A Curious Incident with a Dog in the Night Time Leading to Wounded Knees and Changed Plans

Hello subscribers!

As promised two weeks ago, here’s a newsletter from “on the road”:

Its cryptic title is an allusion to a) a book title (“The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time”, which is a highly recommendable novel by Mark Haddon) as well as to b) Wounded Knee, and c) especially it’s a reference to what happened to me a week ago in Lublin in south-eastern Poland:

As we were walking back from the Old Town to our hotel in the evening we passed a woman with a bulldog-like aggressive dog she was incapable of controlling. Even though she had it on a leash she didn’t / couldn’t stop the blasted creature from leaping out at me, running between my legs, tripping me over, so that I fell to my knees, badly grazing both of them and ripping my trousers. The woman never as much as apologized, but together with her dog quickly disappeared in a doorway while my wife hurled abuse at her in Russian (neither of us speak Polish, so she thought Russian was the closest she could muster). At least the dog didn’t go as far as biting me. But the knees needed bandaging – and the trousers will need mending when we get back home …

Unfortunately this also meant that I had to change plans. I had a hire car booked for the next day, but I didn’t feel like I could drive with my damaged and painful knees that I could hardly bend. I tried contacting the hire car company but it was too late to cancel, so I just had to let it go (it wasn’t so expensive anyway). Next morning, with newly re-bandaged knees (as seen in the photo above) with some cream my wife had fetched from a nearby chemist’s, I searched online for options of getting to Sobibor some other way the next day, either with a guide, driver or even by public transport. The latter was eventually suggested by the local tourist information office. It would have involved getting a regional bus to Włodawa, and from there a taxi for the last 15 miles or so to Sobibor and back to Włodawa and then another bus back to Lublin.

In the end, though, I was lucky enough to find a guide online who offered to take us to Sobibor, and also to Izbica, by private car and for a price we deemed acceptable, so we went for the comfortable way rather than the bus/taxi adventure (which it could have been mainly due to the language barrier – out in eastern Poland you cannot necessarily expect every bus or taxi driver to understand English).

The guide turned out to be very likeable, experienced and enthusiastic – and very cheerful too, at times almost giggling a bit too much, given the sombre subject matter of Sobibor. But I know from my own experience that if you deal with such topics all the time you do develop a certain level of black humour, maybe as a counterbalance.

Anyway, we visited the new museum at Sobibor, which I can already say is excellent. And we were also lucky: the memorial site was supposed to be fenced off from 16 August for a year so that additional archaeological digs could commence, but when we got there on the 17th the workers still hadn’t showed up. So we were still able to see the entire site. I’ll make a blog post about Sobibor when I’m back home.

After Sobibor we drove to Izbica, and it was good to have a guide there because she knew the way to the former Jewish cemetery and new monuments on a hill behind a row of private houses. It may have been a little tricky to find on our own.

I abandoned the original plan of also going to Zamość and Trawniki, but asked the guide to drop us off not back at the hotel but at Majdanek. There wasn’t enough time left before closing to see everything in this sprawling complex (also given my wounded knees, which indeed slowed me down quite a bit), but I did see the slightly changed commodification of the shower rooms and gas chambers so I will be able to update my main website’s Majdanek chapter and add a few new photos to the gallery. The new multimedia exhibition inside one of the large workshop barracks was unfortunately already closed by the time I got there.

So I have reason to return to Lublin yet again and then I could also finally tag on Zamość and Trawniki.

Before Lublin we were in Warsaw, which is always nice. We revisited Pawiak Prison, which hasn’t really changed in any significant ways since my first visit back in 2008. But at the old citadel we found that most of the inner structures had disappeared and in their stead was a gigantic building site – a new Museum of Polish History is under construction there. So when that’s finished, it’ll give me a good reason for yet another return visit to Warsaw (any excuse!) too.

After Poland we moved on to Berlin, the “capital of dark tourism”, and probably my favourite city in the world. I’ve been there about a dozen times already, but it’s always great to get back there. On this occasion we didn’t see so much of the city because we only had one full day and much of that was taken up by our visit to the brand-new Documentation Centre for Displacement, Expulsion and Reconciliation. I had expected to maybe spend two hours in there, but in the end it took us well over four hours and I even had to skip some audio guide spots and ended up just photographing text panels to read at home later in order to speed the visit up a bit. The amount of information is vast, almost overwhelming. So I’d recommend splitting a visit to this place over two days. We couldn’t, though, as we had a train booked for the next morning.

From tomorrow we’ll be in Hamburg for a few days – the city where I was born and spent nearly all of the first half of my life in. It’ll be nice to reconnect with my roots, as it were.

Unless the threatened train drivers’ strike in Germany is extended or has knock-on effects to Thursday I should get back to Vienna that day.