Today we had a tour at 8 am. It was raining hard. We grabbed our raincoats and umbrellas and our driver outside of the apartment building we were staying at. I booked this guided tour through trip advisor. The tout company contacted me yesterday and said that they were no guides available but that they could still take us and we could use audioguides if we liked at a reduced rate. We agreed.
Our driver was Christopher. He was close to my age and grew up in Gdansk. He was a history teacher and was doing this gig to earn a bit of extra money for retirement. He was carrying quite a bit of anger about what happened to Poland during and after the war. He spoke of the agreement that was signed by Neville Chamberlain in 1939 that guaranteed assistance if Poland were ever attacked. France also signed this. The Anglo-Polish Agreement of Mutual Assistance. When Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, “Nobody ever came”. The UK and France did declare war on Germany but they were definitely ill prepared. He also spoke of the Marshall Plan offered by the United States after the war. “We received nothing”. We rebuilt this country all on our own. That was true. None of the Soviet satellite countries received aid. It was offered but they “refused”.
He spoke about FDR and Stalin deciding the fate of Europe when the war ended and FDR agreeing to allow Poland to be ruled by the USSR. The war ended in 1945 but Poland was essentially occupied by the Soviet Union until the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the world witnessed what life under communism was like. Christopher said he remembers when he was a young boy in the early 1970s and his mother would wake him up at 3 or so in the morning so he could wait in line of 6 or 7 hours to get a small piece of meat. “For 50 f..ing years we had to put up with this.” He showed us where the Red Army housed its soldiers near the edge of town until the late 80s.
It’s amazing to me having extended family that escaped communism and now having young folks in our country embracing it.
I enjoyed the history lesson on the one hour drive to the castle. Malbork Castle is a UNESCO World Heritage site. It was the former home of the Teutonic Order. A picture shows how the castle was destroyed by Germany. This was done to humiliate Poland as the fate of Germany had already been sealed when this was done.
The Malbork Castle has been under constant rebuilding since the end of the war. It was a great tour and we spent 2.5 hours looking through it. Christopher picked us back up at noon and took us back to our apartment. Still raining, we decided to go into the mall next to the apartment building and have lunch. Hmmm, what kind of pierogi’s today?
We finished the day by having dinner a nice restaurant, did some people watching and called it a night.