By Michelle Lawson
It was 1971 in a nightclub somewhere near Gdynia in Poland. Men held me close as we danced to Je t’aime, an infamous chart-topper banned from British radio stations thanks to Jane Birkin’s breathy, orgasmic vocals. Je t’aime returned to the turntable between other tracks, its distinctive organ notes reminding me of church hymns. I had no idea it was perceived as an intimate lovers’ dialogue. I didn’t even know it meant I love you. But why would I? I was ten years old.
Je t’aime was our travel companion on that summer road trip through Poland. My father drove us from the northern Baltic beaches, via the city of Wrocław, to the mountain resort of Karpacz. The song followed us back to England, where my mother bought the single to remind her of the holiday where she was permanently on edge. She’d been terrified my father’s dual nationality would trigger an arrest. Or perhaps it was the suitcase full of black-market goods.
Poland was the closest my father could get to his birthplace, the eastern Polish lands that found themselves in the post-war icy grip of the USSR. Our Western-centric perspective perceived everything Polish as the Other, from the head-scarved women digging up roads to the children who crowded around us, open-eyed at the oranges, tomatoes and toffees stashed in the boot of the car. Of course, we too were the Other: fashionably-dressed foreigners handing out exotic goodies. Vague acquaintances would give up their beds for us in Communist apartment blocks and take us to nightclubs, although my father’s wartime leg injury kept him off the dance floor and my mother wouldn’t dance with strangers. That left me to demonstrate how Westerners could dance as well as anyone behind the Iron Curtain.
Fifty years later, thanks to Poland’s generous ‘citizenship by descent’ policy, I’m now a dual citizen myself. My father would have been thrilled, my mother less so, as I flew to Wrocław with a brand-new Polish passport in my pocket. The aim? To track down surviving memories from those distant holidays.
![Wrocław](https://www.literarytraveler.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/7CFE1E33-7E51-4CD9-B2E5-E22905AD1988_1_105_c.jpeg)
It was only mid-November, but Wrocław’s Market Square was consumed by Christmas. Greasy fumes wafted from frying sausages, like the kielbasa my father would cook us at weekends. The next stall sold Wiśniowa, the cherry vodka he used to brew in our tiny council-house kitchen. That night, its sweet burn brought tears to my eyes, worsening the mawkish nostalgia that sprung from nowhere.
Blame Mariah Carey and All I want for Christmas playing on a loop though the square’s loudspeakers. Visitors mouthed the lyrics as they flicked through overpriced souvenirs beneath a cascade of red-brick Gothic gables and cloud-piercing spires.
Wrocław Old Town had been beautifully reconstructed after the war. But not much of it was Polish. Before WW2, Wrocław had been a German city, and before that, Prussian, although there’d been a significant Polish population until the Nazis deported them. When borders shifted west after WW2, Wrocław and the region of Silesia were handed over to post-war Poland, its German inhabitants forced to move westwards. But their homes and cities weren’t left empty. Stalin used them to house the Poles he deported from the former eastern Polish lands, now lying within the USSR.
1970s Wrocław would have presented a disconcerting mix of familiarity and otherness to my father. Familiarity would have been with the newly settled population, as they came from his former eastern homeland: cities like Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk. But the buildings and the city streets still carried the ghostly footsteps of the original German inhabitants.
The next morning, I headed for Wrocław’s oldest hotel, the Monopol. Beyond my budget nowadays, in 1971 the hotel had been an affordable luxury for my parents. We’d been treated like VIPs the first evening, escorted through the main bar to sit unaccompanied in the adjacent cafe. The band announced the arrival of ‘honoured’ guests from England, although ‘honoured’ was no doubt a euphemism for ‘untrustworthy’ – as foreigners, we were kept separate from the Poles. But we basked in the celebrity treatment and the sensation of sitting inside a rocket ship. Round lights of different sizes peppered the dark circular walls, giving the impression of flying through the stars.
And then the glory of a song dedicated to my mother. The sins of the Communists were momentarily forgotten as she sang along to Secret Love by Doris Day.
Fifty years later, the old Rocket Room was still the hotel’s café and I was on my way to buy a coffee. Instead, blacked-out windows reflected my frustrated expression as the café was closed for renovations.
I lingered outside the entrance of this grand Neo-Baroque hotel. It was hard to believe we’d stayed here. In which room had waitresses in white ankle socks rummaged through the suitcase of black-market goods? Were my parents aware the balcony above the entrance had been built for Adolf Hitler, back when Wrocław was German Breslau? He’d stood there in 1938, firing up the German inhabitants with his rhetoric.
![Jelenia Góra market square](https://www.literarytraveler.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/4686943E-91EA-41DA-96A5-4E1C5D9DCB3D_1_105_c.jpeg)
The train to Jelenia Góra ran south towards the Karkonosze, the Giant Mountains of the Bohemian Massif. Yet the only peaks through the window were the flat-topped slagheaps of coal mines. At least the pastel colonnades marching around Jelenia Góra’s market square remained firmly within November: no Christmas lights, no souvenir stalls, no Mariah Carey.
The final stage was a bus to Karpacz, a mountain resort where we’d stayed in a hotel whose name I’d long forgotten. I’d tried to find the hotel online, but nothing resembled that long building with chalet-type gables.
November was the lowest level of off-season in Karpacz, and that evening I followed a few people rattling the locked doors of restaurants. The only entertainment was provided by photographs of old Karpacz lining the corridors of my hotel. But there, like a time machine, one particular photo spun me back fifty years – the gables of the old hotel. And now I had a name – the Hotel Orlinek. It was practically next door.
![Photo of Hotel Orlinek, Karpacz](https://www.literarytraveler.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/2FA254EB-75F5-4A10-B4B5-6F131EE9FEB8_1_105_c.jpeg)
The following morning, recognition gave way to dismay. The Orlinek was on its way to dereliction. But never mind the hotel. What I was really here for was a ride.
Karpacz was the birthplace of Poland’s oldest chairlift. The Kopa single-seater ski lift had been built in the 1960s, running close to Poland’s border with the former Czechoslovakia (now Czechia). That alone had been a reason to give it a wide berth, according to my mother. Nevertheless, we’d found ourselves queuing for a ride among excited Polish families. As we inched forward, my mother’s anxiety fixated on the chairs’ feeble safety bars, one of which was broken and dangled loose whenever it swayed back to base. I was too big to sit on her lap, but too young to ride alone. What if I fell out into the Communist forests? At the very last minute, she lost her nerve and pulled me out of the queue.
Unbelievably, that same chairlift had continued to operate until 2017, when it was replaced by a four-seater Swiss system. A few years earlier I’d have been able to ride the original single-seater, putting to bed the resentment of having it snatched from me as a child.
It turned out I couldn’t even ride the new lift. Like the Rocket Room, the Kopa ski lift was closed for maintenance.
![Back to Karpacz](https://www.literarytraveler.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/61E3438B-862C-4C87-9D5B-CA617B60DD65_1_105_c.jpeg)
The map showed a parallel path and I started off up a dark track edged with dense pine woodland, stepping into increasingly deep footprints made by others. Still no Giant Mountains in sight, and the track steepened. Why hadn’t I brought my hiking poles? How the hell would I get down without breaking something? Cursing with anxiety I searched among the trees for a branch of the right length, scraping the snow from one whose knobbly curve was a perfect match for my palm. Still the track steepened and when a path appeared on the right, I gave up on reaching the chairlift summit and stepped across a glassy-frozen stream towards gentler gradients that would loop me back to Karpacz. And when I rounded the corner, I cried out, startling a hiker coming towards me.
Giant Mountains was an overstatement, but the scene was glorious – a snow-covered craggy ridge encircling a semi-frozen lake. Rustic timber fencing edged the path down to a mountain restaurant, encircled by footprints in the snow.
But the stick … what if another hiker took the perfect knobbly stick? Better not leave it outside the building. I tucked it under my arm and entered the steaming restaurant. Balancing soup on a tray as I crossed the wet stone floor between jostling hikers, I almost fell as the stick slipped and caught beneath a man’s jacket, forcing me to follow him until I could free it with a muddled apology in a mix of English and Polish.
Wojtek nodded slowly at the stick, then followed me outside and sat at my table. An ornithologist who’d led bird watching tours in England, he took an interest in my memory trip. ‘Most English people can’t grasp what it was like for us back then. I’ve tried saying I didn’t taste a banana until I was 19, but that’s beyond people’s imagination. Now I say, “Imagine you’re forbidden to travel. No holidays to Spain!” That’s what shocks them. That’s what they can relate to.’
Wojtek wondered why I’d taken so long to explore Poland as an adult. He took my notebook and wrote a list of Polish films to help me catch up, starting with the 1967 comedy Sami Swoi, about resettled families from further east. ‘It’s strange you never came here before now.’
‘Maybe it was association.’ Whenever we had guests, my father would bring out picture books from Birmingham’s Polish Club, their red cloth covers embossed with titles like We Will Never Forget. Family friends would leaf through the pages in silence, while I tried to read their expressions. I’d walk past occasionally, glimpsing the dark smudge of a body hanging from a lamppost. Maybe that was why I’d avoided Poland when travelling around eastern Europe in my youth. Hungary, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia felt more neutral, less troubling.
Wojtek encouraged me to return to the Hotel Monopol and walk inside. So the following evening, back in the city, I opened the doors beneath Hitler’s balcony and walked through the marble-floored restaurant, past an unmanned reception desk, until a staff member stepped from a dark stairwell. Did I need any help?
He nodded at my story. ‘Of course, go ahead,’ he said with a smile. ‘Have a nice time.’
The best place to have a nice time was the hotel bar with its cocktail menu. I sank into a seat and ordered a Corpse Reviver. But what this bar really needed was music.
Ear pods in, I searched online for the song that had brought celebrity status to my mother – in this very building. Whenever I’d heard it played, I’d tuned out, thinking it too sad to listen to. A reminder of what was lost. But tonight, it felt different. As headlights lit the rain-darkened streets through the window, there was another voice alongside that of Doris Day. My mother, singing as she flicked her duster around our house. Reliving her moment of glory in Communist Poland.
Michelle Lawson is a British writer of travel articles, fiction and non-fiction. In a parallel life she’s a lecturer in Applied Linguistics and she turned her PhD into a travel memoir based on English settlers in the French Pyrenees. Given the choice, she’d always rather be on a train in Europe. Follow Michelle’s travels at her blog.