Gdansk, Poland

From the old palace of Macjewo, we drive a short distance to Regenwalde. On the gray walls of the old Communist buildings is a bounty of graffiti, written almost exclusively in English. In Tschew, the Graffiti says, "Mushroom Sweat!" Another, here in Regenwalde says, "Dig it Octopus."

We knock on the door of the lady Denuta. Her home is small, and sits adjacent to a river, facing a now vacant flour mill. When she answers the door, she erupts into a welcoming smile. She speaks little German, and understands nobody. But she has made a berry cake and a berry-alcohol, which she distilled herself, from her own garden, on her lot in the middle of a place I had never before considered. And uncle, without the benefit of Polish, is managing to make her laugh.

Her home is formerly my grandparents, along with Uncle and dad, before the Polish ousted all Germans from the now Polish section Pomerania following World War II.

She has never married. On the wall hangs a photo of her standing next to the Pope in Israel. Her professional hospitality probably means she has an active life in the Catholic Church. But this – all these foreign faces – has to phase even the veteran entertainer.

Few things have changed in her home. There is some element of the 1970’s in her furniture, sure, and the walls have been painted. But this house is essentially the same as where Uncle spent his earliest years. She shows us her garden, which is alive with peaches, cherry trees, strawberries, blackberries, lettuce, rhubarb, carrots and celery. There is an organized display of cabbages, all sorts of them, and plums hanging above.

That vacant mill – that was great grandfather’s flourmill. And, like my grandmother’s father’s own mill, which stood in a nearby town, it was a vast construction.

The next morning, we drive further east through woodland and farmland. Our goal is Slowinski National Park, one of Poland’s natural crown jewels. It encapsulates the giant Lake Lebsko, a long coastline, and a series of coastal dunes which stretch for miles. The dunes, the largest in Europe, are constantly moving, so that every year they overtake new forest and swamp. This murky water-covered forest is a hint of the wildness of old Pomerania. Even stepping a few feet from the dunes into swamp, my feet go swollen with the bite of ants. In minutes, they harbor even the bellows of my camera.

This is the northern route to Gdansk, a Polish city-state on the eastern edge of Pomerania that has changed history as much as it has changed hands.

The next morning, the summer sunrise in Gdansk is three-thirty. The post-communist smog is thick with purple, and so am I. I have been suffering a constant state of jetlag. A constant state of Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb for the last eight days. I walk to the Maritime Museum, where, I gathered, my camera could capture Gdansk in the nordic morning light.

But the museum was gated, and when I fiddled with the gate latch, the guard woke and yelled at me from the premises, like the eternal café-bound European and his pigeons. But when the sun broke, and that odd Gdansk light covered water and land in haunting violet, I went under the gate, camera and all, and set camp.

One shot, two shots, and the guard was again awake. He came to me with a vengeance, but my bags were already packed, and comfortably numb, I was on the other side of the gate.

The rain in Gdansk today is unrelenting. So much so that there seems nothing better to do than take refuge in a small café on the expansive baroque Dlugi Targ Street with wife Jane and brother Hans. We are sipping on Bitburger, watching the swarms of people under their umbrellas: a man with a monkey on the leash is hurrying, an elder woman is selling lavender bouquets and a trio of female teens are sucking on wet gummi bears, laughing and chatting under their hoods. Hans says that this is how he imagined Hemingway’s ‘A Moveable Feast,’ only in Pomerania.

“What exactly did he mean by moveable feast?” I asked, thinking that Hemingway was referring to a big picnic. "This is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy," Hemingway wrote, but Hans says, “A Moveable Feast was about being able to take your Parisian experience with you, to wherever you go.”

“I apologize,” I said to the two of them, “we have to find a piece for my tripod, I hate to drag you into this, but this will not be easy in this town...”

What I meant is this would mean we would have to walk all over the city in the rain, on a hopeless venture that could result in nothing more than an expansive exploration of Pomerania's greatest city.

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