Treblinka Monument

Treblinka

Les and I Cycle

    Day before yesterday, Les and I went on a difficult and daring bicycle trip to the remote town of Treblinka.  Notice that I say,  “difficult and daring”, but we were both into it even though it is the middle of the “winter” and our bikes are less than long-distance cruisers.  Les’ bike is in much worse shape than mine.  The crank grinds and moans like a living being in mortal pain!  I think it bothers me more than it does him because he keeps riding it, but maybe it is because of not having the extra funds to repair it.  Nie wiem.  Now to get on with the story.  We were both interested in Treblinka because it is the site of the second largest concentration camps in Poland even though it was almost completely destroyed by the Nazis.  They were trying to cover their “tracks” before these particular regions of Poland were re-occupied by Allied soldiers.  So, Les and I checked out the route on the map and figured that it would be between 75 and 80 kilometers one way.  We decided to leave early in the morning and make a day trip out of it.  I was bad and did not get up very early because I felt like sleeping in since it was vacation.  We did not get pushed off until around seven o’clock.  It was quite cold, like around twenty five degrees, but fortunately no wind was blowing.  We actually made it up to Treblinka around noon, but we made a bad discovery on our way up!  No stores were open because it is the second day of Polish Christmas, and we were counting on stores for candy bars and other healthy things like that.  Thanks to Les we had a few slices of dried-out bread, an old piece of pizza, two slices of pumpkin roll, a bit of cabbage salad, and two apples.  He had raided the fridge before we left, but we were not planning to rely on his booty!  We were running out of liquids on the way up, so we stopped in a little town called Stoczek and learned that a little bar in town was open.  So, we went into this hazy, little room and asked for some bottles of juice.  I think that the bar-keep expected that we were going to be buying some hard liquor like all of his other patrons were.  He looked at us like we were aliens when we asked for juice.  That was the dirtiest, manliest establishment I have been in!  It reminded me of what I imagine I will find in the middle of Siberia.

Swarthy men sitting around a small table with the dark, wet air working its way                between the hairs of their fur-lined coats.  They are drinking “wodka”/ vodka silently         boring holes in the impending walls and wasting away the days of a long winter.  No             wonder Russian writers wrote such long, dark novels!

Les and I made it safely to Treblinka.  We ate “lunch” and rested, but by then a stiff wind out of the southwest was chilling our sweaty bodies.  We walked around site of the concentration camp and views the huge field of unpolished granite stones that are a memorial to the 900,000 or more who died there.  I was taken aback again by the sheer horror of mass genocide, and the fact that even though so many people died in an actual experience like this; their reality remains almost merely a statistic.  There is a huge stone monument, high above the field of stone (probably fifteen acres), with an cutaway view of a mass grave carved on its face.  It remains as a memorial to those murdered at Treblinka.  It is worth contemplating. Unfortunately because of the cold, Les and I got back on our bikes and quickly started home.  However, riding home became laborious as we faced into a steady headwind.  We did find a small sklep that was open where we bought some juice and candy bars.  About ten kilometers from home, we finally called Lavern to come and give us a lift.  I have not been so tired in a long time!  Not bad for two American transplants; around ninety miles!

Christmas Day!

On Christmas Day, we all had brunch over at Lavern and Lolita’s house.  There was great food and lots of it.  As Lavern said, the different dishes went together quite well!  Stuffed French toast, eggs and a sausage ring, apples and a peanut butter dip, some fruit beverage, and an egg “danish-like” pastery!  After brunch, everyone worked to clean up the meal, and I made a huge wreath out of pine and spruce boughs to hang above the fireplace.  I miss doing that with my sisters, especially Caia, because we do that every Christmas!  We all went on a long walk together because the day was so beautiful with a blue sky.  That is very rare in Poland!  I think there were some pretty roudy games of tag between the guys!! There was no snow here for Christmas which makes me mad, but what can I do.  We sang songs together, played guitar, watched a Chanticleer Christmas video, played games, and talked about what Christmas means.  Such a wonderful lazy day!

Christmas Celebrations

    Well, I want to write about our Christmas celebration in Poland.  On the last day of teaching before Christmas, I went to a “Wigilia” at school with my co-teachers.  This is like a Christmas dinner before Christmas Eve.  There is a tradition of sharing an “oplatek”/ wafer together with friends and family before the meal, and you break your piece with other people in a gesture of unity.  Then there are all kinds of interesting and delicious foods to eat.  I already mentioned the carp, which is terrible, but there was some meatless “bigos” as well as other cold salads.  I think that it is a remarkable meal because there is traditionally no hard liquor at these meals before Christmas day, only wine, which allows the atmosphere to be much less disjointed and messy.

At the Smucker household, we had a wonderful Christmas Eve celebration.  Laura made a traditional Oregon seafood chowder and Italian sauce bread for supper. Delightful! Then we sang a number of Christmas carols, and John read the prophecies and story of Jesus’ birth from Luke and John.  I am always amazed by the new things that I learn about Jesus’ birth.  If you think about it, the wise men probably did not come to Bethlehem on the eve of Jesus’ birth.  For one thing, it was probably too great a distance to be covered even in a a few days of travelling.  Things moved at a different pace than they do today.  (I want to write a modern version of the wisemen’s story with them traveling across the deserts in their Mercedes cars and their lapeled suits.)How did the wise men know that this star was anything special and when did it appear to them?  We do not know that they were believers, although they knew about the Son of God’s coming.  So, these were one or two of my thoughts.  I was also struck by an article that Lolita Hershberger read by Michael Card.  He wrote about their familytradition of celebrating Christmas Eve in a stable with the animals, manure, a small candle, and the sounds of the night.  Jesus’ initiation into the world was not so romantic as I would like to think!  It was not even sterile.  No halogen bulbs to shed some light on the birth.  No saline solution or betadine.  This is especially clear in my mind since we had sheep, I was always very careful to immediately dip the lambs’ navels in iodine so there wasn’t that wide-open pathway for bacteria and infection to set in.  A barn is a very crude and inhospitable birthing environment!                                                                                                                          Well, back to the other train of thought.  We had a little treasure hunt for the younger kids, and they searched for a few of their Christmas gifts.  It was great!  They were tearing around the house finding clues and howling as they discovered new ones.  After they had opened their gifts, the “present time” took on a more “geared down” approach.  Each person opened their present while the other people looked on with anticipation,  Boy, opening presents is such a hard thing; all the waiting and the suspense!  Surprise, that is why they are called presents!  The boys immediately started playing a Risk game which one of them had received as a gift.  I looked at a photo album that my family sent me and donned a new West Virginia t-shirt.  I was so tired though that I fell asleep in the arm chair and slept for about an hour.  I awoke at about ten o’clock.

Les and I had promised to stay in our Polish tutor’s house and keep the fire going while she was in southern Poland over Christmas.  But, there is a man named Richard who has been here for over a week, and we (except Cor) have not seen him more than about fifteen minutes morning and evening.  This was something that both Les and I were thinking about, so we dressed in dark, drab uniforms with masks and went over to Cor’s house to lynch him for the night.  We pushed our get-away car up the driveway so as not to draw any unecessary attention. Unfortunately for us, the door to their house was locked, and so we had to knock to announce our presence.  They opened up, and we grabbed Richard.  He was not all that much to fight with, but his girlfriend . . . wow!  She first tried to keep us from exiting the house, and then she lept into the car when we were about to make our get-away.  She just sat in the seat and said that she was going with us too.  No amount of bribery or threatening could remove her.  The love-bug has victimized her!  Finally, we reached an agreement that they could have ten more minutes to wrap things up (they did not keep that bargain very well).  Then, Richard was popped into the car, leaving a fuming Cor in her house.  Actually, I hope that she wasn’t too lonely.  We enjoyed the night; guy time.

Skating

   I am listening to “A Living Prayer” by Allison Krauss.  What a wonderful song; a powerful cry and testimony to life in Jesus! Yesterday was a wonderful Sunday.  There would be several different reasons that people on the team here would give for that.  I would say that with the approach of Christmas it becomes clearer to me why there is so much to celebrate.  I think about what Christmas means to all of humanity whether we recognize it or not.  Christmas ultimately celebrates Jesus who came to this earth as the God-man and gives the human race Life.  That moment in history initiated a huge change in the human existence.  Instead of simply “doing time” on this earth, there is hope for us; for our ultimate redemption!  Next Sunday,  our church service is going to be open for anyone who wants to read a piece of Christmas literature, a Scripture passage, personal thoughts, or songs vocal/ or instrumental.  I am looking forward to this!  Corleen would say that this past Sunday was wonderful because her boyfriend Richard is here from Canada.  This is the first time that they have spent together, face to face, since they started their relationship.  I am happy for them both!  I think that we will not see much of Richard even though he is staying with Les and I;)  The Smucker boys would say that it was a wonderful day because we got to go skating at the new skating rink here in Minsk.  What an interesting experience!  The rink is not finished being built, but it was opened about two weeks ago.  There is no cost to skate there until the first of the year.  That means that a lot of people were skating last evening; I would guess between three and four hundred!  The rink is actually quite large, but it was extremely rough due to the number of blades etching its surface.  It is funny because Minsk does not have a big ice skating tradition (to put it mildly) and so out of two hundred people on the ice about one hundred and fifty were sort of “scoot-gliding”around.  This made the ice a wonderful obstacle course; always fluctuating and posing new “hazards”.  I teach a good number of the kids in Minsk and so I saw a bunch of my students skating.  I even got to help a couple of them with their skating technique by skating around the rink, linked arm and arm.  That was fun.  I forget how helpless it feels to be trying to keep your balance, let alone dodging obstacles on the ice.  My shoulder is sore today from having them hanging onto my arm for “dear life”.  The people have so much to learn about even building ice skating rinks here.  The rink here has a cement block floor surrounding it instead of the rubber/ nylon mats I have seen other places. Imagine this!!  Concrete does an absolute number on your skates if you do not have guards.  I cringed as I walked around the rink and passed people gleefully trotting along in their skates, oblivious to the fact that with each step they take, their skating experience is significantly diminishing in quality!  I know because I have skated with dull skates before, and I would sum it up by saying: “I lacked control”.  I can’t change the way that people design things though; Polish engineering lacks terribly!  The Smucker guys had a blast, I must say!  We came home, drank cocoa, and listened to Ken Davis.  So for the Sunday evening update from Polski Rolski, this is Robin Soukup signing off.

General update

    It is supposed to be winter here in Poland, but we still haven’t seen any snow since a little that we had at the beginning of October.  Local people as well as the general media tells me that the  climate has not been this mild in December since 25o years ago.  How the people kept records from that long ago, I am not sure!  I know that they had thermometers and paper to record temperatures but having a valid temperature record from that long ago seems more unlikely to me.  I am not sure why this is important though.  I have found that Poland has a lot of damp and cloudy days.  It is likely less damp and just plain colder at this time of year usually.  Dampness has a way of penetrating deep into everything.

School is not going too badly.  I enjoy some of the classes more than others.  The classes that I enjoy teaching are the ones with kids/ teenagers/ adults in them who simply cannot wait to try to converse.  That gives me something to “work with”.  It becomes a lot more work for the teacher when it is all his responsibility to keep the class going.  I know that good questions are supposed to keep classes active, but they do not always generate the kind of response that you were hoping for.  I had one particular class of  young girls the other day that was just great.  They were a little bit embarrassed entering my classroom for the first time; however, they really just wanted to check me out, to learn what I knew, to “talk” with me, etc.  I had a great time.  They started by pointing to things in the room and asking me if I knew the Polish word for it.  OF COURSE I did not know all of the words for everything in the room and so they were delighted to have the chance  to “teach” me.   Overall, I think that we had a really nice time together!  We studied and attempted to discuss Christmas vocab and we created word pictures about the familiar traditions in both cultures.

I must get to bed.  I tutor two people in the morning before lunch tomorrow.  I think that I need sleep before the sun “rises.  These days it does not really rise; it peaks over the horizon.  All the best.

Commentary on Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall

    I think it would be indecent of me to publish a piece of literature on my blog without giving some personal insight and commentary on it.  Many powerful quotes speak for themselves.  I think that this song by Bob Dylan does.  However, I also think that this song was written to invoke/ provoke us to deep thinking.  With that in mind, I write.

One of the most powerful things that this song does is that it paints vivid and startling pictures about what exists in this world.  But more than that,  the images create a powerful revulsion within me.  A revulsion and frustration that stems from my inability to justify the terrible “wrongness” of what is taking place in these pictures.  “I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it . . . I saw a black branch with blood that kept dripping, I saw a roomful of men with their hammers all a bleedin’. . . I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children.”  The song is so relentless because it slogs through all the human senses.  The being, the seeing, the hearing, the thinking.  It offers a picture of contradiction and pain to each of the ways that I experience life.  Every verse is summed up with the impending words “It’s hard, it’s hard, it’s hard, it’s a hard rain’s gonna fall”.  I can imagine a little child listening intently as the music to this songs dies away and then turning to his father he asks the question that all of us ask inside.  “What rain is going to fall? Why is it going to be a hard rain, Papa?”

The only reason that a child dares to ask this question is he has not lost his sense of innocence.  He is simply asking the question out of . . . he does not know. (I don’t either) That is what this song speaks about so strongly to me! Innocence is lost; it is gone.  The young, blue-eyed son has been changed and he sees life.  He has witnessed life and he has learned.  But about that rain.  Is it the future decay of the human race, fallen victim to inner degradation and corruption?  I think that it is and much more! The hard rain has fallen and is falling.  My sense of justice calls out for there to be retribution for all of this terrible evil.  The rain that falls and is falling is connected with who man is.  Man is fundamentally twisted.  Sinful.  The “blue-eyed son”.  He is going to return to this world that he knows and he is going to tell everyone about reality; about what he knows is happening.  I admire his courage.  I think he is very brave and very honest.  Willing to give himself to such a thankless task, to be the prophet to people.  But what does it do for him to be honest about a situation of this magnitude if it keeps repeating itself?  There must be an answer!  Do not quickly form one. For it is not easy to do so, the answer must become personal before it will work any great thing.

-Robin