“Ma’am, the salami,” insists a young man in uniform to a Muscovite who won’t resign herself to giving up her treasure.
“Please, I’ve come from Moscow; I’ll never do it again. Let me keep half at least.”
“I can’t, Ma’am.”
“If you knew how good it is… you can’t get salami this good where you live. This is the best and the most expensive.”
Out of her bag comes a huge cylinder, at least three kilos of salami, and a matching smell of garlic. “Alright, I’ll give it to you.”
“Ma’am, I’m not allowed to touch it. You have to carry it outside yourself.” So the Russian woman gets up and goes out, under escort, to the Dumpster of shame. Welcome to Euroland, mesdames et messieurs.
By now the train has been stopped for an hour and a half, all for a few cartons of cigarettes and some salamis. Apparently it’s that way every time. The conductor goes to complain to the Poles. “Do your job, but please don’t say anything to the railroad people in Kaliningrad, or I’ll get fired.” He claims he’s the victim of a trap. In the meantime, one of the passengers, a Polish man, is taken into custody by the police and escorted off the train.
Now two hours have gone by. The entire car has been dismantled and the sun is going down behind the stupendous Prussian station at Braniewo. The passengers limit themselves to complaining sotto voce, emanating the infinite Russian patience. The woman whose salami was seized has also calmed down and she tells me about the magnificence of the Saint Petersburg cathedral. Even the guy who was taken off the train is released and comes back on board.
The train leaves again after dark, and right away the incredible happens.
Voicing an elegant apology, the passenger hauled off the train by the police and then put back on board starts opening, one by one, the upholstery of the uninspected seats. He rapidly pulls out the remaining cigarette cartons and puts them in a sack. Just like that, right in front of everybody. In Italy, he would have been skinned alive. Not here. The passengers—force-fed like geese, beleaguered by the seizure of their food, and punished on his account by an apocalyptic delay—discover their fellow feeling for this chicken stealer, who has to, poor guy, feed a family. “Excuse me, just for a second, get up, I have to look under here, too.”
He asks me to move just like the others, and from my seat, too, cartons of king-size American cigarettes come sliding out. “It’s even worse in Poland,” a woman from Danzig tells me. “My country is the best place in the world for thieves. They kill someone to steal twenty euros, and they get off scot-free.”
9. VISTULA
THE LITTLE TRAIN heading southwest from Kaliningrad is cutting through countryside labeled with new names invented in 1945 after the defeat of Hitler in order to conceal the Prussian spirit of the places. It’s the revolution of the toponyms, adopted from the Baltic to the western half of Poland—west of the Vistula—the former German Saxony, where Halbau has become Iłowa; Naumburg am Bober, Nowogród; Sorau has been transformed into Żary, and Görlitz has sprouted Zgorzelec, on the other side of the river Neisse. The landscape, however, is magnificent—cows grazing in an azure fog, storks’ nests silhouetted against the pink sky. Nature doesn’t say that millions of Germans were forced to evacuate from here between 1944 and 1950[6] and were replaced by others, Poles driven from their homes in the heart of the East, from lands that are now Belarus, Lithuania, and Ukraine, in a double exportation to the West.
What does Europe know about the wounds inflicted here? What history book in Italy tells about this tragedy, as large as the Istrian exodus multiplied by thirty, yet which is still nothing compared to the deportations in Russia? In 1945, after the concentration camps and the Stalinist deportations, the engineers of ethnic cleansing were still at work. From the eastern territories ceded to Russia, the party brought to this place waves of Poles terrorized by the bloodthirsty hate of the Ukrainians for their former masters. With horrific symmetry, it sent eastward millions of Ukrainians who had been trapped inside the new borders, to die of winter in a Ukraine stripped of its population by the Nazi war and by Stalinism’s siege of hunger against the peasants.
But there was still room in the immense void left by the expulsion of the Germans, and so in 1947 Operation Vistula was launched by the Communist government of Poland. The southern frontier needed to be “purified.” The minorities near Czechoslovakia—innocent peoples, mountaineers like the Lemkos and the Boykos, or people without a homeland, like the Gypsies (to whom Monika has dedicated years of work)—came to be judged as ethnically suspect. They were forcibly deported with barely two hours’ notice, and sprinkled about in the villages of western Poland already inhabited by the first wave of refugees from the East, to die of homesickness in camps with no horizons, where the wind encountered no obstacles and froze their souls as well as their bodies.
They were in a land of refugees, but since they were the last to arrive, they were more refugee than the others. They were called przwitrzeni, those carried by the wind. People were afraid of them. The police had spread panic before they arrived. “The bandits are coming,” said the police officers in charge of the deportation. They spread fear because distrust among exiles was useful to the regime and kept the people in submission. But it wasn’t over. The last wave of Stalinist terror was unleashed in Ukraine and the Poles who were still there also escaped to the west. When all the moving was done, nine million people had changed countries between 1945 and 1956.
Janina, Monika’s aunt born in 1940, today a lawyer in Wroclaw, escaped from Ukraine when she was six, with her mother, two suitcases, and her six-month-old baby brother. It was the winter of 1946, and her father was still missing in action in Germany. They put her on a train, on the same line and in the same freight cars that had transported Jews to Treblinka. It took them two months to go from Lviv to Lublin. Sixty days to go 120 miles. She adds: “They parked us on dead tracks, in the middle of the snow. The Soviet soldiers came and robbed us.”
During that same winter, Janina’s father tried to make his way home on foot from the German concentration camp where he had been locked up, and the only way to find his family was to wait at the border, on the train tracks. He waited for weeks for the great move to the East to be completed, until the right train came by and the family was reunited. Then they were offered a house that used to belong to Germans, in former Silesia, near Wroclaw. It sounds like a novel by Pasternak, but everyone in Poland, says Monika, has stories like that.
Today, the Poles from the east, like Janina, live in western Poland, where the great void left by the Germans weighs on their souls like the Jewish void in Latvia, Ukraine, and along the Danube. It is a land of ghosts and the uprooted, where still today the question asked in order to get to know someone is not “Where do you live?” but “Where are you from?” and where the biggest hidden fear is the fear of the return of the old masters, the Germans. In the meantime, in Berlin, the German exile lobby starts to put pressure on again. National public television hammers away with reports on the newly admitted EU member countries to the east, talks about “Germans and Poles deported due to ‘no fault of their own,’” the latter to the homes of the former. But behind the equanimity hides the trap of revisionism. “I don’t like what they’re saying,” Monika explains. “The Germans have their responsibility, and then some. We, on the other hand, didn’t wage war; we only suffered its consequences.”
6
The exile and deportation of ethnic Germans then living in eastern Poland and Czechoslovakia began in 1944 as Germans fled to the west to escape the advancing Red Army. This flight of refugees became official deportation after the Potsdam Conference in 1945, when the Allies agreed to deport Germans from the East to the Allied occupied areas of Austria and Germany. By 1950 a total of twelve million Germans had fled or been expelled from Eastern and Central Europe.