Remembering Poland's contribution to the Battle of Britain

The 2005 Radom Air Show, took place the month before the 65th Anniversary of the Battle of Britain. Time to remember that Polish pilots destroyed one in eight German aircraft shot down over South East England during the battle. Krakow air museum's Spitfire LF Mk XVIE, representing 308 (Polish) Sqn's aircract TB995, ZF*O, was on display.

The Red Arrows made their second appearance in Poland at the 2005 Radom Air Show, and were greeted with great enthusiasm by the 140,000-strong crowd. Below, the Red Arrows' BAE Systems Hawks pass overhead in Diamond Nine formation. The RAF team were without doubt the stars of this year's show - although individual performances by F-16s from four NATO air forces were highly impressive, as was a Polish air force MiG-29 and a French Mirage 2000.














Bottom: A Dutch F-16 climbs steeply after deploying flares

The Orthodox Church at the Edge of Europe

On Sunday, my wife and I left Warsaw bright and early and headed along Route 637 to the Belarusian border. We passed the large military zone just east of Warsaw, where in days gone by the Czarist army and later the Red Army could park itself in case of potential unrest. The 637 is the old road, built by the Czar, upgraded by the Soviets post-1945, allowing rapid deployment of Russian forces from the border into Warsaw. Just eight years ago, the road surface was still in relatively good condition; today, it's deteriorated, and traffic along the road, passing through towns like Wegrow and Sokolow Podlaski, does not warrant the big zloties needed to keep it maintained to armoured fighting vehicle standard.

Traffic used to be light, with many stolen cars from the west heading for a porous border before making their way to the used car markets further east. The border's slammed shut on that enterprise today; the few cars with foreign number plates are clearly tourists. Sokolow has become a prosperous town thanks to its meat processing factory and other recent investments. Beyond Sokolow, what little traffic there was falls away.

Next we cross the River Bug, marking the September 1939 - June 1941 border between the Third Reich and the USSR. Signs of Soviet occupation of the far side of the River Bug remain in the form of numerous concrete bunkers, there to keep Stalin's erstwhile allies at bay. On to Drohiczyn, a small town of three Baroque churches, sandy beaches on the shores of the Bug, and an underdeveloped tourist presence for such a picturesque location. Here, one can take a riverboat trip on a Soviet-built craft reminscent of the boat in 'Apocalypse Now', only painted grey. Price 7PLN (less than two bucks/euros, just over a pound) for around 30 minutes.

As one heads east, so the villages take on a different character, with more wooden buildings in various states of decay, some, though gaily painted and well-maintained despite their antiquity. Here, in villages such as Slochy Annopolskie, one can hear Belarusian spoken in the streets by old folk, sitting on benches outside the houses, erected there so the dwellers could sit and chat with passers-by.

Crossing the main north-south Bialystok-Lublin road, the countryside acquires a borderlands character. Some five km east of the crossroads, you pass under the railway line from Hajnowka in the Bielowieza forest (home of the European bison) to Warsaw. We're now less than 20km from the border. Forests line both sides of the road. Three more villages lie along the way, the last of which, Adamowo, is a pumping and gas storage terminal for the pipeline that runs from the Siberian oilfields through Belarusia and Poland on to western Europe. Adamowo also houses a sizeable garrison of border defence troops. One final crossroads, beyond which is a 'No entry except for local traffic' sign; we're now two kilometers from Europe's eastern frontier.

There's a reason for going on; the Orthodox church at Tokary, a village arbitralily divided after 1945 by the Polish-Soviet (today Polish-Belarusian) border. The wooden church, painted bright pale blue, was built in 1912 . Sited among trees, a little way off the road which ends at a red-and-white barrier and a sign saying 'National Border', the church is surrounded by old, large wooden Orthodox crosses with ribbons tied to the them.

I asked a man if the service had started. It was 11:05 am; "Is this the eleven o'clock service?" I asked. "No, the nine o'clock". We went inside; a splendid iconstasis, women on the left, men on the right, average age, 70; angelic singing in harmony that makes Catholic church song seem banal and crude in comparison. The hymn lasted maybe 10-15 minutes, repeating the same four-line verse-chorus many many times.

Bicycles in the churchyard had cyrillic names, presumably relics from the times before Lukashenka tightened the screws and Poland joined the EU, when local villagers could freely cross the border. Older people spoke Belarusian. The Pop (Orthodox priest) looked young; in his mid-20s, beardless, but with a black pony-tail and floor-length clerical robe.

The service over, people visited the miraculous well outside the church for some healing water before heading off home.

A beautiful visit to a different age; pity that half of the congregation consisted of tourists... [like us...]

Polish beer: Not great news for foreign beer lovers.

Eight years ago, you could still find good Polish beers, they seem to be disappearing. The Polish breweries are now mostly foreign owned (SAB Miller, Carlsberg, Heineken have snapped up the big brands and dominate the market), the few local independent breweries have fallen on hard times.

What's available tends to be sweet and heavy like a late-August afternoon; sunny, humid, with more than a hint of thunder, plenty of fruity smells in the air.

Wherever Poles take their beer, there's always large plastic bottles of fruit syrops about. If an Englishman asked for a large dash of raspberry syrop in his beer, he'd be rightly considered a poof. Here, you'll see many a shaven headed, muscle-bound type knocking back the Tyskie, the Zywiec or the Lech discoloured by some syropy, sugary goo.

The beer companies have not been slow to spot this, and have launched their own sugary fruit-flavour concoctions - beers like Redd's, FreeQ, Gingers. And mainstream beers have become sweeter. New launches, like the 'English style' beer 'Dog in the Fog', posing as a 'smooth beer' (one thinks draughtflow beers like Boddingtons), turn out to be ghastly in taste. Even the much-praised Perla from Lublin, said to have a strongly hoppy flavour, lacks hops. If you like hoppy beers, try the German Jever pils.

And so after eight years in Poland my quaffs of choice are not Polish, but Czech - Pilsner Urquell or Ukrainian Obolon's wheat beer.

Manners are different in Poland to those found in the UK.

This is a brusque country in which expressions such as 'please', 'thank you' or 'sorry' in public are seen rather as a sign of weakness in the person saying it, attempting to ingratiate himself to a shopkeeper, bus driver or bank clerk. Requests should be replaced with commands. "I'm telling you what to do, you do it".

Britain, which has a greater sense of social harmony, is also a country where people 'know their place'. In Poland, the bus driver and bricklayer had been led to believe, during communism, that their social worth is at least that of a university lecturer, doctor or lawyer.

As such, every exchange, routine request, becomes an elemental struggle to see who's top dog. This daily series of biological contests for dominance become quite tiring after a while (especially if you're not one of nature's 'alphas'), and one hankers for the gentility of British social intercourse.

An example:
[at London Victoria Coach Station:]
Me: "Excuse me, do you have phone cards, please?"
Assistant: "I'm terribly sorry, but we don't carry them. Why not try the newsagents, just around the corner. They sell a wide range of cards."
Me: "Thank you very much".

[at Sopot railway station:]
Me: "Do you take credit cards?" (Sopot being Poland's premier seaside resort town)
Ticket saleswoman: "No."
And that's the end of the dialogue. No attempt on her part to tell me that there's a cash machine up the street 50 metres away, no expressions of regret or apology, no attempt to sympathise with my cashless predicament.

[at our local shop:]
Me: "Can I buy a one day travel card, please"
Shopkeeper: 'Nie ma' (lit. 'there aren't any', with sneering undertone of 'bugger off').

Driving in Poland is a similar picture. Never mind that the average age of cars is more than double that in the UK and that the roads are shabby, pot-holed, ill-lit, not up to the traffic on them, these things could all be overcome if Polish drivers displayed more common courtesy.

In Britain, if you are indicating to change lanes, the guy behind will automatically let you in. Ditto turning into a major road. In Poland, if you wish to change lanes, the other guy will speed up just to prevent you from getting in front of him. Leaving a safe gap between you and the car in front in Poland is an open invitation for another driver to nip in, creating a dangerously small gap between the three cars.

The Darwinism of the Road

The driver of a BMW 7 Series believes he's superior to the driver of a Toyota Avensis, who believes he's superior to the driver of a Ford Focus, who believes he's superior to the driver of an Opel Corsa; all believe they are superior to the driver of a Fiat Seicento, who beneath him has the driver of the Fiat 126P 'Maluch' to hold in contempt. And at the top of the tree is the driver of a Porsche Cayenne, VW Tourag or Jeep Grand Commander (latest shape with darkened rear windows).

In other words, it's the law of the jungle again, the constant daily struggle for one-upmanship, for getting one over one's fellow citizen.

This all results from a lack of trust in Polish society. No one trusts anybody. Citizen does not trust government. Tax authorities do not trust tax payers. Employees do not trust their employers. Neighbour does not trust neighbour. This is in contrast with Britain, where levels of social trust and harmony are far higher. One does not need to look too far for an explanation; 45 years of communism, constant invasions and foreign rule. This is all in the past now; Poles now need to work harder to be pleasant and polite to one another.

As my cousin said, "Whenever you meet a polite, cultured, well-dressed, well-groomed man, it always turns out he's a queer'.

Some catching up to do

How long will it take Poland to catch up economically with western Europe?

How can a civil society be quickly created, without losing Poland's positive national characteristics?

I've been living in Warsaw for eight years, and can see many areas of life which have got better for the Polish citizen, especially retail, telecoms and banking; others remain almost unchanged - road infrastructure, health care. Rail services have got worse.

To quote The Economist (5 August 2005), the difference between government pulling its finger out and doing what needs to be done equates to Poland catching up with western Europe in our lifetimes - or our children's lifetimes.