Warsaw Inspiration: My Return to Poland

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Scott Smoot at Warsaw's old town today, virtually.

Pozdrowienia z Atlanta! We greeted Poland with that slogan on our tee shirts when the Westminster Schools' Ensemble toured the country. Friendship Ambassadors Foundation sent us to win Communists over to Democracy with our repertoire of spirituals, Mozart, and Broadway songs. But my strongest memory of Poland is a Communist propaganda film.

I'm remembering Poland now because I've biked 417 miles on trails around Atlanta since the end of February. On the map of my virtual tour of the world, that distance takes me from Vienna to Warsaw.

In June 1977, Poles didn't need our help to resent the Communist Party. As our bus from the airport entered Warsaw, our guide Marek pointed to an imposing skyscraper and said, "We call that 'our gift from our Russian friends,' the ugliest building in Warsaw." The union Solidarity was already resisting Russian overlords in Gdansk, a port city on our tour that we would come to love.

Our tour started, however, with a documentary film screened for us by the official (Communist) tourist agency. Grainy black-and-white film showed Warsaw's old town square thriving during the 1930s. In 1939, Nazi Germany invaded. Then the people of Warsaw rebelled. Hitler ordered the systematic destruction of the city to make an example for all subjugated peoples. A Nazi soldier with a camera panned 360 degrees to document that Hitler's order had been fulfilled, "not one brick should remain on a brick."

Warsaw's old town square, ca. 1945.

Soviet soldiers are presented as liberators in this propaganda film, but the image I've carried in memory all these years is all Pole: men and women picking their ways over a landscape of rubble. They stop, survey the scope of the task ahead, and then a woman stoops to place a brick in her basket.

The kicker was after the movie. We stepped from the grim images in the dark theatre into the beautiful town square of my selfie, rebuilt as it had been pre-war, with the original bricks.

Daunted by a pile of papers to grade, a kitchen strewn with dirty dishes, or any impossible task, I've remembered the landscape of toppled bricks, that woman, her basket, and the beauty of Warsaw's old town center.

[I remember our choral director Frank Boggs here.]

Miles YTD 975 || 2nd World Tour Total 14,510 miles since June 2020 || Next Stop: Minsk, Belarus

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