viv, Lvov and Lemberg
Lwów, Lviv, Lvov and Lemberg
Keith Meredith
Copyright 2011 by Keith Meredith
Now he was finally, physically, going to be in the city that he had written, read and thought about for so long, this city that was neither founded as a Polish city nor in the boundaries of the present -day Polish state yet played a major part in Poland's national life from 1340 right through to modern times. From 1340 to 1773 and from 1920 to 1939-it was nearly all the time under Polish national government. This, he now reflected, comprised the majority of the time from the founding of the city about the year 1250 to the Twenty-first century present. From what he had read the city had also had a crucial position in the culture and history of the Ukraine, where the city was known as Lviv. Just how this all panned out in practice he'd have to wait and see. He had had his interest in Eastern Europe for many years, visiting several countries in the region. So why had he not attempted this particular peregrination before?
The principal reason was that he could not plan or even desire to go to a place he did not know existed. He had visited Poland on more than one occasion in the 1970's but the information for visitors provided under the auspices of the post-war Polish People's Republic concentrated on the lands within the post-war boundaries. He had also visited the Soviet Union but here the main places to visit were considered to be St. Petersburg (Leningrad) and Moscow. Even if one went to the Soviet Ukraine itself, the cities that first came to his mind for visiting were Kiev and Odessa. All in all, Lwów was under the radar. However, in due course he had met a Polish couple living near his home in Birmingham who had come from the city which they knew as Lwów, and who quickly remedied this gap in his knowledge. They had made him realize that Poland was not all that it seemed. It was not a centuries-old political-physical entity like Britain or most other countries. From the First Partition of 1773 there were to follow some two centuries of foreign control or domination of one sort or another, with the sole exception of 1921 to 1939. There was moreover the particular Polish experience of having the boundaries of their country changed by powerful if divided external forces. Poland was thus, under the Potsdam Treaty of 1945, allowed an inner core of its pre-war territory-including the cities of Warsaw, Łodz, Kraków and Poznan-but beyond that the Great Powers gave with one hand but took with the other, giving a hundred-mile or so wide strip taken from Germany in the West but taking away from them de jure a large area in the East including Lwów that had already been lost to them de facto in the course of World War II. True, the new area corresponded roughly to the area the country had occupied during the early years of the Polish state, but that was centuries before, and might or might not be the best borders for the mid-twentieth century. Another Partition was it not? Questions arose as to what a country or a nation is. Countries' national poets would in the ordinary way have in mind in their writings not only the people of their respective countries but also their landscapes and townscapes. So, what happens if millions of the people are suddenly transferred in to what had tor many years been someone else's landscape with its cities and countryside and are expected to make it theirs again, leaving an area whose landscape and towns had been theirs for centuries? Many had simply left mainland Europe altogether, going to North America or to Britain: the people in his street had told him a certain amount about it. In addition there had been an exhibition of photographs and maps of the city at a Polish centre in London, which he had made a day trip specially to see. He had also tried to find out from books from the local library. But there were certain basic things that he couldn't seem to find the answer to. Like: what if a Lwów person in 1945 had decided, come what may, to stay in the city? What would have or did happen to him? Then again, suppose, against the odds, he had managed to hang on in there amongst new, presumably Ukrainian, neighbours, how would they have treated him then-and what is life like for the Poles still there now? Maybe the actual Ukrainians themselves wouldn't have been bothered about a few Polish people left over when most had gone and it would have been the overall Soviet government that would take exception to these individual challenges to its view of the shape of the new Europe? And supposing that this Lwów Pole had wanted to visit relations or friends in the area now officially designated as Poland-just like he himself visited relations in Lancashire from time to time? Would it be easy, difficult or downright impossible? And what if one was also Jewish?
Environmental concerns were reviving interest in travel by train to continental destinations. Thirty years before the old British Rail had had a special ticket office for rail travel to the Continent, including Eastern Europe, selling the prospective traveller a booklet of tickets to cover an entire trip. That was then. Today, even with the Channel Tunnel and some faster trains it would cost hundreds of pounds, involve four changes of train and would still take around 33 hours to get even from London to Gdańsk on Poland's Baltic coast-or so the advice he'd got went. The advice was to go by air to Eastern Europe and back and leave the rail travel to when one got there, buying single tickets as needed. Anyway, he could just imagine the fuming queue at the ticket office in Britain building up behind him while the clerk prepared such a complicated ticket. According to logic and common sense, if a country had one of its principal cities located at something like a central point, then that city would have train services straight to all the other main towns. Birmingham was a case In point, and that was without being a capital city as Warsaw was. Yes, Lviv, Lwów, had been affected by boundary changes but then a railway was something physical, a fact on the ground which should be still there notwithstanding the paper, pen and ink job at Potsdam in 1945. As to how long the train journey would take, well it was about two hundred and forty miles give or take, rather less than from Birmingham to Glasgow and that took about four hours. He'd remembered that trains in Poland had sometimes been hauled by wood-burning steam locomotives, so maybe better allow six to seven hours.
His East European trip had started three days earlier when he had gone by air from Birmingham to Gdańsk, albeit requiring a change at Copenhagen. He had gone there to see some Polish people there whom he had not seen for many years. They were a little surprised of his plan to go to Lwów but did agree that a six-hour train journey from Warsaw was what could reasonably be expected. He knew from thirty years back that the train journey from Gdańsk to Warsaw took about four and a half hours, and that since then they had introduced an 'Inter City' network. So, it seemed reasonable to get a train that left the Oliwa station in Gdańsk at 8.44 in the morning. The ticket came with a seat reservation but the seat in question was already occupied, by an elderly woman. No matter. Most of the seats were empty, with no indication that they were reserved, so he just found another seat. A few stations further on-and the train did seem to be stopping disconcertingly often, an oncoming passenger claimed this seat too as reserved, so he moved to a third seat only for that seat too to be claimed by someone in the same way an hour later. As he found a fourth, this time distinctly less congenial, sitting place he did wonder why P.K.P, the Polish railways, could not offer more in the way of indication when seats were reserved. The train, officially an Ekspres IC (inter-city express) though it was, finally arrived at the central station in Warsaw at or about the scheduled time of eight minutes to three, a journey time of more than six hours for slightly over two hundred miles. But his anxieties about thus missing a possible connection to L wow proved pointless: the station timetables indicated no services thereto whatsoever, even with a change of trains. There was a monumental queue for tickets –he had not dared try to buy a ticket to Lwów in Gdańsk. But he had allowed for some delays and he should at least be at the hotel he was booked in to near the cen
tral station in Lwów by around ten thirty at night... He joined the queue. Ten or fifteen minutes later, with microscopic progress, he remembered again that Lwów was not officially in Poland these days, so theoretically he would be eligible to join the much shorter queue for international tickets. But supposing PKP still treated Lwów as a domestic destination and he thus lost his place in the queue for nothing? He decided to chance it and at the international window they did indeed sell him a ticket to Lwów. But it wasn't exactly a direct route. Instead of a single journey of two hundred and forty miles there were two journeys each of around two hundred miles.. There were two hours to wait to get a train to Kraków at quarter past five, where there would be a further three hours or so to wait for the train to L wow. As he waited he ran over in his mind the different words for the city: Lwów in Polish, Lviv or L’viv in Ukrainian, Lvov in Russian and Lemberg in Yiddish and German. Yiddish and German? Well, it had been in the Austrian empire for most of