Category Archives: Europe

by | 8 June 2026 · 8:58 am

Our Quick Visit to Moldova

The Far Outliers have just returned from a short visit to Moldova, flying from Warsaw to Chișinău for Poland’s Corpus Christi school holidays. We had multiple reasons for the visit.

We had earlier considered doing another year abroad under the English Language Fellow program after our year in Poland. In fact, we had originally hoped to go to Romania, but there were no current openings. Moldova has an opening for next year, but my scary health problems during our deep winter in Poland made me fear I might not make it through a Moldovan winter, despite my advantage of arriving in Moldova still fairly fluent in Romanian. Public signage all over Chișinău was indeed almost fully in Romanian (not in Moldovan Cyrillic or Russian), and I enjoyed being able to converse much more readily in Romanian than I have been able to in Polish. (My ability to navigate written Polish is far ahead of my conversational ability.)

Our other reason for visiting Moldova was to make a pilgrimage to the village where Ms. Outlier’s Bessarabian German grandfather was born, and from which his family emigrated via Odessa to Canada and the Dakotas in the 1890s. Their rural village was named Neudorf, like dozens of German villages around the world. (There is a Neudorf village in Saskatchewan, and a poorly documented Neudorf cemetery in Eureka, South Dakota, originally settled by Germans from Russia). All the remaining Germans were expelled from Bessarabia in the 1940s, and Neudorf was renamed Carmanova (in Russian, Карманово).

Carmanova now lies in Transnistria, so near to the Ukrainian border that T-Mobile sent us “Welcome to Ukraine!” text messages when our phones came within range of their Ukraine cell towers. To get us there (and back), Moldova Tours was able to arrange for a private driver fluent in Russian, Romanian, and English, who had prior experience driving groups into the Transnistrian capital, Tiraspol, on their Soviet-era culture tours. But he had never been to very rural Carmanova and was curious about it. We ended up getting turned back twice at Russian Army checkpoints that could not handle international passports, and we had to wait in a long, slow line at the Grigoriopol checkpoint that could process our passports. They gave us a temporary insert but did not stamp our passports.

The rolling green hills of the Transnistrian countryside are quite lovely in June, with vast acres of foot-high sunflower sprouts. Several forks in the road had signposts directing us to the German settlements, and the road into the village featured a roughly made tall welcome sign with the year 1809 (when Neudorf was founded), its name in Cyrillic, Нойдорф, the year 1944, and its new name Карманово (from Карман ‘pocket’?). There was also a rock monument in the village inscribed to mark the 200th anniversary of its founding in 1809.

The village itself was very small and quiet. We were given a tour of the House of Culture by its cordial manager. It contained a curtained stage and auditorium, a disco hall, a barre-lined ballet studio, and several rooms for workshops of various kinds. We also visited the cemetery for Soviet soldiers who died there, billboards with the names and faces of local citizens who died between 1941 and 1945. We saw no sign of a former church. The little country store where we bought a bottle of Ukrainian water took only Transnistrian rubles, so our driver/translator handled the payment.

I’ve added a Moldova album to my Flickr site, Joel Abroad.

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Filed under family, Germany, language, migration, Moldova, Romania, Russia, U.S., Ukraine

by | 30 May 2026 · 1:26 am

Legacies of the Jeannette Expedition

From In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2014), Kindle pp. 406-410:

IN 1883, George De Long’s remains, along with those of his comrades, were removed from Amerika Khaya [in Russia] and brought to the United States in a long and elaborate mass funeral procession jointly orchestrated by the U.S. Navy and the Russian government. The secretary of the Navy called De Long and his men “martyrs in the cause of science.” After a Manhattan funeral attended by thousands of mourners, De Long was buried, along with five of his fellow explorers, in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx; that same year, his journals from the voyage, edited by Emma De Long, were published to wide acclaim. Although the Jeannette expedition became the subject of a naval court of inquiry and a congressional hearing that produced considerable controversy, both tribunals upheld De Long’s command and reputation. In 1884, New York City dedicated a prime piece of land along the East River as Jeannette Park (it’s now known as Vietnam Veterans Plaza). Six years later, a replica of Melville’s Lena monument and cross was erected on the grounds of the Naval Academy in Annapolis, overlooking the Severn River. A mountain range in northwestern Alaska was named in De Long’s honor, as were two naval ships. In Russia, the High Arctic islands he discovered—Jeannette, Henrietta, and Bennett—are known as Ostrova De Long.

FOR MORE THAN a century after his death, August Petermann’s work continued to be a prominent force in cartography. In 2004, after nearly 150 years of publication, Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen halted its presses in Gotha and closed its doors forever. The geographer’s legacy lives on in dozens of place-names scattered about the planet, including the Petermann Ranges of Australia; Petermann Island, off the coast of Antarctica; and the Petermann Glacier of Greenland, one of the world’s largest. His name has even been immortalized in space: A feature in the north polar region of the moon is known by astronomers as Petermann Crater. Today, Petermann’s rare maps often fetch thousands of dollars at auction and are coveted by fine-art collectors around the world.

…

GEORGE MELVILLE NEVER quite got the north country out of his system. In 1884, he returned to the Arctic to search for survivors of yet another disastrous American polar effort—the Greely Expedition—and remained a tireless champion of America’s push for the North Pole. Melville divorced Hetty and remarried, spending most of his life in Washington. He rose within the ranks to become engineer in chief of the U.S. Navy and, eventually, a rear admiral. Melville presided over an expansive redesign of the fleet, largely completing its conversion from wood to metal, and from wind to steam power. When he retired, in 1903, the U.S. Navy boasted one of the most powerful modernized fleets in the world. Widely sought on the lecture circuit, Melville wrote a popular book on the Jeannette expedition, In the Lena Delta, and defended De Long to the end. Melville died in Philadelphia in 1912. Two Navy ships—a destroyer tender and an oceanographic research vessel—were named after him. Today, the George W. Melville Award is the Navy’s highest honor for accomplishments in nautical engineering.

AFTER RECOVERING FROM his Jeannette ordeal, John Danenhower also enjoyed popularity on the lecture circuit and became a well-known critic of both the De Long expedition and Arctic exploration in general. “It is time to call a halt,” Danenhower argued, “to further exploration of the central polar basin. There are better directions for the display of true manhood and heroism.” Danenhower married and fathered two children, and for several years, he served successfully, and seemingly happily, as an officer in the U.S. Navy. But in 1887, his melancholy returned. Alone in his quarters in Annapolis, Danenhower shot himself in the head with a .32-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver.

JOHN MUIR NEVER returned to the High Arctic. After his trip on the Corwin, he became gradually embroiled in the conservation battles that led to his co-founding, in 1892, of the Sierra Club. Instrumental in the creation of Yosemite National Park, Muir is considered one of the fathers of the environmental movement. He died in 1914. The Cruise of the Corwin, Muir’s posthumously published account of his journey in search of the lost Jeannette, is now a classic of Arctic literature.

AFTER WINNING MEDALS and Navy commendations, Charles Tong Sing turned to a life of gambling and crime, resulting in several prison terms. As the head a powerful Chinese criminal syndicate in New York, he was said to be responsible for at least six murders; he became known as Scarface Charley, in reference to a five-inch facial scar from an injury he sustained aboard the Jeannette. An 1883 article in the New York Times noted, “Recently he gained an unenviable notoriety in Chinatown through his ferocity and physical prowess, and has been suspected of a number of bold and very adroit robberies.” Later in life, Charley Tong Sing went clean and reportedly ran a Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles, worked as a court interpreter, and briefly served as a policeman in Portland, Oregon. The circumstances of his death are unknown.

WILLIAM NINDEMANN WAS awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. He married Miss Newman in New York, as planned, but was soon widowed and left to raise their only son, Billy. Nindemann spent two decades working closely with the Irish-American engineer John Holland, widely regarded as the father of the modern submarine. Serving as a gunner and torpedo operator on Holland’s prototypes, Nindemann delivered several of the new undersea vessels to Japan for use in the Russo-Japanese War. In 1913, one year to the day after his son, Billy, drowned in a canoe accident on the Hudson River, Nindemann died in Brooklyn.

…

THE LAST SURVIVING member of the Jeannette expedition was Herbert Leach, the seaman from Melville’s party who nearly perished of frostbite in the Lena delta. A native of Penobscot, Maine, Leach worked much of his life in a shoe factory in Massachusetts. In 1928, he joined Emma De Long at the unveiling of an enormous granite statue dedicated to George De Long and the other Jeannette dead, at Woodlawn Cemetery. Leach died in 1933.

…

IN 1938, Emma De Long, well into her eighties, published her memoir, Explorer’s Wife. (That same year had seen something of a Jeannette revival, with the publication of a best-selling novel, Hell On Ice, which was adapted into a nationally broadcast radio drama by Orson Welles.) Emma De Long never remarried, and she lived out her last years alone—happily, she said—on a New Jersey farm she had purchased. “My husband’s memory,” she said, “is all I have left.” Not only was she a widow, but she had lost her only child: Sylvie De Long, after serving in World War I as a Red Cross nurse, marrying, and giving birth to two children, had died in 1925, of a mastoid infection. Emma De Long passed away in 1940 at the age of ninety-one. She was laid to rest beside her husband at Woodlawn Cemetery.

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Filed under biography, Germany, military, nationalism, publishing, Russia, science, travel, U.S.

by | 18 May 2026 · 12:39 am

Bering Strait Mission Impossible, 1879

From In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2014), Kindle pp. 141-143:

Even while the Jeannette steamed north toward the Bering Strait, another world-renowned vessel was steaming south out of it, and down the North Pacific coast of Russia. It was the Vega, Adolf Nordenskiöld’s exploring ship. The world didn’t know it yet, but the Finnish-Swedish scientist and explorer had emerged, a month earlier, from his winter quarters in northeast Siberia and was well on his way to Japan, where he would announce his considerable accomplishment: Nordenskiöld had become the first navigator to make a complete Northeast Passage—that is, a journey across the top of the entire continent of Eurasia. Hugging the land for the most part, the Vega had successfully worked its way along the eight-thousand-mile coastline of the Russian Arctic.

De Long had guessed from the start that Nordenskiöld was safe—that, indeed, he had never really been in any danger. The Scandinavian didn’t need to be “found,” any more than Livingstone had needed to be hunted down in Africa. But Bennett had wanted his “De Long meets Nordenskiöld” moment, and that was the end of it.

But the timing of Nordenskiöld’s emergence from the ice was particularly bad for De Long. He had missed Nordenskiöld by only a week. By the time De Long approached Alaskan waters, the Vega was making for the Kuril Islands of Japan. As one Arctic historian put it, “Somewhere in the fog-wreathed Bering Sea between the Aleutian Islands and Norton Sound, the USS Jeannette and the ship she was supposed to look for passed each other on opposite courses.”

Meanwhile, another bit of rotten luck was brewing in Washington. Earlier in the summer, a schooner commissioned by the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey had made its way out of the Arctic after an ambitious multiyear study of the North Pacific and the Bering Sea. The hydrographers and meteorologists hired by the geodetic survey had been conducting painstaking analyses of oceanic currents, depths, salinities, temperatures, and prevailing wind patterns. Specifically, the survey was interested in learning about the Kuro Siwo—the Black Current of Japan. Much of the data had yet to be analyzed, but already clear patterns were starting to emerge.

The Kuro Siwo, the findings suggested, was not nearly as strong or as warm or as reliable as the Atlantic’s Gulf Stream. As it swept up from the coast of Japan and out into the open ocean, the Kuro Siwo frayed into numerous subsidiary currents, and its power steadily waned. If anything, the prevailing tendency at the Bering Strait was that of cold-water currents flowing south.

The survey’s final report would be written by an eminent Harvard-trained naturalist, William Healey Dall. Dall was a scientist of wide-ranging interests—he had published papers in the fields of ornithology, anthropology, oceanography, and paleontology and had conducted numerous meteorology studies for the Smithsonian Institution. Dall had traveled extensively in Alaska, and his name would become well known throughout the region.

Dall’s report on the Black Current was unequivocal. “The Kuro Siwo sends no recognizable branch northward, between the Aleutians and Kamchatka,” he wrote. “No warm current from Bering Sea enters Bering Strait. The strait is incapable of carrying a current of warm water of sufficient magnitude to have any marked effect on the condition of the Polar Basin just north of it. Nothing in our knowledge of them offers any hope of an easier passage toward the Pole, or, in general, northward through their agency. Nothing yet revealed in the investigation of the subject in the least tends to support the widely spread but unphilosophical notion, that in any part of the Polar Sea, we may look for large areas free from ice.”

By the time these devastating findings were released, De Long had sailed from San Francisco, and thus he never saw them. They called into question nearly all the scientific theories on which the Jeannette expedition was based—theories that had been endlessly reaffirmed in the popular imagination. (After the Jeannette set sail, the Herald had declared that it was “undebatable that a warm current of water from the Pacific flows into the Arctic Ocean at Bering Strait.”) But as the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey results were showing, there was no warm current tunneling under the ice cap. There was no thermometric gateway to the pole. And, likely, there was no Open Polar Sea. The theories of Silas Bent, Matthew Fontaine Maury, and the late August Petermann were resoundingly wrong.

While the Jeannette wallowed ever northward, scientists and bureaucrats in Washington slowly digested the new data. Everything they learned seemed to suggest that De Long’s voyage, before it had even begun in earnest, was a fool’s errand.

Another scientist who would closely study the survey data was a respected physician and chemist named Thomas Antisell. Dr. Antisell, in an address before the American Geographical Society in New York, was ruthless in his conclusion. The portal De Long was aiming for offered “no real gate of entrance into the Arctic Ocean,” he said. “The North Pacific Ocean has, practically speaking, no northern outlet; Bering Straits is but a cul de sac.”

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Filed under military, nationalism, Pacific, Russia, Scandinavia, science, travel, U.S.

by | 16 May 2026 · 7:13 pm

Riding the Kuroshio to Wrangel

From In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2014), Kindle pp. 81-82:

Most assuredly, it was time for an entirely new route. Petermann had read Silas Bent’s treatises on the Kuro Siwo and was familiar with his ideas about a “thermometric gateway.” Petermann agreed with Bent. The place to strike for the pole was the Bering Strait, just as De Long had been thinking. Not only had the route never been tried before, but the Kuro Siwo was likely to be a warm-water current powerful enough to soften up a pathway through the ice that would lead to the Open Polar Sea.

But there was another compelling reason for going by way of the Bering Strait, Petermann suggested. Lying off the coast of northeastern Siberia, not far from the Bering Strait, was a mysterious landmass marked on some maps as Wrangel Land. For centuries, it had existed as little more than a rumor, a mirage, a fog-gauzed dream. People weren’t sure what it was. Perhaps it was an island, perhaps a continent, perhaps a magical portal to the pole. Perhaps it didn’t exist at all. Before it came to be called Wrangel Land, it had gone by a succession of other names scrawled on whaling charts: Tikegan Land, Plover Island, Kellett Land.

In 1822, Chukchi natives on the northeast Siberian coast told the Russian-financed explorer Ferdinand von Wrangel about a land to the north that could sometimes be seen when atmospheric conditions were just right. The Chukchis had never been there, but once every few years, on sharp, clear days when the mists and fogs opened up, and when the vagaries of Arctic refraction were favorable, a mountainous land seemed to rise up from the sea like a dream. The Chukchis called it the Invisible Island, and they spoke of legends of a forgotten people who lived there. They had seen herds of wild reindeer clomping north from the Siberian mainland across the ice, presumably to graze on the strange land during their seasonal migration. Flocks of geese and seabirds, too, had been seen aiming in that direction. The animals seemed to know something the humans did not.

Enticed by what he heard, Baron von Wrangel sailed for the mythic land, but he was thwarted by ice and failed to snatch even a glimpse of it. Nearly thirty years later, the captain of an English vessel searching for Sir John Franklin’s lost expedition thought he spotted a large Arctic island in the distance. Later, various whaling captains insisted they’d seen it, though their claims were disputed. A German whaler, Eduard Dallmann, was even said to have briefly landed on it in 1866.

Something was there—Petermann was convinced of it. And this land, he believed (on the basis of anecdotes from Arctic whalers and ancient reports from Russian explorers), was surrounded by open water. “It is a well-known fact,” he had written, “that there exists to the north of the Siberian coast, and, at a comparatively short distance from it, a sea open at all seasons.”

Now Petermann drove home his point: Bennett and De Long should utilize that open sea and make Wrangel Land the target of their expedition. What a contribution to science it would be to finally learn what this land was about! On their way to the pole, he said, Bennett’s party should try to land on Wrangel, explore it, and claim it for the United States.

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Filed under Germany, nationalism, Russia, science, travel, U.S.

by | 12 May 2026 · 12:42 am

Era of Polar Obsession

From In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2014), Kindle pp. 20-21:

The “polar problem,” as it was sometimes called in the press, had taken on a quality of nagging, gnawing obsession. People had to know what was Up There—not only scientists and explorers but the general public. The North Pole was, said the London Athenaeum, the “unattainable object of our dreams.” An eminent German geographer named Ernst Behm compared humanity’s ignorance of what lay at the poles to the insatiable curiosity felt by a home owner who doesn’t know what his own attic looks like. “As a family will, of course, know all the rooms of its own house,” Behm wrote, “so man, from the very beginning, has been inspired with a desire to become acquainted with all the lands, oceans, and zones of the planet assigned to him for a dwelling-place.”

A New York Times editorial at the time echoed Behm’s sentiment: “Man will not be content with a mystery unexplored, will not rest with a perpetual interrogation point at the end of the earth’s axis, whose query he cannot answer.”

By the 1870s, no greater mystery existed on the face of the earth. (Antarctica was, of course, equally mysterious, but the South Pole was considered a less obtainable goal for the leading exploring nations, all of which happened to be located in the Northern Hemisphere.) It was hard to comprehend how profoundly the world needed to scratch the Arctic itch. Speculation about what lay at the North Pole permeated popular culture and world literature, from the books of Jules Verne to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (whose scientist-protagonist pursues his monster across the floes all the way to the North Pole). Many practical considerations were floated as justifications for pursuing the polar grail—landmasses that might be claimed, minerals seized, shipping routes discovered, colonies founded, new species described. There was a riddle of geography to solve, and personal glory to be won. But the quest was ultimately about something even more elemental and atavistic: to reach the farthest place, the ne plus ultra, where no human had been before.

“Within the charmed circle of the Arctic,” argued the Atlantic Monthly, “lay the goal of geographical ambition … the final solution of the polar problem. And it may be said that long years of fruitless effort and frightful suffering seem only to have whetted the appetite for discovery; and the more we know of our planet the more ardent becomes the desire of geographers to view the mysterious extremity.” An 1871 article in the journal Nature characterized the search for the pole as the paramount scientific and geographical riddle of the age: “The immense tract of hitherto unvisited land or sea which surrounds the northern end of the axis of our earth, is the largest, as it is the most important field of discovery that remains for this or a future generation to work out.”

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Filed under Britain, Canada, Germany, literature, nationalism, publishing, travel, U.S.

by | 28 April 2026 · 8:34 am

Fingerprint Matching in 1968

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 238-239:

AT THE FBI Crime Lab in Washington, the fingerprint expert George Bonebrake spent the early-morning hours of April 5 poring over the contents of the package that had been couriered up from Memphis. A slight, fastidious man, Bonebrake was one of the world’s foremost authorities on dactyloscopy, the study and classification of finger and palm prints. Bonebrake had worked as a fingerprint examiner for the FBI since 1941. His was an esoteric profession within the crime-fighting universe—more art, it was said, than science, a closed world of forensic analysis predicated on a foundation of facts so incredible that a thousand bad TV detective shows over the decades had done little to diminish the essential mystery: that the complex friction-ridge patterns on human fingertips and palms, unique to every individual on earth, carry trace amounts of an oily residue excreted from pores that, when impressed upon certain kinds of surfaces, can be “raised” through the use of special dusting powders or chemicals—and then photographed and viewed on cards.

As far-fetched as the discipline seemed to most laymen, fingerprint analysis by 1968 had been the standard technique of criminal identification for more than half a century. It replaced a bizarre and not terribly accurate method of French origin called the Bertillon system, which required the careful measuring of a criminal’s earlobes and other anatomical parts. Fingerprinting wasn’t perfect, but it was the best system in existence for narrowing the pool of potential culprits in many situations. In many cases, fingerprinting was a godsend, providing the breakthrough that solved the crime.

In 1968, the FBI categorized fingerprints according to the Henry classification system, which was developed by Britain in the late nineteenth century. The system recognizes three primary friction-ridge patterns—arches, loops, and whorls. Loops, the most common pattern, are assigned a numerical value according to the number of ridges contained within each pattern found on each digit. Loop patterns can be further described as “radial” or “ulnar,” depending on which direction their microscopic tails point.

Bonebrake got started with his meticulous work shortly after dawn. Most of the prints that he found were fragments or smudges that contained little or no information of value. The twenty-dollar bills that Mrs. Bessie Brewer had provided yielded no usable prints whatsoever. Eventually, however, Bonebrake was able to lift six high-quality specimens from the Remington rifle, the Redfield scope, the Bushnell binoculars, the front section of the Commercial Appeal, the bottle of Mennen Afta aftershave lotion, and one of the Schlitz beer cans.

Most of these prints appeared to come from different fingers, but already Bonebrake could tell that two of the prints—those taken from the rifle and the binoculars—were from the same digit of the same individual. Both seemed to have been deposited by a left thumb, and, upon further study, the print pattern would turn out to be unmistakable: an ulnar loop of twelve ridge counts.

This was an important find. The FBI had the fingerprints of more than eighty-two million individuals on file—a number obviously too large to work with, as fingerprint examiners had to do all matching the old-fashioned way, by hand, eyeball, and magnifying glass. This tiny little detail, however, narrowed the search considerably: an ulnar loop of twelve ridge counts on the left thumb. Bonebrake’s task was still formidable, but now he had something definite on which to draw comparisons. He made large black-and-white blowups of all six of the latent prints, and then he and his team got started.

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by | 11 April 2026 · 12:31 am

Evolution of Polish Viticulture

My latest compilation of stories from Culture.pl includes an interview about the history of Polish viticulture. Here are some excerpts:

Monika Kucia: Poland isn’t historically a winemaking country, but we do have a short history of winemaking dating back centuries. When were grapes first cultivated on our territories? 

Wojciech Bońkowski: In the Middle Ages, viticulture was quite developed in our country, also because the climate in our part of Europe was warmer back then. Wine was mainly needed for religious purposes, the celebration of mass, so it was grown on a limited, very small scale. Cultivation collapsed due to the so-called Little Ice Age, a period of cooling in the North Atlantic when average temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere dropped by about 1°C. Around the 17th century, Poland began importing large quantities of wine from, among other places, Hungary and Ukraine. After World War II, Lubusz Voivodeship, including Zielona Góra [‘Grünberg’], was incorporated into Poland. Before 1939, Zielona Góra was the largest wine-producing region in Germany and specialized in sparkling wines. We took over these vineyards, but they, too, were closed down by the 1960s because the Polish communist authorities promoted the production of fruit wines, not grape wines.

MK: What is fruit wine?

WB: Fruit wine is a cheap alcoholic beverage made from widely available fruit, in Poland primarily from apples. Hence the Polish term ‘jabol’ [slang term for low-quality, wine-like alcoholic fruit beverage derived from the word for ‘apple’, jabłko, trans.]. This kind of wine is much cheaper to produce than wine made from the fermentation of grape must. Fruit wine production was possible in Poland on a large scale thanks to the orchard industry. The Polish People’s Republic saw a decline in wine culture, which had been quite developed in interwar Poland, among the elite of course. The common folk, if we may use that term, drank other alcoholic beverages. This is, of course, a result of our geographical location. We have a different social situation today; changes are affecting the whole of society, and wine has definitely become very popular. Studies show that nearly 50% of Poles declare at least occasional wine consumption.

…

MK: How did it all begin?

WB: Winemaking was first revived in the Podkarpackie [‘Subcarpathian’]  region thanks to the efforts of Roman Myśliwiec [‘Hunter’], who founded a nursery where he propagated vines and supported the establishment of small vineyards and the production of wine in a style we affectionately call ‘allotment garden wine’. Some had 1,000, others 2,000 square meters of vineyard. Back then, no one had a hectare. These were amateur production attempts. 

…

MK: Where did the winemakers get their seedlings?

WB: Partly from Myśliwiec, but of course, seedlings can be easily purchased in wine-producing countries. We have Czechia and Slovakia just across the border. That’s not a problem, just a cost. And these were investors, businessmen who had money they’d made in other industries.

MK: And what about Jutrzenka in the Podkarpackie region?

WB: That was a variety created by Myśliwiec, a typical hybrid. The problem with hybrids was that most of them were of very poor quality. The early ones, such as Bianca and Sibera, were so-called second-generation hybrids that reeked of cabbage and IXI laundry powder; they had no merits.

MK: So why were they cultivated?

WB: Hybrids are developed for two purposes: either to ripen early and be suitable for a cold climate, which was their main function in Poland; or to be more disease resistant. At the time, it seemed that we in Poland couldn’t grow Chardonnay or any other viniferavariety, that the grapes wouldn’t be ripe enough to make wine. This turned out to be untrue. It gets a little warmer every year, which helps. Meanwhile, the discussion about hybrids is currently gaining momentum worldwide. On the one hand, we have the pressure of significantly reducing the use of chemicals in agriculture; after all, winemaking is responsible for a significant portion of soil contamination – in France, for example. There are stories about a winemaker spraying fifteen times, but if he’s planted a hybrid, spraying twice would be enough.

MK: So hybrids aren’t ‘inferior’?

WB: At first, I was skeptical about hybrids. Not from a cultivation perspective, as I don’t know anything about it, or at least I don’t have practical experience, but from the perspective of the market and the quality of these wines. Fourth-generation hybrids, such as Johanniter and Solaris, are varietals that are no longer easy to distinguish in a comparative tasting; they are simply very good. Johanniter and Riesling can be very similar, so the quality argument is no longer relevant.

MK: And can one grow noble red wine varietals in Poland?

WB: In Poland, for example, we have a lot of Pinot Noir; this varietal has recently produced surprisingly good wines in many places around the world, such as Czechia and Canada, which have similar climatic conditions to Poland. It used to be said that this was a difficult grape variety which only performed well in Burgundy, but that’s not true. That’s the great thing about wine – we’re constantly being self-verified. Yesterday, it seemed that only Italian wines were sexy, but today, wines from Greece and Croatia are considered sexy. It’s constantly changing.

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Filed under Canada, Czechia, food, France, Germany, Poland, religion

by | 5 April 2026 · 12:04 am

Polish Exiles Trapped Abroad

From the Epilogue by Neal Ascherson in Wojtek the Bear: Polish War Hero, by Aileen Orr (Birlinn, 2014), Kindle pp. 174-178:

The Polish troops in Scotland, Italy and Normandy, like Poles all over the world, watched in agony as Warsaw fought and died. But there was little they could do. Some long-range aircraft, Polish, British and South African, managed to reach Warsaw from airfields in Italy, but they suffered terrible losses and the supplies and ammunition they dropped often fell into German hands. Predictably, Stalin refused to let the Allies use airfields in Soviet-held territory until it was too late. The British, for their part, refused to let the London Poles fly the Parachute Brigade to Warsaw.

From the military point of view, that would have been suicidal madness. But there was political reluctance too. Both Churchill and Roosevelt knew that the Soviet Union was carrying the main burden of a war now approaching its climax. They were determined not to let ‘Polish problems’ disturb their partnership with Stalin.

After the collapse of the rising, the Home Army in the rest of Poland began to disintegrate. A few groups retreated into the forests and carried on a hopeless guerrilla war against the new Communist authorities. Within a few years, anyone who had fought in the Home Army fell under suspicion as a ‘counter-revolutionary’, and thousands were imprisoned. The parachute couriers from Scotland were hunted down by Soviet military intelligence, and some – caught with their radios tuned to the Polish government in London – were tried and shot as ‘imperialist spies’. The true story of the Warsaw Rising, and the main role in the resistance played by the non-Communist Home Army, became forbidden topics.

From trenches in Italy, or from camps in Lowland Scotland, Wojtek’s friends watched this process in deepening despair. Although they did not know it, their country had already been abandoned by Britain and America. At the Teheran summit in late 1943, Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed that Poland should remain under Soviet occupation when it was liberated and that the new eastern frontier established by the Soviet invasion in 1939, leaving the cities of Lwów and Wilno (Vilnius) in Soviet hands, should become permanent. As compensation, Poland would be given the eastern provinces of Germany. The whole country would be shifted 150 miles to the west.

The Yalta conference in February 1945 did little more than publicly confirm these decisions. Postwar Europe would be divided into ‘spheres of influence’ – with Poland left in the Soviet sphere. Roosevelt and Churchill eagerly accepted Stalin’s assurance that there would be free elections in Poland.

It didn’t escape the soldiers’ notice that Poland was invited to neither of these meetings, nor to the Big Three Potsdam Conference after the Nazi surrender. It was behind closed doors that the ‘Victor Powers’ had dictated Poland’s political future.

General Sikorski had died in a plane crash at Gibraltar in 1943. His successor as prime minister in the London government was Stanisław Mikołajczyk, a peasant politician who tried desperately but vainly to save what he could from the Yalta settlement. But the Communist-led Committee of National Liberation had now become the provisional government of Poland. In July 1945, a few months after Germany’s unconditional surrender, Britain and the United States withdrew recognition from the London government-in-exile and transferred it to the Communist-led regime in Warsaw.

At first, the new regime pretended to be an alliance of ‘progressive forces’ and Mikołajczyk felt able to join a coalition government in Warsaw. But the Communists controlled the security police and within two years the opposition was being crushed by violence and threats. The promised free elections produced crudely faked results. Late in 1947, Mikołajczyk fled Poland, hidden in the back of an American diplomatic car. The Communist monopoly of power soon became complete.

By now, Poland was being ruled by state terror. Veterans of the AK were still being rounded up and imprisoned. The Home Army commanders were kidnapped, taken to Moscow and tried on incredible charges such as ‘collaborating with the Nazis’. Returning soldiers who had served in the Polish armies under British command were treated as suspected traitors and saboteurs.

The Polish troops in the West, by now demobilised and living in temporary camps scattered over England and Scotland, knew what was going on. The postwar British government hoped that they would go back to Poland, but – in a rare act of guilt-driven generosity – promised to care for them if they preferred to stay.

It was a miserable choice that they all faced. Most of them longed to go home and help rebuild their beloved, shattered land. But there they would be rewarded by persecution, by the sadness of life under foreign tyranny. On the other hand, what future could they have in a land whose language they hardly spoke, where they lacked friends, where their skills beyond manual labour and soldiering seemed to count for nothing?

But for the men who lived with Wojtek in the camp at Winfield, the choice was a little easier. Before they came across that bear cub in the Persian hills, they had seen the real face of Soviet Communism and had experienced on their own bodies its brutality, its callous indifference to human suffering, its hunger and its lies. If Poland were to become like that, it would no longer be a country they could live in. These were the men who had travelled the third path, and they knew only too well what they were being offered.

The third path, like the first, began on 17 September 1939, in south-eastern Poland. But this path led eastwards, into the depths of the Soviet Union. A part of the defeated Polish army was able to escape over the border into Romania and Hungary. But some 200,000 others were captured by the Soviet invaders and became prisoners of war. Some 15,000 of them, mostly officers, were moved into three prison camps in Russia and Ukraine: Kozielsk, Starobielsk and Ostaszków.

All over the regions which had been Poland’s eastern provinces, Poles in responsible jobs – teachers, judges, police chiefs, mayors, editors – were arrested and imprisoned. Under directions from Moscow, the local Communist Parties in what was now Western Belorussia and Western Ukraine filled the posts with their own Belorussian or Ukrainian supporters.

But this turned out to be only the first act in an immense programme designed to obliterate Polish identity for ever in this part of eastern Europe. In February 1940, the Soviet authorities began the first mass expulsion of the Polish civilian population. Troops from the NKVD (predecessor of the KGB, as the political security force) herded Polish families to railway stations and crammed them into unheated cattle wagons. From there, the trains set forth on journeys which could last many weeks, and which the old, the youngest children and the sick often did not survive, until the prisoners were dumped in Arctic labour camps, at railheads near Siberian mines or on the empty steppes of Kazakhstan.

More deportations followed in 1940, until by early 1941 something like 1.5 million Poles – Christians and Jews, Communists and Catholics – had been driven into exile. For the gulag empire, the life or death of these slave labourers was a matter of indifference. By the time that they were allowed to leave the camps, in the summer of 1941, between a third and a half of the deported Poles were dead from hunger, exposure, exhaustion and disease.

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by | 4 April 2026 · 6:47 am

Poland’s Underground State

From the Epilogue by Neal Ascherson in Wojtek the Bear: Polish War Hero, by Aileen Orr (Birlinn, 2014), Kindle pp. 170-173:

The couriers who reached London did not only bring despatches from the resistance. They were themselves direct witnesses to the appalling nature of the Nazi occupation. The messenger Jan Karski laid before British and American statesmen the full news of the Jewish genocide. Jan Nowak (Jeziorański) was sent out of burning Warsaw during the 1944 uprising to plead with the Allies for help. In the West, most people knew that the occupation was brutal, especially in its treatment of the Jews. But the governments of the democracies were slow, even reluctant, to believe the sheer scale and intensity of horror which the Polish messengers and the exile government revealed to them.

In German-occupied Poland, some 5.4 million people died in concentration camps or mass executions, 3 million of them Jews. That figure does not include casualties caused directly by war and, in all, Poland lost roughly a fifth of its pre-war population. Its industry and infrastructure were almost completely destroyed, while much of Poland’s cultural heritage was burned or looted. In 1944, the whole central city of Warsaw was blown up on Hitler’s orders and reduced to rubble.

After the 1939 invasion, the Nazis divided their half of Poland into two regions. The first consisted of territory in the west of the country which was simply absorbed into the Reich, the Polish population being driven out and replaced by German settlers. The second region was the ‘General Government’, a kind of colonial protectorate ruled from Kraków by the tyrannical Hans Frank. It was in the General Government that almost all the extermination camps were constructed for the Jewish Holocaust, the industrial murder of Europe’s Jews by gas. (Auschwitz lay just out[side] the General Government, in the Upper Silesian region absorbed by the Reich.)

In the General Government, the SS began a programme of selective genocide, designed to destroy the Polish elite and to prevent any national revival. Academics, creative intellectuals and the priesthood were targeted. A little later, the German authorities started to round up the first of 3.5 million men and women for slave labour in German war industries or agriculture. Villages which resisted were burned down; their men were shot, the women deported and the children either killed or kidnapped for ‘Germanisation’ in German families.

These conditions brought immense popular support for the resistance. But at first the AK concentrated on building up its strength and acquiring weapons, and it was not until 1942 that widespread attacks on the German occupiers began. The price for resistance, even for disobeying regulations, was usually death. In the cities, the Germans carried out random mass round-ups of ‘hostages’ who were lined up against walls and shot, their bodies left lying on the street as a warning against defiance or disobedience. Ghettos were set up in the towns, as a prelude to the Jewish genocide, and the penalty for hiding an escaped Jew was immediate execution for the rescuer and his or her whole family.

In spite of these risks, the underground state survived and proliferated. This was not a new idea. During and after the January rising of 1863, the insurgents had established a ‘parallel nation’ which preserved Polish identity through illegal publishing, education and even clandestine courts. The AK’s arms and explosives were captured from the Germans, and later parachuted in from the West. But the resistance was able to do little to help the Warsaw Ghetto Rising in April 1943, as Jewish fighters decided to die fighting rather than go passively to the gas chambers of Treblinka.

By the end of 1943, AK partisan units were in control of many districts of rural Poland, especially the forests and hills of the old eastern borderlands which now lay behind German lines. But once again, strategic problems emerged. In 1943, the plan of the government-in-exile and the AK command inside Poland had been to harry the Germans as they retreated and then to join the Soviet armies as they drove the Wehrmacht out of Poland. But early in 1944, as Soviet troops advanced across the pre-war Polish frontiers, it became clear that the Russians had no intention of restoring Polish authority in the regions they had seized in 1939.

Worse still, they treated the AK units which welcomed them as potential enemies. The Polish partisans were offered a choice between arrest and conscription into the Red Army. Places liberated by the Home Army were handed over to the People’s Army, the Communist partisans, and to their Committee for National Liberation (PKWN). This body had been set up in Moscow as the nucleus for a future Communist government of Poland.

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by | 3 April 2026 · 12:59 am

Aiding the Polish Resistance

From the Epilogue by Neal Ascherson in Wojtek the Bear: Polish War Hero, by Aileen Orr (Birlinn, 2014), Kindle pp. 169-170:

The second path back to a free Poland lay through resistance within Poland itself. This meant almost exclusively resistance to the German occupation. The massive deportations of the Polish population from the eastern borderlands annexed by the Soviet Union made partisan warfare there almost impossible to organise. In any case, the Nazi invasion in June 1941 transformed the Soviet Union from enemy into ‘gallant ally’.

As the September campaign ended in 1939, Polish units – cavalry as well as infantry – were already taking to the forests and mountains. In cities and towns, centres of patriotic conspiracy sprang up. Poland had been defeated but had not surrendered, and there were to be almost no collaborators with the Nazi occupation. As the historian Norman Davies has put it, ‘there was never any Polish Quisling, for the simple reason that in Poland the Nazis never really tried to recruit one.’ Their long-term plan for the Poles was to enslave and ultimately to exterminate them, not to enlist them as allies. This gave the Poles a simple moral choice: to fight or to be obliterated.

By November 1939, Sikorski in France was in contact with many of these resistance groups, drawing them together into a coherent command structure answering to the government-in-exile. The movement eventually took the name of Armia Krajowa (Home Army) or ‘AK’ for short. After Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union, a separate, militant but much smaller Communist resistance appeared, the ‘People’s Guard’ or ‘People’s Army’ (AL). But its relations with the AK were wary, and it took orders from the underground Communist leadership rather than from Sikorski’s government in London.

As German repression and deportations for forced labour grew more intense, the AK was joined by ‘peasant battalions’ raised from the countryside. By 1943, it had become the biggest resistance movement in the whole of Nazi-occupied Europe, eventually numbering over 400,000 men and women. But the AK itself was only the military wing of a complete underground state, equipped with a Delegatura representing the exile government, with ‘councils’ drawn from the main political parties, and with most of the apparatus of a normal country down to a chain of clandestine universities and a vigorous illegal press.

For the London government-in-exile, keeping in touch with the AK and its affiliates was difficult; dangerous but crucial. In Scotland, at training centres at Polmont and Largo or at the Polish ‘spy school’ in Glasgow, agents were trained as parachutists and radio operators and dropped back into Poland from long-range aircraft. Many were lost, but gradually regular and reliable radio communication between the Delegatura, the AK command and the London government was established. Even riskier was the return journey of couriers from Poland, sometimes smuggled on neutral ships through Scandinavia, sometimes – later in the war – picked up by Allied light aircraft from secret airstrips. (In July 1944, the AK used one of these flights to deliver to the British the working parts and guidance system of a prototype V-2 rocket, stolen from a Nazi missile range.)

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