POLAND 2023

Why Poland?

Scanning the travel brochures that arrive in the mail or the Sunday Travel sections in our newspapers, we noticed that few itineraries include Poland. Perhaps Krakow, perhaps Warsaw, perhaps the German death camps, but nothing very thorough. So we thought we would like to look more carefully at the country that produced Nicolaus Copernicus, Fryderyk Chopin, the three Singer siblings, Arthur Schopenhauer and Günter Grass (both born in Danzig, Germany/now Gdansk, Poland), Pope John Paul II, Leck Wałęsa, Ignacy Paderewski, Isaac Stern, Joseph Conrad , Maria Salomea Sklodowska (Marie Curie), Czeslaw Milosz- to name only the most obvious – and decide for ourselves. The first thing we had to get our heads around was that Poland is a relatively new country, having only lately emerged from totalitarianism. World War II only ended for Poland in 1989; after six years of the protracted horrors of the Nazi German occupation and then over forty years of Soviet Russian control, the country, newly democratized and independent, occupied once again the center of Europe’s map, stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Czech Republic.