Reconnecting

Goodness knows how far I've travelled in the last six and a half weeks, or for how many hours (or days). I could work it out, but my poor jet-lagged brain wilts at the very notion. Let's just leave it at 7 flights, 11 rail journeys, one week-long cruise plus four other boat trips, and lots of driving. Being driven, rather, in cars, coaches, a roller-coaster and one ambulance.

There's been history and architecture, art and war, old friends and some new ones, a wedding and a camel, innumerable churches and cathedrals plus one astonishing mosque, lots of good food and a surprising amount of beer (favourite: Berliner Weisse - must be rot, not grun). It's been interesting, sad, funny, emotional, heart-warming, boring, horrifying, painful and tiring. The weather was summer-hot and winter-cold, with rain and an icy Mistral. I hated myself for packing so badly and having to haul around such a stupidly heavy suitcase, and will NEVER do that again.

Right now I feel that I never actually want to leave home again. Mainly because I'm tired, and sore, and have so much writing to do from the trips I've done this year already - but also because though I've seen such wonderful sights, such beauty of so many different sorts, I went down to the beach today and realised yet again that where natural beauty is concerned, a 20-minute drive is all it takes for an eyeful (and heartful) of the best.

Berlin, wieder

Driver Chandor and guide Karin were surprised today - and so were we: on our 580 km drive from Warsaw to Berlin, we were on excellent motorway all the way, so someone's been spending some money. Fortunately, not yet quite enough to erect the planned high barriers along its length, designed to make driving safer in winter conditions, but stuffing up any chance of enjoying the scenery for even high-up coach passengers like us. The lenghts of fence already in place are mostly solid, with see-through panels occasionally that I was pleased to note had hawk silhouettes on them, to scare away the birds that would otherwise crash into them. Nice touch.

There were more storks today, stalking through the grass, and some deer, but few other animals apart from the odd tethered cow: small farms across these plains, growing wheat mostly, fruit and trees. Green and lush, but not spectacular, so it was just as well there was lots to listen to. "And now we have to mention Adolf Hitler," Karin began, after summing up over 1000 years of pan-European history delivered without notes.

The day ended with an uber-jolly evening at Ziko's Grill, where there was unlimited beer and wine, an efficiently-delivered 4-course meal that was generally good, a literal joker of an owner who took as much delight in pretending to spill soup on people as the customers did, and a stand-up musician who started with 'Lili Marlene' and 'Valederi, valdera' and ended up with 'New York, New York' and conga lines round the crowded restaurant. Not really my scene, but amusing enough to witness from behind the safety of my sling.

I left my heart in Warsaw...

Chopin was Polish you know: Polish, Polish, Polish. Yolanta, our feisty guide today, was very keen that we should get that straight, and not let France or Spain attempt to poach him. So were Copernicus, John Paul II and Madame Curie, and they all came into today's tour, but Chopin predominated. At Wilanowa Palace, where we enjoyed the Baroque splendour almost as much as the warmth inside on yet another day of icy wind, we came across these schoolchildren, one party of dozens we saw in the city today, really getting into the spirit of the period - though when this little mock-Chopin sees the photos in later years, he may not be so proud, especially when teased by the boy behind.

The Poles are proud of Warsaw, of what they've made of the 80% destruction after the war, of how they fought back in the 1944 Uprising. They're not proud of Russia's gift of an ugly wedding-cake tower in the centre of the city: "gift", they call it, the inverted commas part of the name - they paid for it with 50 years of communism. But the Old Town that they rebuilt and recreated, using the walls left standing and recycled rubble, is pretty and authentic-looking and no doubt hugely important to their self-image. From a tourist's perspective, it works well, and we wandered happily around it, the Royal Way with its grand buildings and embassies, and then the less appealing modern maze around the Russian monstrosity, for hours today, as the sun finally came out.

This Insight tour is less leisurely than I was expecting: we've frequently had 6am or so wake-up calls, and there's been quite a lot of walking in between the days on the coach travelling between cities. Though I think differently when the phone rings each morning, I actually wouldn't want to change things: there's no point being here and not seeing as much as we can - so even on the free afternoons we've been busy, prowling around looking more closely or doing extra exploring; consequently, despite being so well fed, we're actually feeling pretty fit, and the scales that seem to be a feature of hotel rooms here aren't the party-poopers they might otherwise have been.

Crowd control, deutscherweise

I bought my first pair of shoes, with saved-up pocket money, when I was about 10. They were red: I like red shoes, and I’ve always had at least one pair in my wardrobe since. I saw red shoes today, small splashes of colour in a sea of dull brown, a long, long heap of 70 year-old shoes, doubled on the other side of the room to make, apparently, 43,000. Pairs or singles? Doesn’t matter.

There were so many big numbers at Auschwitz today, 6 million being the biggest – but the small numbers were impressive too, in their way. The one month Helena lived after arriving at the camp; the mere hours most of the Jews lived there, sent straight to the gas chamber on arrival, deemed unfit for work; the twenty minutes it took for the Zyklon B gas to kill a roomful of naked people.

The camp is intact. The brick barracks are neat, the grass between them trimmed. The electric fencing is tight, still ironically labelled ‘Vorsicht – Lebensgefahr’. The flowers in front of the Death Wall are fresh, the trees surrounding the chimney from the gas ovens covered in lime green new leaves. The steps down to the basement cells are very worn, though – that happens after 60 years of visitors, a million-plus every year. It was busy today, thousands shuffling through the halls, eyes everywhere, silent mostly.

The recycling was impressive too. The gold teeth melted down, the hair cut off and woven into cloth, all the belongings, 50kg per person, carefully sorted. Very efficient, the whole operation, especially the mug-shots labelled with name, ID number, dates of birth, arrival, death. Not so the two simple angled wooden posts near the Wall of Death, though, the ones with the hooks: for hanging people by their hands, tied behind their backs, to dislocate their shoulders as a punishment. They couldn’t work after that, so they were killed. Seemed like an uncharacteristic waste of time, to me.

Rock and a hard place

Rock salt. Who knew it was made from rock? Actual rock, that's hard and can be carved, and polished - and tunnelled through, for hundreds of kilometres, several hundred metres deep. We only went down to 135m in the salt mine this morning, and covered a mere couple of kilometres, just 1% of the total. It was interesting, and fairly spectacular, and nicely warm on a cold drizzly day. There were tunnels, and impressive timber shoring, and teeth marks on the walls, and long flights of steps, and an incredibly snug lift, little chapels and big halls, the Last Supper and Pope John Paul (a Krakow local) and even Goethe - all carved out of salt. Lot's wife, however, didn't make the cut.

Then we walked round Krakow's old town in the drizzle - unlike so many of these old European cities, it's all original, unreconstructed; though that's not to say it hasn't suffered destruction during its many occupations. Still, what's left is lovely and well worth a wander, even cluttered with school parties and undisciplined umbrellas. The street food looked good, the market stalls were appealing - even better at Christmas, I bet - and every side street offered some new discovery of something old.

I headed downhill, in both senses, and walked through the former Jewish quarter and over the Vistula River to the Jewish ghetto, where there's a square with rows of chairs, symbolising the furniture and possessions left there by Jews on their way to the ghetto, who'd been told they were simply being moved, and so brought all their things which they then had to abandon. Then I carried on to what was Schindler's factory and is now a museum: probably the best-presented I've ever been into. Of course the occupation of Krakow, the walling-in of the ghetto, and Schindler's list is a powerful story, but it was told so well, with video, photos, touch-screens, radio, artefacts, reconstructions, symbolism, art - full of variety but simply done, the facts standing for themselves. And what facts they were: almost unbearably shocking and sad and terrifying. We all know roughly what happened, but it's the individual testimonies that make it so real.

Tonight there was a jolly evening of Polish food, dance and song - but tomorrow we go to Auschwitz.

Another day, three other countries

Breakfast in Hungary, lunch in Slovakia, dinner in Poland: what it is to be a globetrotter! Though in fact it was only a day's not very intensive driving in our comfortable Insight coach through pretty green hills and farmland with little villages of coloured houses with steeply-pitched roofs, and churches with tall spires of various shapes. There were people tending neat gardens, some crop hung to dry on triangular racks, a stork wading through long grass, a deer watching something, lots of clear mountain streams and proper mountains with snow on them.

There were also clusters of horrible Soviet-era apartment blocks, now painted brightly but still eyesores ("though stylish inside!" insisted Karin, who grew up in one), ugly factories belching smoke and smells out into the clean air, electricity sub-stations all cables and transformers, car-yards under tents of plastic banners, and lots of Tesco supermarkets. But mainly it was lovely, the apple and plum trees blossoming white and pink, the woodlands pleasantly mixed deciduous and conifer, scatterings of goats and sheep, random singly-tethered cows chewing their cud, and always the appealing traditional houses, three or four storeys, or just one in sturdy wood.

The southern part of Poland we came in to was especially attractive - and the roads were excellent! And now we're in Krakow, which has not only swans on the wide bend of the river below the towers of the Old Town's cathedral, but an actual salt mine to explore tomorrow. Now there's a thing.

Hallo aus Berlin!

Who else would you expect to see by the Brandenburg Gate, if not Darth Vader? This is Berlin, and we're part of a permanently seething horde of tourists again, not stand-out foreigners as we were in Zagan. It's kind of a shame: it was quite a novelty being in a real town with real people, who didn't speak English and were slightly startled that we would think they might. There they were, just getting on with their everyday lives, while here of course they are too, but so outnumbered on the streets by wandering tourists of all nationalities that they're the ones who stand out, in their business suits.

Tourists aren't an edifying lot, by and large: chattering away and not paying attention, and cluttering the place up, whether they're the young ones in shrieking, brightly-coloured groups or the older couples in special matching, quasi-military travel clothes. We do bring money, though, and Berlin is as focused as anywhere else on extracting it, whether it's Segway tours along Unter den Linden, bronze soldiers to pose with under the Gate or bicycles built for six to hold up the traffic on.

There's a lot to see here, of the grand and impressive sort, as well as tackier stuff, but today was taken up mostly with house-keeping, returning from Zagan, getting the hire car back to the Hauptbahnhof (a mission, a veritable mission, and all praise to the sat-nav), and finding our hotel again - but we did manage time for some gawping at the vast food hall at the Ka-De-We department store, with more cured meat than you could shake a stick at, and smelly cheeses, and beautiful shiny fruit tarts, as lovely as in any French patisserie, and amazing fish, and displays indicating a predilection for chocolate-coated marzipan that I could entirely identify with. Tomorrow, more travelling - tonight, we luxuriate in a vast bed with separate duvets as light as air, which we will appreciate after the last two nights in a former German military hospital in Zagan, which was as luxurious as it sounds...

Stalag Luft III

 A lump of concrete in a forest; a lump of broken brick in my hand; a lump in my throat. Our visit to the site of Stalag Luft III today was moving, definitely, standing on the ground where Hut 103 once stood, walking on sand dug out of the Harry tunnel, looking at things that Dad had seen day after day during his four years in the camp - things like the brick-lined fire-fighting pond, the theatre walls, bits of broken crockery with the Luftwaffe eagle on the bottom. It was a warm and balmy day, but in winter it gets down to -20 degrees, and the pine and young oak trees growing all over the compound now weren't there to cut the icy wind back in 1942-45.

Marek, the museum director, is a man with a mission and enormous enthusiasm, spreading the word of the camps to local people and seeing it as a duty, to honour the memory of the men who were imprisoned here, and the thousands who died here. That was my surprise today: to learn about adjoining Stalag VIII C, where thousands of Russian prisoners of war endured (and often didn't) concentration camp conditions - all because Stalin wouldn't sign the Geneva Convention. It made Stalag Luft III seem a bit like a holiday camp in comparison, with no work to be done by the officers, Red Cross parcels, Shakespeare productions, model yachts on the pond, choirs and orchestras. But of course it wasn't really: there was never enough food, the boredom was epic, the cold was horrific - and the ingenuity, hard work, determination and courage involved in digging the tunnels was totally an inspiration.

Fifty of the escapers were shot afterwards on Hitler's orders, and their names are everywhere; but there was also danger in everyday life in those extraordinary times: my father was one small stroke of luck away from being shot by a guard wanting revenge for his family killed in a bombing raid. That kind of thing wasn't rare. It all seemed very real today, especially as the area is still used by the Polish tank division for training, and as we walked around we could hear gunshots and the boom of tank cannons, and saw one trundling through the trees.

It was a relief afterwards to find Zagan's pretty centre and sit with a beer and a pizza outside in the sun, joking about how glad we were that fast food is an international language; but actually thankful for so much more than that.

Mentioning the war

In preparation for my day at Stalag Luft III tomorrow, I was reading Paul Brickhill's 'The Great Escape' on the train to Berlin last night, and got a bit embarrassed when I realised I'd put it down with its cover up to get out my ticket for the conductor. I really shouldn't have been: the war is a fact of life, or of history at least, here in Germany, and I suppose every German has had to sort out for themselves how to manage that. Every culture has events in its past that are, at the very least, an embarrassment to those living with the ramifications - even we mild-mannered, low-profile Kiwis have our issues, the treatment of Maori in the early days of European settlement not the least of them.

But of course a World War (or two) that killed millions is another matter altogether, especially when that includes the Holocaust. I was quite impressed this morning when I was photographing (badly - broken shoulder, remember) a bronze sculpture of children that we came across by chance in a side street off Friedrichstrasse near the station, which commemorates the Kindertransport. That was the sending of 10,000 Jewish children to England in 1938-41 - the lucky ones, that is. Other trains took other children to places like Auschwitz. I learned this thanks to the passing German lady who took my arm and led me to read the nearby story boards that accompany the sculpture. She's got her handling of history sorted, it would seem.

And tomorrow is going to be all about the war, as I visit the remains of a prisoner of war camp hidden in the pine trees that line the bumpy roads here in western Poland. My father spent four years of his early 20s there, hungry, bored, frustrated and no doubt sometimes fearful for his safety - with good reason, as we discovered after his death. I wonder what else I may learn tomorrow.

Connections

Our city beaches are in the news: dead pilchards by the thousand, dead penguins, dead dolphins, even dead dogs. It's a mystery and a worry. Thank goodness it's not summer - then it would strike to the very heart of daily life here, if the beaches were out of bounds (I have faith it will be sorted by then).

It's one of the main glories of Auckland, that we have beautiful sandy beaches edging all the suburbs - usually pretty sheltered and safe (the surfies have to go over to the west coast for the wild black-sand beaches) and always a balm for the eyes and soul. Only a balm, etc, at the moment - but that's still worth a lot.

Yesterday I was in Takapuna, where I love to go shopping simply because I can be buzzing along the road between boutiques and cafes and there, at the end of the street, is the sea, blue and shining, with always a yacht gliding past. It's lovely.

Takapuna Beach is long and broad at low tide, and Charles Kingsford Smith landed his plane the Southern Cross there in 1932, a stop on his tour around the country celebrating, amongst other notable firsts, his pioneer flight across the Tasman. When he got down to Dunedin, my father, a boy, was thrilled to win a lucky draw for a joy-flight with him. It gave him the flying bug and led him to leave the farm when he was older to go to Christchurch to take lessons. Then the war began, he joined the Air Force, went to Britain and met my mother, crash-landed on a bombing mission over northern France, was helped by the Resistance, captured by the Germans and ended up in Stalag Luft III in Poland, the Great Escape prison camp, where he spent the next 4 years.

He disliked talking about it, and there's a lot we don't know, but I would like one day to make a sort of pilgrimage to Sagan. My nephew has been, and says the pine forest has grown back over the site of the camp, but still...

Most people look down The Strand and just see a beach.