Gdansk a Solid Symbol of Poland’s Past, Future

It was adjacent to this city, at a narrow peninsula on the Baltic Coast called Westerplatte, that the first shots of World War II were fired, little more than half a century ago.

The date was Sept. 1, 1939.

Though Gdansk has achieved worldwide fame in recent years as the birthplace of the Solidarity trade union, Westerplatte, symbolically, remains a significant landmark of 20th-Century history.

The monument, modernistic and muscular in appearance, was erected in 1966. Towering 82 feet atop a man-made hill, it commemorates the Defenders of the Coast. Fresh flowers--in red and white, Poland’s national colors--adorn the monolith’s base. Bouquets tied with ribbons are sometimes placed in clefts in the sculpted granite.

The first time I visited the peninsula, blossoms quivered in a stiff breeze blowing in from the sea. I was joined that morning by flocks of bundled-up Polish school kids, who learn early on that Westerplatte has great significance in their country’s long, often tragic history.

So they listened intently as teachers told them about Maj. Henryk Sucharski’s gallant stand.

Following a cannon bombardment from the battleship Schleswig-Holstein at 4:45 in the predawn morning of Sept. 1, 1939, 5,000 Germans stormed Westerplatte. Maj. Sucharski’s 88-man garrison, hastily reinforced by about 100 volunteers from the city, was ordered to hold the peninsula’s munitions depot for 12 hours.

Incredibly, the stubborn defense against impossible odds lasted seven days and seven nights, while Poland waited for Allied naval and air force help that never came. The world’s most destructive war was suddenly under way, and the Poles were its first victims.

Why Adolf Hitler chose to attack this place at that time is an entangled matter, with strands stretching all the way back to the Treaty of Versailles, signed 70 years ago, in 1919.

By treaty mandate, the strategic port city was taken from defeated Germany and made an independent state--called the free city of Danzig--at the Baltic outlet of a 90-mile strip of German territory assigned to Poland. This “Polish Corridor” separated East Prussia from Pomerania on Germany’s fractured map. Hitler’s demand for reunification led to the 1939 invasion.

I walked the pathways over grassy stretches and through wooded areas. Sea birds swooped and squawked overhead. The vanished garrison’s concrete barracks have been left as a bullet-pocked, artillery-shattered ruin.

The actual monument to Sucharski and his men is close by: a tank on a pedestal, along with a cross and a dark bronze tablet brightened with flowers. Atop a tablet perches an eagle--Poland’s ancient, stalwart emblem--with one wing bent low to represent pain in battle.

As I looked and pondered, a girl’s voice came from a cluster of teen-age students. She was reciting a poem. It is, my companion explained, commemorative verse written by Konstanty Ildefons Galczynski and familiar to Poles young and old:

“When the days were fulfilled

and one had to die in summer,

straight to heaven, in rows of four

went the soldiers of Westerplatte.” Such gestures are not uncommon, for this is hallowed ground indeed, and Polish people are emotional and intensely patriotic. On a subsequent visit, I watched six old men step into military cadence while heading uphill to the Defenders of the Coast monument. Medals hung from their suit jackets. After laying a floral wreath, they saluted and then marched back down the hill to conclude their silent, private ceremony.

Friends in Gdansk told me that Westerplatte’s importance to Poland goes beyond that fateful first week of September in 1939. It represents defiant resistance throughout the war. Hence the powerful symbolism of a monument that stands alone, rock-solid and tall, facing the sea.

Of course, my friends also showed me their city, made famous in this decade by Lech Walesa and his Solidarity movement. Local history, however, precedes Westerplatte and the labor unrest of the 1980s by hundreds of years.

As is the case everywhere in Poland, the past is clouded by conquests and partitions. Consequently, Gdansk has endured geopolitical identity crises, becoming Prussian-German Danzig in 1772 and 1793. It was absorbed into Hitler’s Reich after the fall of Poland in 1939.

But there have been glory days, too. This is immediately apparent in the sizeable Old Town sector, clustered between canals, the Motlawa River, magnificent gate towers and remnants of medieval walls.

We strolled the pedestrian-only Royal Road, lined with beautifully embellished Baroque and Renaissance facades. The route broadens at a public square called Dlugi Targ (long market); its narrower continuation is Ulica Dluga (Long Street).

At midpoint stands the Town Hall’s 260-foot clock tower, built in dark-red brick late in the 14th Century, soon after the seaport had joined Northern Europe’s Hanseatic League of mercantile cities.

Highest prosperity occurred during the 16th and 17th centuries. Gdansk, favorably situated at the mouth of the Vistula River, became a Baltic granary for rye and wheat, shipped on rafts from the Polish heartland for purchase by German, Dutch and Swedish merchants.

Rich burghers acquired mansions with decorative terraces, parapets and curlicue gables. They can be seen in pastel rows on parallel side streets, dominated by the Church of Our Lady’s stern tower. This lofty Gothic basilica--begun in 1343 and completed in 1502--is said to be the world’s largest brick church and is the fifth-biggest cathedral in Europe.

It takes little more than a casual look around the Old Town to notice numerous pale patches in the omnipresent brickwork covering towers, steeples and facades. These are vestiges of a massive rebuilding program that began in 1948 and was substantially completed by 1956.

Gdansk suffered almost total destruction during the war, especially in the spring of 1945, when the city became a last-ditch German stronghold against the Russian Red Army’s advance on Berlin.

And so one learns that the historic district is, remarkably, a meticulous reconstruction from rubble--a powerful assertion that Poland, though battered by war, was too tough to die. Restoration work is now under way on the dozen granaries bordering the Motlawa River. Granary structures elsewhere tend to be squat and drab. Gdansk’s were built in the Hanseatic tradition of architectural flamboyance. The best is 17th-Century Baroque; another has been transformed into a music academy.

Displays and artifacts covering the city’s centuries-old history as a port and shipbuilding center are on view in the Central Maritime Museum, facing the river embankment where sightseeing excursion boats tie up.

The Gothic gate tower that houses this fascinating museum has a past of its own--its built-in wooden crane began hoisting cargo 500 years ago. The river and interconnected canals are vital access lanes to the sea, four miles away.

Any reference to shipbuilding in connection with Gdansk must lead to the Lenin Shipyard and, in turn, to Solidarity. The yard isn’t far from Old Town attractions and is easy to find because its dark, angular cranes loom high on the skyline.

St. Brygida’s is a venerable 15th-Century parish church, but has become far better known as a meeting place and sanctuary for Solidarity activists and sympathizers. Fiery slogans are familiar sights on the interior courtyard walls.

The lean, high, much-photographed Solidarity monument shares blood brotherhood with the granite shaft out at Westerplatte. Both, after all, commemorate resistance against numerically superior powers. Situated just outside the shipyard’s Gate 2, this newer memorial consists of three steel beams, each rising 140 feet to form three crosses at the top.

The mound covering the base of the emotionally charged, stark but oddly beautiful structure is festooned with flowers as well as banners, ribbons, coins and school badges, even religious medals, rosaries, handwritten poems and prayers, along with votive candles whose dots of flame flicker in the wind.

I looked up at the crosses on an afternoon when glinting sunshine turned the beams to silver. Dedicated in December, 1980, the monument honors 27 protesters who died exactly a decade before, killed by police during Gdansk’s “bread riots.”

Nuances are the tower’s real strength. Purposely lacking any arty pretensions, it looks the way it was built: shaped and welded by local laborers. Three anchors hanging below the crosses could easily be interpreted as symbols of the dingy shipyard where the independent trade union Solidarnosc was organized during a 17-day strike in August, 1980.

But in fact they go back 45 years into the depth of Poland’s wartime trauma. An anchor, symbolizing hope, was the insignia of the underground Home Army that launched the Warsaw Uprising against German occupiers in August, 1944. In terms of utterly courageous resistance, nothing in Polish history can match that 63-day battle to the death.

Inbred emotional fervor gives typical Poles a talent for dramatic flair. I was mindful of this when one of my Gdansk friends shared with me her memory of the Solidarity monument’s 1980 dedication.

Government and church dignitaries were present, for this was meant to be a time of national reconciliation during the fragile hiatus preceding martial law, imposed 12 months later. An orchestra and chorus performed an oratorio to the dead by Polish composer Krzystof Penderecki.

Then came a synchronized wail of whistles, horns and sirens from the shipyard, autos, outlying factories and ships on the Vistula. With a welder’s torch, Lech Walesa lit the eternal flame.

My friend recounted this as we sat in a kawiarnia (coffee house). For the Poles, this is a favored haven for relaxation and gossip. The best of them--and there are several in central Gdansk--have a quiet, intimate, prewar European atmosphere enhanced by dim lighting and dark, carved woodwork.

In fair weather, cafe proprietors set up tables beneath tulip-shaped umbrellas on the Long Market pavement. They’re placed beside the 17th-Century Neptune Fountain, with watery reference to this city by the sea and perhaps the finest classical statue in Poland.

Patriotism becomes audible each hour throughout the day. Bells in the Town Hall tower clang out the pigeon-scattering notes of an anthem called Rota (the Oath), written in 1908 to honor Polish territorial resistance in nearby Prussia:

“We shall not yield our forebears’ land

Nor watch our language muted;

Our nation is Polish and Polish our fold . . . “ But brooding about past struggles is not a national obsession. Poles have always managed to escape into their rich, exuberant culture. Thus the Wybrzeze Theater, located alongside the walls on the Old Town’s perimeter, is widely acclaimed for artistically bold, nationalistic productions. Packed houses are the norm in Gdansk’s futuristic glass-and-brick performing arts center, home of the Baltic Philharmonic, State Opera and a brilliant ballet company.

Begun by Cistercian monks in the 13th Century, the cathedral in suburban Oliwa predates partitions and the severest wars. Though Romanesque on the outside, its prized feature is an 18th-Century rococo organ with 7,826 wooden and pewter pipes.

During daily recitals, hymns boom out, accompanied by sounds of trickling water, twittering birds, howling wind and tinkling bells rung by mechanical angels.

I also toured a hilly “Polish Switzerland” lake district where Kashubians live. The Kashubs are a durable breed of northern Poles who have preserved their distinct Slavonic dialect and traditions throughout national upheavals.

Wydzydze Kiszewskie, 40 miles inland from Gdansk, is a vibrant, full-fledged folk center with ethnic Kashubian crafts, food, music and farm-village architecture.

And so, despite the blitzkrieg and conquest of 1939, despite limitations on freedom during the subsequent 50 years, the Polish spirit lives on.

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LOT Polish Airlines has scheduled nonstop service to Warsaw from New York and Chicago. Pan Am is the only U.S. carrier with service to and from Warsaw. New York’s Kennedy Airport is the gateway with connections in Frankfurt, West Germany. Flights between Warsaw and Gdansk via LOT domestic service are frequent; travel time is one hour. LOT now flies wide-body Boeing jets across the Atlantic.

Hotels managed by Orbis, Poland’s largest travel organization, have consistently good standards of quality. There are seven in the vicinity of Gdansk, including two--Hevelius and Monopol--which are close to the Old Town. The Orbis Marina in suburban Jelitkowo is an alternative for those preferring a resort close to Baltic beaches. Double-occupancy rates are per person for all three hotels are approximately $62 U.S. in summer and fall, $42 in the low-season winter period.

Along with a passport, U.S. citizens need a visa to enter Poland. The fee for a single-entry visa, good for up to a 90-day stay, is $18. Visa applications are handled by the Orbis Polish Travel Bureau, 500 Fifth Ave., New York 10110, (212) 391-0844.