burning furnaces for heat in a few houses), but there were also quite a few wind turbines and many houses (including our relatives’ house) had solar panels.

Polish politics

Poland is having a national election in a few months. Currently, the government is led by the conservative Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (PiS) party. They are pretty popular in the countryside, but the cities are more liberal and we saw a lot of signs against PiS. In Kraków, we encountered a small protest against the leader of PiS (Jaroslaw Kaczyński)⁸ who was visiting Wawel Castle. Police had closed down the whole castle, so the protestors were on the road outside.

Earlier this summer there was a big protest in Warsaw about abortion rights, when a pregnant woman died of sepsis after not being given proper medical care. We saw some pro-abortion graffiti which might have been left over from that:

But generally, Poland is very socially conservative (likely from Catholic influence). An interesting example is this sign in Wrocław outside a single-stall bathroom:

In Polish, this says “Toilet for people with disabilities,⁹ women, and men”. Apparently, only English speakers can be “all gender”.

Which brings us to our final section:

The Polish language

In a museum under the central square of Kraków was the longest Polish word I’ve ever seen: wczesnośredniowiecznego. Try saying that ten times fast!

Meaning: “of the early Middle Ages”

“Entrance” and “exit” are almost the same word: wejscie and wyjscie. They sound nearly identical to me.

Thankfully these ones are marked with arrows.

For vehicles a different pair of words is used: wjazd and wyjazd.¹⁰

Polish Scrabble: a “Z” is only worth one point!

Uwaga: Polskie słowa!

Conclusions

Poland was a nice place to visit. I learned a lot about the country, its history, and its culture (and quite a few new Polish words).¹¹ And I’m very thankful to my girlfriend’s relatives for hosting us – it was nice to meet them in person. However, I prefer living in Boston, since there’s much more interesting science going on, and I think most Poles would disapprove of the kind of research I’m doing. But when I have kids and they’re old enough to travel, I’ll return to Poland and show them our heritage.

1. I *still* can’t do any experiments since there have been lots of delays in setting things up in the new building.

2. In Iowa, this would be corn + soybeans (wheat and sunflowers are less popular, at least when I visited there in 2015).

3. Meaning either “peace” or “room”. Confusingly, “Jestem w pokoju” means either “I am in Pokój” or “I am in the room”. The relatives we stayed with are the same ones who helped process our donations to Ukrainian refugees last year.

4. Also known (in German) as Oder.

5. These are the only rainbows I’ve seen in Poland, except for a single Pride flag in Warszawa. Poland is a very Catholic country and LGBT rights are unpopular.

6. It was called Breslau University from 1811 – 1945, back when Wrocław was part of Prussia/Germany.

7. Poles build chapels in mines, Americans build neutrino detectors. I visited one in Minnesota in 2012. (To be fair, the Wieliczka mine isn’t deep enough for this sort of science.)

8. Sort of like the Polish version of Mitch McConnell.

9. Literally: “with not-full abilities”. This is the second-longest Polish word I’ve seen used.

10. This relates to the fact that Polish doesn’t have a verb for “to go”. So you have to use “to walk”, “to ride”, “to fly”, etc.

11. Na przykład: “węgiel”