Westerplatte
The bus is driving past decrepit business parks along a road with deep water-filled potholes. Dirty brown water splashes left and right every few metres. It’s muggy inside even though the bus is almost empty. July is hot in Gdansk on the Baltic; and I’m going to see a battlefield.
During the 1930's Gdansk, or Danzig, was a strange place. It had become the ‘Free City of Danzig’ as part of the Versailles treaty in 1919. The Free City included both the city of Danzig itself and over two hundred nearby towns, villages, and settlements. The Treaty stated that the region was to remain separate from the German Reich and the newly resurrected nation of Poland, but it was not an independent state; the Free City was under League of Nations protection and placed in a binding customs union with Poland. Created in order to give Poland access to a well-sized seaport, the Free City was also respecting the fact that the city’s population was roughly ninety-five percent German. This did not bode well with the Germans, who still considered Danzig a German city, and anti-Polish resentments were flaring up. Throughout the Polish–Soviet War 1920–1921, German dockworkers refused to unload ammunition supplies for the Polish Army. While the ammunition was finally unloaded by British troops, the incident led to the establishment of a permanent ammunition depot at the Westerplatte and the construction of a trade and naval port in Gdynia. In December 1925, the Council of the League of Nations agreed to the establishment of a Polish military guard of 88 men on the Westerplatte peninsula to protect the war material depot. On September 1st, 1939, the second War of the World began, with Nazi Germany invading the Republic of Poland. The German attack also entailed a bombardment of Polish positions at Westerplatte by a battleship and the landing of German infantry on the peninsula. The outnumbered Polish defenders resisted for seven days before running out of ammunition, which attested them legendary status in Poland.
I had arrived in Gdansk two days ago, after seven hours on the bus from Berlin. I could have taken a plane, but as I was trying to learn as much as possible about Poland I had decided to take the bus from the concrete-and-plastic main Berlin bus depot, the ZOB, through the West Pomeranian Voivodeship and Pomeranian Voivodeship. After an early 6:00 a.m. start for hours I had stared at old women with headscarves and washed-out Micky Mouse t-shirts in front of grey and crumbling high-rise estates, at the river Oder squeezed into concrete banks in Szczecin, at the potholes of local bus depots and large wheat-fields and green plains; everything looking exactly as I imagined a former Warsaw Pact state might look.
Gdansk itself is busy, both with tourists and business. My hotel is located near the main Gdańsk Shipyard, the birthplace of the Solidarity trade union movement, whose opposition to the Communist regime led to the end of Communist Party rule in 1989, and sparked a series of protests that successfully overturned the Communist regimes of the former Soviet bloc. But I’ve come here to find traces of earlier events. From my hotel, I stroll through the old town of Gdansk, which is quite impressive when you realise that all the colourful merchant buildings framing the streets and the main square seemingly originating in the 18th century are all replicas built after the destruction of World War II. And that destruction somehow must connect me to the place, I feel. My grandmother grew up not far from here, under the same insecure and unstable conditions as did the people in Danzig, both Germans and Poles.
Most of West Prussia (including Gdansk) and the former Prussian Province of Posen, territories annexed by Prussia in the 18th century and linking East Prussia to Pomerania and Berlin were ceded to the newly created Second Polish Republic according to the Treaty of Versailles. East Prussia became an exclave, separated from mainland Germany. There was an air of mistrust and insecurity, negative feelings especially aimed at the newly created country now surrounding East Prussia on almost all sides: Poland. The Sea Service East Prussia was established to provide a direct sea link to the Reich in 1920, but transport to mainland Germany overland was difficult, with train windows covered with curtains and some trains completely sealed for the duration of the trip through Polish territory. As a result of the demise of so many European empires in 1918, there was constant fighting around East Prussia: Estonia, Finland, Latvia and Lithuania declared independence from Russia and fought the Red Army to preserve their freedom and also bloody civil wars. So-called German Freikorps, volunteer military or anti-communist paramilitary units formed of disgruntled soldiers of the defeated German army also fought in the Baltic, Silesia, Poland and East Prussia, often with anti-slavic racist tendencies. All throughout the existence of the Weimar Republic, there were constant border skirmishes with Poland, which also had to fight off the Red Army in the Polish-Soviet war from 1919 to 1921.
The bus drops me off in what looks like a shady park, a recreational area. To my right there’s a grass dyke, and behind what must be the Baltic, which I cannot see but smell. To my left is a small car park, and a few booths selling candy floss, ice cream and, oddly, small plastic machine guns and steel helmets for children. Many families saunter around, with small children and toddlers. I buy a ticket from one of the souvenir booths and enter what looks like a concrete janitor hut from the outside. This is the famous guard post No. 1, one of the five bunkers that formed the backbone of the Polish defense. Concentrated fire from the bunker’s machine guns killed fifty Germans soldier during the attack. The guard house today exhibits old rifles, Polish uniform replicas and a model of the Westerplatte area in 1939, but nothing that really conveys the experience of the defenders of the guard post back then. The Germans had an old battle cruiser from 1904 stationed near the peninsula, and even though by 1939 the Schleswig Holstein was too old and outdated to fight other battle ships, it could still fire shells 28 centimetres in diameter from its guns, and the droning sound of the shells slicing through the air made must have been nerve wrecking, not to speak of the moment of impact which would shake the ground, uproot trees and fling earth 20, 30 metres up in the air.
I step from the bunker and walk to the next exhibit, an open air exhibition with pictures of the battle and from the German occupation of Poland, with explosions and mass shootings and starving children on plastic canvasses. I am still astonished that Polish families bring their children here. There is no candy floss and ice cream at sombre German war memorials, only the expectations that you learn something from the horrible things that have happened or are remembered there. I see a father taking his son, not older than eight, to the exhibition, explaining something at every single canvas. I still do feel strangely disconnected from it all. Maybe this is because I never was a soldier.
Behind the guard house are the ruins of the former barracks, which held a small improvised hospital in the basement. I clamber around the twisted and broken pieces of concrete and metal, much colder than the park outside. Some of the barracks were destroyed on the second day of the battle by continuous fire from the Schleswig Holstein and two attacks from the dreaded Ju-87 dive bombers, the Stukas, who added their howling sirens to the existing cacophony of exploding shells and machine gun fire. I step back into the sun, and wonder what the landscape must have looked like then. Today it’s green and nicely shaded by the trees, but then it must have looked like something the soldiers only knew from World War I pictures, a smoking desolate landscape of craters and tree stumps and forlorn hopes. The air attack destroyed the only radio the defenders had, so they could not know that Polish radio stations were broadcasting the message ‘Westerplatte still fights on’ each morning of the battle to all other parts of the Polish army fighting the Germans. As I step from the woods into an area of lawns and hedges, there’s another message, three Polish words in large white plastic letters: Nigdy więcej wojny. No more war.
I come to a grassy knoll with a large monument on top, a huge twisted column of granite, the Monument to the Defenders of the Coast. My guidebook tells me that the monument itself is 25 metres tall and is assembled from 236 granite blocks weighing between 6 and 12 tons each, brought here from nearby quarries. The combined weight is 1150 tons. There are grannies selling small replicas of the monument along the path, but I’m not tempted to buy one, it’s too ugly. From the top of the hill I can see the blue of the Baltic in the distance, and a few storehouses across the port canal. Karol Wojtyla, or Pope John Paul II, was here as well and gave a speech in 1987 to a group of young Poles. ‘Each one of you, young Friends, will face some Westerplatte in your life, too. Tasks of some dimension that need to be undertaken and performed. Desertion will be out of question then.’
After the seven days of battle, the defenders of Westerplatte were marched off into captivity. They spent more than five years in German prison camps.
