"Uncomfortable is Good"

Strange is the world (according to Czesław Niemen), and stranger than all is Poland. It’s a phoenix country led by a phoenix capital, rebuilt by the mythic Robinsons on ashes and ruins. A land of magic, where fire-breathing dragons still guard castles as in Krakow. A country marked by layers of sadness and horror of wars and occupation and partition, yet experiencing breathtakingly rapid change and growth. A place now experiencing brain-drain and exodus of the younger generation but also home to the optimistic hipsters and do-it-yourself, build-it-yourself, make-it-yourself go-getters bringing fresh life to urban decay. It’s a place you can’t just read about and you can’t visit without being changed.

Stepping out of the Krakow airport with my motley group of acquaintance-students, riding a terrifyingly fast taxi through a strange city in East-Central Europe, I seriously doubted why I decided to come half way across the world to a country I knew virtually nothing about. Over the next four weeks, we wandered through tons of museums, read through a stack of journal articles, met with researchers, went on guided tours, and learned about the past century of Polish history.

“Uncomfortable is good,” Professor Anna Muller said repeatedly. “That’s when you learn. That’s where you can be creative.” These words were often a source of encouragement for me because living normal life without speaking Polish was often tricky and sometimes awkward and a little scary. There was one evening when I was feeling proud of myself successfully ordering something vegetarian at a milk bar with the help of a nice lady behind me... and my food ended up being a sugar covered rice, jelly and sour milk concoction of stomachache doom. But there was also this fantastically pink soup (Chlodnik) we called Pepto-Bismol soup and the wonderful invention of fresh strawberry pierogi.

There were also [lots of] moments when I never wanted to come home and I would get lost in blissful thought, scheming ways to stay in Poland or at least move there after I finished my degree. (I’m still dreaming one day of spending a year or two in Lublin learning Polish.)

There can’t be anything to beat sipping coffee in the Zielony Balonik while reading about the historical cabaret and then wandering the rooms to see the actual cartons made by and portraying the people discussed in our text. Unless, of course, it would be random evening coffee with polish artists who encouraged my artwork and whose exhibits I could often see in museums the next day. Or unless it would be wandering through the eerily empty Gdansk shipyard where Solidarność was born after meeting with Lech Wałęsa and hearing his thoughts on the young people’s role in modern solidarity. Or finding the graffiti that bored Polish nobles carved into the walls of the Holy Trinity Chapel in the Lublin castle in the 1600s. (We were almost the only ones there in the history-laden chapel, once a prison and now stripped of any religious vestiges except the chipping frescos.) ...Ok, so I guess there were a lot of “unbeatable” moments.

Poland also has—without question—the coolest museums I’ve ever experienced. Be it the Krakow city museum catacombing under the market square to show the city’s foundations, to the artifact-filled Solidarność museum, situated in the historic shipyard, to the uncertainly undulating spaces of Polin, to the chaotic, terrifying sensory explosion of the Uprising Museum in Warsaw, to the yet unbuilt WW2 museum in Gdansk whose artifact catalogue we were beyond lucky to be allowed to explore... there is nothing to compare to these museums.

Oh, and did I mention that Poland is just plain beautiful? Because it is. Castles, Tatras,

Krakow, the Baltic, Warsaw... there is so much to see and be in awe at.

Sure, I could have read about Polish history at home, could have watched the Katyń movie on my own, could have researched the holocaust at a local museum. But meeting with the people still pursuing justice for holocaust victims at the Institute for National Remembrance, hearing Bór-Komorowski’s son tell stories of his father in the room in the Jagiellonian University where the professors were assembled before being taken by the Nazis, even just drinking polish beer with Polish university students from Gdynia—these real experiences are where the deeper learning took place that could never have been reached simply through the comfort of my laptop at home. Sure, at times it was uncomfortable or strange—travel always is—but Poland is an awesome place and I hope one day I’ll be able to return.

-Taylorann Lenze

The University of Michigan-Dearborn’s “Memory and Oblivion: Polish and Polish-Jewish history in the Polish Modern Landscape,” led by faculty members Dr. Anna Muller and Dr. Jamie Wraight, was a 4-week history study abroad through Krakow, Zakopane, Lublin, Lodz, Warsaw, and Gdansk.