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Polish Autumn

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By Christopher Phelps

Emerging somewhat rumpled and bleary at the Warsaw airport from our overnight transatlantic flight, my family and I pass through customs and locate our luggage without complication.

We exit into a crowd dense with Poles. My wife Carol quickly spots the sign reading "Fulbright" upheld by Urszula Moczydlowska, a staffer with the Polish-U.S. Fulbright Commission.

We are fortunate to be able to interact immediately with Polish professionals conversant in English. A similar commission existed in Hungary when I was a first-time Fulbrighter four years ago, as I mentioned in my first column in this series chronicling my Fulbright year in Poland. In many countries, though, Fulbrighters must orient themselves, using whatever resources the U.S. embassy can provide.

Sharing our van from the airport is Lawrence Martin, an economist from Michigan State University en route to a Fulbright lectureship at the University of Kraków. He befriends our children instantly.

Upon checking into the Hotel Solec, we are filled with a sense of familiarity. The lobby is elegant, but the spartan rooms are strikingly similar to what we experienced in Hungary, with single beds, thin mattresses, and pull-cord showers. This modesty -- along with the omnipresence of smoking, Communist-era apartment blocks, and breakfasts of sliced meat, cheese, cucumbers, and tomatoes -- fills us with a sense of Eastern Europe that is experiential more than geographical.

After a nap, we take our first walk in Poland. The autumn weather is superb, crisp and sunny. Warsaw, dense with cars and people, is busy and cosmopolitan. We pass through a large, sloping urban park with wooden benches, slate walks, and tall deciduous trees. Several beer gardens occupy a plateau.

In the city center, we locate a Bankomat from which to withdraw Polish currency converted straight from our Ohio bank account.

Then it is back to the hotel to dress up and hail a taxi to that evening's reception honoring the 45th anniversary of the Fulbright exchange program in Poland. My daughter Rosa, 4, leads the way in her red patent-leather shoes. We arrive at the home of the U.S. ambassador to Poland, Victor Ashe, and shake his hand in the receiving line before passing through the palatial residence and out onto the spacious lawn.

Waiters circulate, bearing trays of delicacies. The yard is full of Polish dignitaries and scholars who once had Fulbrights to teach or study in the United States. We talk with some other American Fulbrighters. In the wan twilight, our three children run in great arcs on the side lawn, ridding themselves of the energy they built up on the plane.

Inside the ambassador's residence, I notice a framed note on White House stationery, handwritten by President Bush. It is addressed "Dear Victor" and -- I am not making this up -- is signed "the Lawd." (See author's note below.) I do not locate the ambassador to ask him the story behind this shared joke. Later, I regret the lapse.

The following day, this year's American Fulbright grantees to Poland convene at the Polish-U.S. Fulbright Commission office. I begin to sense the diversity of paths by which these students, professors, and teachers came here. Roughly half intend to do research, study, or teach about Polish society. Many are interested in discrimination and ethnicity -- particularly pertaining to Jews. Others, like myself, are here to teach finance, law, literature, or history in English.

Among us are several Polish-Americans, both émigrés and second-generation. One couple were student supporters of the Solidarity movement in the early 1980s. They escaped martial law and are returning so that the husband, Piotr Swistak, now a sociologist at the University of Maryland at College Park, can teach game theory.

Our group has a range of linguistic fluency in Polish. Mine is near zero, but I exert a tiny effort. I master "woda gazowana" (carbonated water) and "woda niegazowana" (no gas), essential to keep young children hydrated in a country where bottled water is advisable.

As we file onto a bus that will take us south for a week-and-a-half of orientation in the city of Kraków, we start to get to know the other Fulbrighters better. Despite the common state of jet-lag crankiness, most seem delightful people. After a sardonic remark of mine, one student, Sara Korol, tells me that if a movie were made of my life, my character would be played by Philip Seymour Hoffman. Precisely.

In the picturesque Polish countryside, we spot a peasant driving down the road in a horse-drawn wooden cart. The European Union speaks of the need to "modernize" Polish farming by eliminating its obsolete peasantry, but at least the radishes and tomatoes of Poland still taste like radishes and tomatoes.

International travel with young children is hardly heroic, but it has its challenges. Rosa ends the first few nights with the sobbing refrain, "I want to go home to Mansfield, Ohio." Generally, though, she, Nowelly, 5, and Emma, 7, take well to Poland. They are welcomed by the group, especially by two teenagers accompanying their Fulbrighter parents. We appreciate this graciousness all the more since a cold of Emma's spreads to the entire busload.

Our time in ancient, beautiful Kraków centers on Jagiellonian University, the second-oldest university in Central Europe, where Copernicus once studied. We lodge at the Hotel Studencki Piast, a dormitory that would be thought primitive at Pomona or Williams but is perfectly fine by Eastern European norms. A student, Jacek Blachut, joins commission staffer Dorota Rogowska as our loyal guide.

Our first morning session at the university is held in a high-ceilinged medieval chamber lined with cases of leather-bound books and busts of Polish cultural figures whose abundant facial hair suggests that a handlebar mustache is a precondition for intellectual attainment. I spend some time meditating in front of a modernist painting of the poet Czeslaw Milosz, who died only a few weeks ago.

We assemble around a very long wooden table dating from the 15th century. The silver-haired professor Stanislaw Waltos, who may very well be a polished speaker in his own language, holds forth for one full hour on the ideal of the university in utterly incomprehensible English. The eagerness of the Fulbrighters flags. Several struggle to keep their eyes open. Several do not succeed.

Reveries of a more exultant kind come as we explore Kraków. Down narrow cobblestone streets we locate the market square with its many vendors and performers. We visit Wawel Castle with its giant cathedral bells, sarcophagi, gilded and embellished ceilings, and ornate wall tapestries. Upon entering one immense room in Wawel (in Polish, "w" is pronounced like the English "v"), we come upon Floripari, a brilliant early-music trio of lute, carved horn flute, and soprano in period dress. (I recommend their CD to anyone drawn to 16th- and 17th-century music.)

One of our guides at Wawel assures us that we are "scientists," not tourists, but this dubious distinction collapses completely as we make our way to the outskirts of Kraków to visit a famous salt mine now layered in Disney-style kitsch. Our tour guide there has a high-pitched voice that makes her seem the very model for Andy Kauffman's character Latka. "Do not be afraid, my dears," she enjoins us repeatedly, while donning a hard hat and leaving us bareheaded.

Back at Jagiellonian, we spend our time in class, taking notes on such subjects as "Poland-Europe-USA: Problems in Contemporary Relations." As the student Fulbrighters begin to locate Kraków's pubs, their attendance rate at the morning sessions declines precipitously. By the end of our course of study, however, the rest of us have had a satisfying introduction to Polish literature, economics, politics, and society. The lecturer on Polish history, Jan Lencznarowicz, is so excellent that we insist he deliver a third, unscheduled talk.

Poland was the epicenter of the German decimation of Central European Jewry during World War II, and our most somber day is spent at Auschwitz and Birkenau, the Nazi slave labor camp and extermination center.

After passing through the black wrought-iron gate reading "Arbeit Macht Frei," we enter the buildings that held Gestapo and prisoners alike. We view the bunk beds, the offices, the dungeons. There is a room piled with confiscated shoes, a room piled with eyeglasses, a room piled with suitcases. I had not expected to be upset by the camp, but when we enter a room holding two tons of women's hair, I find it excruciating. The Nazis had planned to use this hair in mattresses and textiles. Now it lies behind a vast glass partition.

Outside, farmers are burning brush, preparing their plots for winter. Where once ovens burnt bodies, smoke fills the air.

We return to Kraków a quieter and more reflective group.

On the bus, I begin to read in preparation for a conference I am to attend in New York on Randolph Bourne, an intellectual opponent of the First World War. "War is the health of the state," wrote Bourne just before his death in 1918. I set the book aside to stare at the Polish countryside.

Author's Note (October 7, 2005): In the above column, written almost exactly a year ago, I made the offhand comment that I had noticed inside the official Warsaw residence of U.S. Ambassador Victor Ashe "a framed note on White House stationery, handwritten by President Bush" that was addressed "Dear Victor" and signed "the Lawd." I remarked that I had not located the ambassador to ask him the story behind the shared joke, and that I later regretted the lapse.

As it turns out, the ambassador has now located me. In a note, Mr. Ashe explains that after my column came to his attention, he looked over the framed letter in question. He assures me that it was not written on White House stationery, but rather on the personal stationery of George W. Bush in the year 2000 when he was a candidate for the presidency. What I took as a signature at the bottom of the page and read as "the Lawd" is actually a reference to "the crowd." Ambassador Ashe allows that the "handwriting like many of us (myself included) is not as clear as it might be." The phrase in question initiates a sentence -- "The crowd was large" -- that carries over to the back side of the note, also preserved under glass, but which requires one to turn the frame around to see.

I thank Mr. Ashe for the explanation and correction, and I am pleased to share it with readers.