Back in the day, when the good citizens of Poland finally found
a way to overthrow the Communist yoke, a common refrain, born of
decades of exhaustive effort, was the wish that their country
simply be a “normal” one. That of course meant they wanted to live
à la Western Europe and the U.S., free and prosperous,
under rule of law, without a Soviet Russia breathing down their
necks. Two decades later much of that has come to pass, and no one
speaks of “normal” anymore. Besides, what is “normal” these days?
(Sorry, but that’s exactly the kind of question one can afford to
toss off when belonging to the West again.)
This summer, for family reasons, I found myself in Krakow for
two full weeks — my first time back in Poland in 33 years, a
golden opportunity to see how it has changed. Family and friends
warned me I wouldn’t recognize it. I wasn’t so sure. Yes, on the
way in from the Krakow airport, nicely, discreetly named after Pope
John Paul II, we passed an IKEA, huge lumberyards, many new car
dealerships and KFC-signed strip malls, and even saw a stretch of
modern freeway. Yet on nearing the city’s center, once we turned
into bumpy and narrow Dluga street, everything was as I remembered:
its three-story buildings still a sooty, early 20th century gray,
but with one small difference — all the ground floor stores and
shops had clean windows and displays, bright signs, and not a queue
in sight.
The historic old city, where we stayed at my wife’s old
apartment, was something else again, exactly as I remembered it,
except better: spiffier, cleaner, upgraded, renovated, and not only
its huge Main Square but side streets and courtyards and cellars.
Krakow has become a tourist mecca, and its summer human traffic
never stops, foreign and domestic alike. I would need a lot more
than two weeks — how about two years? — to explore it properly,
starting with its glorious churches, an art historian’s dream. How
can there be so many of them in such close vicinity, if not right
next door to one another? (Not to mention the many chapels within
each one. And it’s not as if these churches weren’t overwhelmingly
Catholic.)
About those tourists. It used to be Poles from the hinterlands
would be bused in, in groups, to see Poland’s old capital. What
struck me this time was the number of individual Polish families,
two parents, two or three kids, on visits. So very Western
suburban, no? That also means they traveled by family car. Krakow,
needless to say, now teems with automobiles, all of them newish,
Japanese, European Fords, German and French, plus an occasional
Cadillac — and for old time’s sake, a communist-era clunker that
didn’t know the '70s are over.
Students of that Polish decade will recall the communist party’s
ill-starred effort to introduce consumerism — all of it resulting
in huge Polish indebtedness to the West (and wide suspicions that
much of that Western aid ended up in Kremlin accounts) and an ever
more restive populace. Back then, complaints centered on food
shortages and the unavailability of Polish pork (and toilet paper).
Now food is so plentiful and shelves so well stocked — eggs in
cartons that let you know if they came from free-ranging chickens
— if there is concern, it’s that modern supermarkets drive out Mom
and Pop efforts. Today’s most frequent complaints have a familiar
ring: there’s way too much public and private debt, regulations are
killing small business, the country is becoming too dependent on EU
funds. It all could end very badly.
But not right away. Drabness is no longer the norm. People make
plans, travel the world, build new houses, knock down walls to
create bigger, sleeker apartments, the entire package at times
worthy of Architectural Digest. And in Krakow every hour
on the hour a trumpeter plays the abruptly interrupted Heynal from
the tower of St. Mary’s Basilica on the Main Square. The
performance recalls the original bugler, who by legend took an
arrow to the throat while warning the city of a Tatar attack back
in 1240. I always remembered its sound as hopelessly forlorn. Now I
swear it’s being played by Louis Armstrong.
