Adventures Of

Dobra dobra,

The scene: Kiev, 12.30 in the afternoon. Very hot. In a kind of darkened underground den full of computers, game-playing kids and a man listening to loud Ukrainian pop music. The keyboard is covered in cyrillic letters, as is the screen.

I left you about to depart from Berlin. There followed a 9 hour journey on a pleasant Polish train, in a nice spacious carriage with a whole seat to myself, marred only by the presence of (in a whole train of Poles) 3 whiny Australians sitting right behind me..honestly, i've never heard people complain so much. After spending the day engaged in such enjoyable activites as reading my book on russian history, listening to music, staring out of the window, eating, sleeping, attempting to learn the cyrillic alphabet, getting annoyed at the whiny australians, making faces at the cute small polish kid running up and down the carriage, staring out of the window some more...I arrived in the beautiful city of Krakow. It really is exceptionally lovely, every building seems to be both deeply historical and elegantly proportioned, and it is laid out as series of rings revolving around the narrow streets of the old town, which surrounds the gigantic central square, the Rynek Glowny, home to many grand buildings, churches, bars, buskers and benches.
Krakow is also experiencing a bit of a tourism boom - the streets are full of cafes and shops catering to english speakers, as well as an inordinate number of kebab places, bizarrely..As the girl working in my hostel put it, things are changing so quickly that she went out one night and discovered there was a new tramline. I assume this must be a lot to do with Poland joining the EU - it would be interesting to see what it was like before.

My hostel was in the old Jewish district, Kazimerz, which provides a kind of Jewish treasure-hunt of old synagogues,monuments and klezmer houses. One place I found paticularly moving was the old graveyard, which was destroyed by the Nazis, but the fragments of gravestones were collected together to create a 'lamentation wall', symbolising the shattered world they represent. According to the Galician Jewish museum (apparently Galicia province was created at the end of the 18th century to encompass the eastern part of poland and western part of the ukraine), elaborately carved tombstones are one of the most important expressions of traditional Jewish art, so it has a double significance.

Walking around this pretty and peaceful old district, it is hard to imagine that this became a virtual prison for jews during the war, as this weas made into the jewish ghetto. The museum tells the story of the Krakow resistance, the 'Jewish Fighting Organisation' - ZOB, mostly composed of determined young men and women who saw their struggle being 'not for life, but for a dignified death.' They used to have meetings in the shop of the chemist, the only non-jewish resident who was allowed to come and go freely, and carried mesaages and supplies, foiling the plans of the Einzatzgappen (a branch of the SS with the special function of killing jews) to starve them. Krakow was the first place in Poland to take arms against the occupiers. (It is also the setting for the film 'Schindler's List').

On 22 December 1942, members of the ZOB and the Polish Workers' party planned a large-scale grenade attack on the German-only restaurants, and to hang the polish flag from bridges and cover the destroyed statue of Adam Mickiewicz, Poland's premier poet, with flowers. The attacks were successful, and they also managed to shoot a Gestapo officer. In the next few months, almost all the members of ZOB were betrayed or caught, and sent to Plaszow, a forced labour camp just south of the city. I went down to Plaszow to see if there was any trace remaining, any memorial, but all I could see were a few houses and a bit of wasteland. What i found really shocking to consider was that, along with Auchwitz (which I didn't visit- somehow I couldn't face the idea of an orgainised tour in a big group of tourists), almost as many people were murdered in the open, on the rolling hills, in the middle of the idyllic countryside, in fields, by rivers, on bridges, in town centres.

The ghetto was liquidised (what an awful word) on March 13-14, 1943. In words from the diary of one of the members of the resistance, Gusta Dranger (who like the others photographed, looked incredibly young),

'History will condemn us forever, so we can only try to save our souls because we are lost anyway. We can try at least to leave a memory which someone, someday, will honour.'

I find it strange that this part of the world is associated so much in the imagination with Jewish culture, but a shock to realise that there are no Jewish people, hardly, or any living culture.
From an exhibition of photographs of ruins of jewish monuments:

'But now there is hardly anyone even to look after these places, which are left to rot. The worshippers are long since gone, taken away, and murdered; and the physical remains of their culture lingers on, damaged beyond repair. There is no preparation for leaving all this for posterity. On the contrary, the clock just stopped..Now there is nothing but silence, the painful ruins of a tragic past. The banality of the ruins left behind is painful to look at.'

However, one legacy that is surely alive and well in Krakow is - musica! Famed for being the home of bands such as Kroke, you can hear the strains of klezmer clarinets and rollicking accordion all over the place - I saw one paticularly brilliant band one young musicians out busking in the Rynek Glowny, which seems to function as a kind of all-purpose all-ages gathering place in the evenings, which is nice..I think we miss out on this sort of thing a bit in Britain..There's also been an international street theatre festival on (there appears to be a non -stop festival cycle in Krakow, arranged by some enlightened town council no doubt), ranging from clowns and mime artists to large complex performances involving lighting and acrobatics and elaborate costumes and fire and revolving giant baskets on roller-coaster structures...All in all, lots of fun and completely free ;-)

As you may well know, I'm a big fan of any kind of street performance, as I love the non-exclusive non-formal entertainment-as-you're walking along kind of thing, so, inspired by the multitudes of buskers, I decided to join them, and, dragging along my new Swedish friend (I've met lots of nice and interesting people in the hostel who are also travelling alone..), I set off, wielding my fiddle. Unfortunately, by the time I actually got near to the main square, it was..well, getting dark, and raining, a little. Not to be put off, I set up, played a couple of tunes, and my first zloty were from an American girl, was was wandering about with her viola with the same intention as me. It turned out she was on her way to the Ukraine to study folk music. So we decided to play togteher, and made I think some quite nice sounds. we made a grand total of 43 zloty and 18 cents (about 9 pounds), and met a large variety of progressively more drunken Poles...an elder;y couple who danced int the street, a guy who asked me to play something to 'rattle his bones, a young chap who picked me a flower, a group who were travelling about with only a guitar as their means of support..

So..saturday (yesterday) I departed. At this point I have to confess something realy quite dumb...I didn't realise that to take a train from Krakow to Moscow, you go through Belarus, for which is needed, that elusive beast, a transit visa. Ah. But, lo and behold! EU citizens no longer need a visa for the Ukraine. So, rather than travel all the way around to the north, through latvia, which would have taken forever, i decided to come to Kiev, and er, discover my roots. All my dad knows is that my grandmother's family left the ukraine for poland, and then france, it seems, and he gave me a few names - Isaacs, Krauss, Regalsky. (The last one apparently became lord mayor of sydney, which I find not quite credulous!)

So..my first night train. It was 40 minutes late leaving and then I found myself in a hot and completely packed carriage with no idea what my ticket went. Some Irish students helpfully pointed out to me that the sleeping compartments were all the way at the other end of the (exceedingly long) train, so at the first stop I staggered off (the steps onto polish trains, which don't seem to arrive anywhere near the platform, make british saftey warnings seem laughable..), ran down to the other end, and clambered on again, together with the large bag of fruit I had collected for my joureny..After many confusing discussions with the carriage attendant, we eventually ascertained which was my compartment. Within were my fellow cabin-sharers, an eldely Ukrainian woman with a wrinkled face, and (I think) her daughter, with a very funny laugh - Stephanie and Loryse. They turned out to be very jolly fellow-travellers, and immediately wanted to know everything about me, which, despite not knowing any of the other's language (to my shame, they could speak Polish, Russian, Ukrainian and German), we more or less managed. They were most approving ofthe fact that I was not married, and horrified and fascinated by the journey I'd shown them the map of..Periodically we were interrupted by rather frightening border control guards on a mission to find somebody with an expired passport, at least, and the evening culminated with Stephania singing 'Ave Maria' in a beautiful soprano (she had earlier shown me with pride her visa to visit the vatican) whilst I lay in my bunk above. They also managed to talk nonstop (to each other) for about 8 hours, and still sound animated - i may be inventing things, but it does kind of remind me of what I can remember of my grandmother's incessant talking..! They abrubtly departed at 1am, as we reached Lviv, leaving me feeling slightly bereft but also relived to be able to open the window wide at last, as I think I might have suffocated. So, the night passed by, with the sound of the rails clunking beneath me, trying not to remember any of the dreadful tales I'd heard of people being gassed at night and their possessions stolen, and so on..

It's nice to know it's possible to communicate easily with people without really being able to tlak much..I've been reading a great book, by the Hungarian author called 'The Invisible Voice- Meditations on Jewish Themes', and he says something that i feel to be very true about human interaction, paticularly when travelling:

'Our honesty will only cause pleasant surprises, because if we declare ourselves identical at the outset, our differences will pop up unceasingly. If, however, we state at the outset that we are different, the common will be discovered time and time again.'

So, then, to kiev and...too tired to write any more, it involved a hot packed metro with all the signs in cyrllic and me wandering the streets desperately searching for the hostel, accosting strangers and saying 'Yaroslavna' hopefully while they consistently sent me in the wrong direction..

So, farewell, for now!

Guten Tag,

My journey began, if I am to calculate correctly, from the first hour of day 1, in a Turkish resturant in Dalston. (And thankyou to all who came to say farewell. At that moment i think i was dancing badly to a turkish pop band with Jannah in front of a fake waterfall inside a pretend cave). Ah, I sighed, who knows how long it will be until I can eat hummous and dolma again. Five and a half days later, and I sit in an intenet cafe surrounded by the sound of turkish being spoken, having just munched my way through a large piece of baklava. Hmm. I'm in Kreuzberg, Berlin, a kind of cross between Green Lanes and Camden, populated by the world's largest Turkish community outside Istanbul and home to the young and cool of berlin, famed for its mayday protests and annual 'love parade'.

Anyway...to return, through the back door of the veg shop across the street, to dalston for a moment..I merrily leapt on the N76 at 2.30am of day 1, having consumed more beer than was wise for one heading alone to china ( I had to drop that in. I promise not to boast any more), landing far too soon upon the steps of waterloo station. The doors were chained shut, so I settled myself down, locked myself to my violin and attempted a quick snooze. However, a young chap in a far more intoxicated state than myself decided to come and chat, and after teling me he was desperate to marry an australian, and that I had ruined his plan to write a book about travelling across siberia by doing it first (I did suggest there may have been others), he promptly passed out with his head on my knee. It seemed mean to ask him to move, as there are, i can tell you, to save the hassle of experimentation, a distinct lack of comfortable sleeping places at waterloo at 4am; and I suspected he would function quite well as an anti-mugging device. A couple arrived, and the girl, upon hearing of my studies, started rooting around in her bag with some excitement, for various chinese medicines for my inspection. Somehow, it all seemed quite normal. Eventually, the doors were unchained and we staggered off to our various destinations, mine to sleep on benches, floors, train seats, bags and anything else to hand before reaching Aachen via the eurostar and brussels the next afternoon.

Here I was met by a tall german stranger, and after watching some conceptual theatre that was taking place in the station (they kindly arranged it for the same time as my arrival), we went to his punk-record shop and had some tea. Then my dear friend Constanze, who lives in Aachen and is the girlfriend of the tall german, arrived, and a joyful weekend, involving much talking, drinking of coffee in cafes in the shade of the magnificent old cathedral, playing of irish songs, and drinking of german beer in german bars whilst discussing politics and telling bad jokes, ensued.

On sunday, after handing over a large portion of my worldly wealth, I boarded the elegant high-speed train to Berlin. I'm impressed with everything about German trains and stations so far. They seem to embody the effortless style, grace and efficiency that richard branson and british rail desperately long for, without being crowded or late, and even tell you how fast you are going! (200kph, in case you wondered). As I entered west berlin, on a miraculously beautiful sunny evening, we passed over the lengthy city outskirts and the zoo, complete with elephants, into the futuristic glass station. The view from the 'S-Bahn' trainline is surely one of the most interesting in the world, as you can see much of the cityscape, in all its old, new, and inbetween incarnations, spread out beneath and beyond. After having been bombed almost into rubble in WWII, and through processes of division and reunification, everything in berlin seems to be in the process of being put up or taken down, destroyed, resurrected or created: it has been called a city in a constant state of transition, and indeed there is a sense that anything could be happening around the next corner. Berlin is famous for its graffiti, which decorates practically every available surface, ranging from the elaborately artistic to the political, some of it beautiful, some an ugly eyesore; I suppose you just get used to coming out of your front door in the morning to find a new decoration! It's also really big! distances which seem tiny on the map are in reality expeditions through diverse districts linked by jungles of roads and wild space - there's no distinct centre, which makes it hard to know where to begin.

Yesterday I took part in a walking tour, which was a Good Idea, as I would never have worked out all the historical stuff on my own. We followed the path of events such as the overnight construction of the wall in 1961, (I paticularly like the story of the old lady whom, like many, found her house suddenly 'between countries', and on attempting to jump from her kitchen window into West Berlin found herself in a tug of war (literally) between the west german firefighters and the east german police, eventually making it to the west!), the balcony of the Reichstag from which two different states were declared within hours of each other in 1918 (consequently the only part to be preserved), the suicide of Hitler in his bunker, now a patch of grass in the middle of a car park, the square where students brought 20,000 books of such 'ungerman' authors as Heinrech Heine, the now (but only recently - some might say due to lingering anti-semitism) beloved german poet and political thinker, to be burnt. I was reading about him in the Jewish museum today, and came across these lovely lines written about his sadness about being away from germany, from his, originally self imposed, and then actual, exile in Paris.

'Here, everything whirls like a jumping-jack
Like a crazy dream or a frenzied race
With us, it's all in a beaten track
Safe in a rut, and nailed in place.'

It's hard to comprehend the relative recentness of some of the significant happenings; that until 18 years ago the whole of west berlin was surrounded by two walls and a 'death strip'. Apparently (and I say this in total historical ignorance, which i'm trying hard to educate myself out of, so feel free to correct me, all you history / politics geeks out there!), there is a school of 'revisionist' history right now which is asking the question, as unemployment rises and the economy worsens - 'was it really as bad as we thought in east germany?' Police state and secret police, but free healthcare and education and state employment - it's a tricky one!

The Berlin - Jewish museum is worth a visit to Berlin in itself: about 15 years old, it was designed by the architect Daniel Libeskind, originally as an extension to the existing museum. What was created takes the visitor deep underground into a vast concrete construction of empty spaces - the 'voids', without any visible link between the old and new buildings, as, the architect explains, it is not so easy to neatly link histories. Inside, the exhibition is composed of three interlinked corridors which contain the artifacts and stories of those murdered in the holocaust - the Axis of Exile, Axis of Holocaust and Axis of Continuity. The floors slope disorientatingly: Libeskind says of his 'Garden of Exile'

'One feels a little bit sick walking through it. But it is accurate, because that is what perfect order feels like when you leave the history of Berlin.'

The museum culminates in the Holocaust Tower, the 'voided void', a really quite frightening experience of standing enclosed inside a narrow and tall structure with a chink of natural light from one corner and the muffled sounds of outside - though no specific experience is intended, it forces comparisons with gas chambers.

I also read lots of enlightening stories of Jewish history, and was particularly interested by the tales of the German jews who fled to Shanghai from 1938-41, as it was the only place that didn't require an entry visa. Many of them travelled by the same route that I plan to take- from Berlin to Beijing by train, and then on to Shanghai (it took 16 days). My family on one side were originally Jewish a couple of generations back,
and although I don't know much about they came from (my dad seems to think somewhere near Kiev), and they would have left/ converted to Christianity before the pogroms (a russian word meaning massacre, or destruction, and used to describe rioting against jews), I still find it interesting to think of a history of displacement.

There are many remembrances of the Holocaust in Berlin - most recently, the huge and controversial Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (they gave the contract for the anti-graffiti paint to the same company that supplied gas to the Nazis) - of course, this misses out all the other groups who were massacred, and there will soon be new structures created for the gypsies and homosexual. It also raises the question now being posed by Berliners - when is enough enough?

This afternoon I walked by the canal , one of the city's many waterways, in a rare burst of warm sun (mostly it has been raining..), and saw how lovely life could be here. (It may be a generalisation, but for a capital city, I haven't seen a lot of self-important people rushing about - even the cyclists are relaxed!) - the banks were full of wildflowers, children were playing, people drank beer in the sunshine (wandering around clutching bottles of beer in germany doesnt seem to have the same negative connotations as at home..), and I came across a klezma (traditional jewish music associated with eastern europe) duo busking on a bridge. They wished me luck on my journeyings and forbid me from ever again going put without my violin - because this, the clarinet player said, is the 'best way, through music, to reach the heart and soul of a people'. So, my violin, and I, we set off tomorrow on the trail of the heart and soul of...well, you'll have to wait and see! Though i can tell you it's about 9 hours train journey to the east....I'm not sad to keave my hostel, there is a person in my room who snores louded than I could shout.

Auf Wiedersehen, i'm off to eat some turkish food!

I cannot rest from travel; I will drink
Life to the lees. All times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea. I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known,-- cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honor'd of them all,--
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains; but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

(Alfred Lord Tennyson, 'Ulysses')