An Irishman’s Diary about war and peace in Poland

Strolling around the Silesian town of Luban last week, where I was attending a Polish-Irish wedding (An Irishman’s Diary, August 12th), I came across an odd little hill-top cemetery. The names on the headstones were in Cyrillic script, and there were no religious symbols, only a mysterious red star on each stone. But then the dates, mostly between February and April 1945, gave the game away. These were the Soviet soldiers who died in one of the last German victories of the second World War. They had been part of a force that was then sweeping triumphantly westwards. Their comrades had just encircled the industrial powerhouse of Breslau. Overall victory was in sight.

Then the Germans launched a massive counter-offensive at Luban, aimed at securing the rail link there before retaking Breslau, which Hitler had declared a fortress, to be defended as all costs.

During several days of fierce fighting, they destroyed 162 Soviet tanks. As for mere soldiers, the Germans were not taking prisoners. Hence the cemetery in Luban’s Stone Hill Park– a shrine to the USSR’s “Great Patriotic War”.

Luban and its hinterland remained German for the rest of that war. But in the carve-up that followed, the Oder-Neisse line was declared Poland’s new frontier, and huge enforced shifts of population followed.

Germans were expelled westwards. Polish refugees replaced them, having themselves been displaced in the east. Breslau became the home of a mass influx from the Ukrainian city of Lwow (now L’viv), where Russians had replaced them.

Studying maps of the region during our visit, I wondered for a while where Breslau – once so important – had gone. Then I realised it’s now Wroclaw, Poland’s fourth-largest city. We travelled there later, on that same rail link the Germans defended so fiercely. And I marvelled at how the city’s gorgeous old-town square had somehow survived the destruction of the 1945 siege.

In fact it hadn’t – it was largely destroyed, as was the rest of the city. But after the war, Wroclaw’s new population restored it with loving care. You wouldn’t know now that a single shell had dropped there.

Not all of Poland’s postwar inheritance has been so lucky. Back in Luban’s park, close to the cemetery, we also found the ghost of a once-magnificent outdoor swimming pool – Olympic-sized, with concrete diving platforms, a children’s pool, and a complex of buildings, all still standing but in a state of ruin.

I’ve learned since that it was built by the Germans in the 1920s and that it purported to be the highest outdoor pool in Europe (the views are lovely even today). It was still used until the 1990s. But having survived the Nazis, the war, and 45 years of communism, it finally succumbed to democracy and the free market.

Latter-day Poland decided the pool was a luxury it couldn’t afford. So now it seems to be an amenity only for drinkers and vandals, who have wreaked astonishing destruction in a short period.

Wading among the debris in the shallow end, my 10-year-old son found an interesting souvenir – an eight-millimetre rifle bullet. We don’t think this was sinister. There’s an army range nearby. Or maybe somebody had used the pool for target practice – you wouldn’t notice the damage.

In any case, Daniel was inseparable from his bullet for days afterwards, and very exercised about how he could bring this treasured possession home.

I explained gently, via a short lecture on airport security in the post 9/11 era, that he would be doing no such thing. So then he wondered could we post it home. But I also explained that the concept of bullets in the post had a sinister ring to it too.

In the end I suggested he bury it somewhere locally before we left. It would be a small memorial to peace in Europe, I said. He could always mark the spot and come back for it some day, if he wanted.

And that’s what he meant to do. Except that, in the last days of our holiday, we forgot all about it. Until, that is, we were half-way through the airport security check, when Daniel reminded us by wondering aloud (but not too loud, luckily) where the bullet was.

Nobody knew, so there followed a tense few moments during which I practised plausible explanations for why my children were smuggling ammunition onto a plane. Fortunately, nothing beeped, not even Daniel (who I’d begun to suspect had swallowed the projectile). By the time we’d arrived back in Dublin, the whereabouts of the bullet remained a mystery.

@FrankmcnallyIT fmcnally@irishtimes.com