Pictures

“Hmm, yeah, looks like Bavaria,” I mused to Ben, peeking out of the airplane portal over the fields and little villages below. We landed at the Wroclaw airport, a small airstrip plunked down in the middle of a hayfield, hay bales scattered alongside the runways. The terminal itself was expectedly small, and we easily found our way through customs and passport control (hey wait, isn’t this an EU country now?!?) to the front hall, avoided a taxi driver who was intent on driving us into the city, bought bus tickets, and went outside to wait for #406 at the bus stop. We had just missed a bus, but the half-hour wait would give us time to learn our basic Polish words – hello, goodbye, thank you, please, toilet, and ticket.

We got off the bus south of the oldest part of Wroclaw, near the current main train station, and proceeded north, along city streets, over what used to be a protective moat, along more streets, until – wait – we missed our turn. Then back again, this time finding the correct places to turn – to our hostel. The buildings along the streets told the history of the city – nineteenth century five-storey row houses, old, worn, and gray, but somehow still stately; ugly concrete apartment rises from the Communist era, with identical monotonous windows and balconies sporting satellite dishes; tall red brick churches, seemingly everywhere; and clutches of modern architecture with shiny new metal and glass fronts, curving lines, and color. The styles mixed so completely that one building that used to be a five-storey townhouse had a bare two-storey cement addition on top, and a remodeled modern storefront on the ground level.

Our hostel, Bursa Nauczycielska, was in the university quarter, a block north of the market square, or Rynek, on which the city is centered. We chose it for its location and recommendation in our Lonely Planet guide. Our room was a double, quite comfortable with a lofted ceiling and big windows. They even provided towels, though the bathroom was shared, as well as cups and plates, and a water boiler for tea or coffee. And, I discovered, there was a phone book. I had wanted to find a phone book sometime! Flip, flip. Kosmala… whoa, yeah! Two Kosmalas – how about that! I tried the other family names – Hippe, Haase, etc. – but nothing there, presumably all expelled after WWII with such German names. Ben, however, was surprised and delighted to find a Hardt – even spelled correctly.

Then we were off again – sans luggage – to walk around the Rynek, center of tourism as well as of city life. It was a quite lovely place with colorful townhouses lining the outside of the huge square, all completely rebuilt after being destroyed in WWII, but apparently each as it was before the war. There was the brick town hall in the center, also restored. And a complex of buildings taking up a chunk of the middle of the square. We wandered down an alley that cut through this middle block and came upon a modern fountain at the other end. Restaurants claimed the ground floors all the way around the square with shaded terraces stretching out onto the cobblestone. Tourists and locals alike walked through the square, stopped for ice cream cones, sat and drank beer on the terraces. Ben and I headed for a recommended vegetarian place called Vega at the square’s east end. It was a cafeteria, formerly a “milk-bar.” Such self-serve eateries apparently used to be very common and offered inexpensive basic meals subsidized by the Communist government. No longer subsidized, Vega is still quite a deal and we got satisfying (and tasty) meals for under 20 zloty (about $5.25) for both of us.

A thunderstorm came and went while we ate, but it was still raining a bit when we were done. We headed for the museum inside the town hall. It wasn’t particularly overwhelming, but the museum shop held a solution to one of the obstacles I was facing.

Coming to Wroclaw I had planned to set out and explore places related to my family. Back in Germany I had xeroxed parts of my grandmother’s family history/memoirs and scoured it for place names and descriptions of places. I wanted just to see what existed now at these places that had eighty or ninety years ago meant something to my grandmother. But there was a problem. She had lived in Silesia, in which Wroclaw is located, at the beginning of the twentieth century, when it was part of Prussia and then Germany. In those days the city was called Breslau and the towns and their streets, likewise, had German names. When the Germans were defeated in the Second World War, they were forced to concede Silesia back to Poland. (Silesia was last part of Poland proper in the 14^th century.) Meanwhile, Russia grabbed a part of eastern Poland and expelled all the Poles, forcing them west. To make room for them, all the Germans, including my family, were expelled from Silesia and sent to Germany.

Which brings us to today; everything in Wroclaw and its environs is Polish – the names of the villages and streets, the food, the whole culture. In fact it’s predominantly of an eastern Polish flavor and I found similarities here and there with my trip to Lithuania. It was interesting to feel that though this was the location of my grandmother’s childhood and teenage years, it wasn’t her culture. She grew up in Breslau and I was experiencing Wroclaw. I couldn’t help but feel that the Bavaria where I live now is closer akin in culture and feeling (not to mention language) than current Slask (Silesia) to the environment of her youth.

The sticking point that the museum shop helped with was one of names. My grandmother had written of her childhood and of her parents and grandparents using the place names that were a part of her life – the German names. Now they were all in Polish; how was I going to find them? Fortunately, this problem occurred to me before I left home and hopped on the Internet to find my translations. An excellent resource (Genealogy.Net) created to help genealogists came to my aid, and I found that the town of Trebnitz became Trzebnica, the village Massel is now Maslow, and its hamlet Masslisch-Hammer is Maslowiec. What I couldn’t find online were translations for street names. I wanted to find what used to be Matthiasstraße, and thought it might be the street on which stood the church of St. Matthew. In the museum shop Ben spotted a map entitled: “Plan von Breslau und nächste Umgebung 1927.” Ah-ha! A historic replica of an old city map. Perfect! I wasn’t quite right about Matthiasstraße – it started a couple blocks from the church and continued up north over the river Oder until it turned into the Chaussee, which ran to Trebnitz.