A View of Ukraine from Kraków
I write late Sunday evening, February 27th, from Kraków, Poland, a city I know well. I learned Polish here in the 1970’s, began medical studies, and simultaneously took part in the Solidarity Free Trade Union movement. I met my Kraków-born wife on the Main Square; our son was born five weeks before martial law was declared in 1981. Six months later the secret police snatched me off the street at an anti-government demonstration and expelled me, though they kept my wife and our baby boy hostage behind the Iron Curtain. Forty years later, we landed 24 hours after Putin invaded Ukraine. The plane from Munich had no empty seats. While Poles fear the latest Chaplinesque “Great Dictator”, they still choose to return home.
Krystyna’s older brother Andrzej, loyal and reliable, met us at the airport at midnight. He handed me my Swiss Army knife, which I once again strapped around my belt. Carrying one is a habit from Vietnam days, when I found such a knife in the gutter behind the office of the organizing committee for San Francisco’s largest anti-war demonstration. But I can’t bring it on the plane anymore, so I leave it with him at the airport every time we fly back to California. Tired, but armed with my knife, we only briefly checked the latest grim news before going to sleep.
In the morning yesterday, first thing after showering, I went out for a haircut. Our apartment is a 12 minute walk from the Old Town, and almost equally distant from the Wisła (Vistula) River. The 600+ year-old distinctly Jewish neighborhood is even closer. I walked 3 minutes to the low-profile barbershop nearby (there is a fancier one closer), opened the door, and saw both ladies unoccupied. With not much hair, my cut lasted 15 minutes, sufficient time for the lady barber to explain, tears streaming down her eyes as I looked at her in the mirror, that her two sons were still back in the Ukraine, with their wives and one six-year old granddaughter. I left an 80% tip and spoke briefly with the other lady — from Gruzja (Georgia), another country partly occupied by Russian forces. I learned back in the 1970’s that Central/Eastern Europe is a rough neighborhood to have a country, especially if it’s a democracy. When I asked for a photo, in a cheerful moment, she put my hat on her head to show off her handiwork.
Next I walked over to our garage to try and start our car and get it out. On the way I passed the usually-sleepy entrance to the city’s blood-donation central office. A few folks were on the sidewalk, and as I strode by I thought perhaps they were donating blood for Ukraine. Then I turned around, and asked. Indeed, it was true.
A few hours later, on our own street, we saw people carrying bundled packages and depositing them on the sidewalk in front of the place which used to sell bicycles, and before that, video games. It has become a collection point for people donating goods to go to the Ukraine; the border’s a shorter drive from here than from our Berkeley home to Truckee.
Inside, volunteers were sorting the goods into cardboard boxes and labelling them.
One block down the street, through an office window I saw people inside doing exactly the same thing (I went inside and asked).
People are glued to their cellphones or televisions. Poland is the size of New Mexico, Ukraine bigger than Texas. If Putin can take the big one, what’s to stop him from taking the other? Without the USA the Poles know they have no chance of long-term survival in this neck of the woods.
After dusk I walked through the Rynek Główny, one of Europe’s oldest and largest Main Squares, to look for the Ukrainian coffee shop. I’d heard they were specializing in collecting medical equipment donations. Couldn’t find it, even after asking a young man walking around with a “F*** Putin” sign on his chest. Afterwards I headed north 2 miles to meet my wife at her friend’s place; two young men were walking on the sidewalk ahead of me, so I asked for a photo of the signs on their backs. The URL is for donating funds to the Ukrainian Army, and the KRA on the car license plate in the lower right hand corner is for KRAków.
After the visit (the ladies talked kitchens, cakes, and kids, while the Dad kept furtively checking his cellphone for the news) we drove home, and encountered a Kraków fire truck (“straż pożarna”) on the sidewalk in front of the old bike store.
A volunteer bucket brigade had emptied the entire truck of donations from other collection points in Kraków, to be sorted and labelled throughout the night, prior to transport to the war zone.
Despite it being a weekend, my EMT contact here confirmed that all four major Polish suppliers of Combat Application Tourniquets are completely sold out. Our daughter’s co-worker in Ukraine was hoping we could send some for his compatriots being wounded in the field.
Over a decade ago the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw liquidated its emergency medical supplies — given Poland’s status as a modern developed country, they were no longer needed. Rather than destroy materiel, I saved it in our garage here. Today we delivered a few MRE’s (Meals Ready to Eat for combatants), medical supplies, and a high-quality transport container, to the site collecting medical supplies for the Ukraine.
The evening I posted this, we learned from our good friend’s daughter, a pharmacist in Biełsko-Biała, a town of 250,000 about 100 miles SW of Kraków, that two young Ukrainian men came to her pharmacy today to buy all the bandages and wound dressing material in stock. They were taking everything back to the Ukraine where they’re going to fight. She rang up all the items, and then an older Polish man behind them in line, waiting patiently, unexpectedly stepped up and paid the entire amount.
This is the first open, full-scale state-on-state war in Europe in our lifetimes. When Switzerland freezes funds, Sweden willingly sends arms during a conflict, and Biden agrees with Elon and Anonymous, it isn’t too hard to figure out who’s the Bad Guy. Over here, no one is debating which pronouns to use, whether all white folks should acknowledge their guilt, or at what age youngsters (who are notoriously subject to peer pressure) should be allowed to decide on sex-altering surgeries. Instead, the simpler existential question of will I live free — or live at all — looms large.
As a result, in many ways I feel more at home here than in the Peoples’ Republic of Berkeley.
And meanwhile I wonder, was the huge explosion a few hours ago at Cherkasy, south of Kyiv, a thermobaric WMD, an ammo dump hit by an Iskander, a photo-montage fake, or yet something else? (Note: turns out it was an Iskander hitting an ammo dump the first day of hostilities.)
