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Gratitude is no longer foreign

By ROBERT N. JENKINS
Published December 25, 2005

This is the feel-good time of year - gift-giving, holidays, a new year approaching - when we typically take time to consider what we can now appreciate and what we can expect.

But for me this year, it has been different.

For the past 100 or so days, when someone would utter the standard "How are you?" greeting, I've answered a version of "Life is great! It only took Hurricane Katrina to remind me how wonderful my life is."

But it doesn't have to be a catastrophe befalling someone else to help you understand how good your circumstances are. It might come to you in conversation with strangers over a cup of coffee - or during an unexpected and interminable delay in a train station.

Both of those events happened to me this year, a few hours apart and thousands of miles from home.

During a late-spring trip to central Europe, I planned to spend a couple of days in the Polish city of Wroclaw. However, a mistake with my train ticket sliced a full day off that itinerary.

Consequently, I was to arrive in Wroclaw, from Prague, at 1:05 a.m. and leave that same night, at 11:55, in a sleeper compartment bound for Berlin.

I was met at the Wroclaw train station by Renata Olesinska-Bigo, a city tourism employee assigned to guide me that day. She delivered me to a hotel, then picked me up again that morning at 10.

Renata, who has a law degree, was proud of her city. Founded in the 10th century, Wroclaw changed hands many times but it was the 20th century that saw the greatest changes. The Germans occupied the city - Breslau, in German - during World War II and defended it so fiercely that nearly 75 percent of the city was destroyed.

Soon after the war the Russians made Poland part of the Soviet Union. While they rebuilt the war damage, "Until 15, 20 years ago, much of the city was gray," said Renata. But the Soviet Union eventually dissolved and "Ten, 11 years ago, we started to rebuild, repaint."

Renata showed me around town: Wroclaw University's spectacular assembly hall, the Aula Leopoldina, in which every wall and the ceiling are covered with Baroque paintings or architectural flourishes. The enormous panorama that retells Polish hero Thaddeus Kosciuszko's victory over Russian troops in 1793. Outside this venue is a small but moving memorial to the 22,000 Poles slaughtered in 1940 by Russians, who tried to blame it on the Germans.

"Tragedy is a word we know very, very well," Renata told me. "We must remember the black fate of history."

Following a tour of the main cathedral, we just made it back to her car before being hit by a ferocious thunderstorm, complete with hail. Back at my hotel, we sat down for coffee with Andrzej Musinski, one of its managers.

The conversation turned to Poland 15 years after communism. Even in this industrial city of about 650,000, unemployment is a problem, they said, and the nation seems to be foundering trying to find its way as a democracy.

"We have so many voices now where we had none," Musinski said. "Everyone wants to rule, and consequently no one rules."

The Poles look to the United States as a role model, said Renata, and Musinski quickly added, "We are amazed at how well your country works."

I didn't know how to accept the compliment. I sputtered about special interests, party politics. They just looked at me as if I were telling them about having seen heaven. Suddenly I realized how important America still is to people who have hardly known freedom for one generation.

Musinski left us and I arranged to meet Renata later for dinner before packing and returning to the train station. She mentioned she had taken a phone call from her daughter, recently graduated from college with a degree in vocal music. The daughter was to sing that night at a recital.

I told Renata she should go, that I could take a cab to the train station, but she politely refused, saying it was her assignment to be with me until my train left.

When I came down later with my bags and we walked to her car, Renata said that her husband had called her to say that the storm had caused structural damage, killed three people and had flooded the direct route back to the train station.

Even taking a detour, we got to the station in plenty of time but as I entered I saw on the board that lists departure times and platforms that a train that had been scheduled to leave at 5:37 (about the time of the thunderstorm) had not left yet. Nor had several others due to leave after that.

Consequently, my train to Berlin was not yet listed on the board.

Renata went to the international departures window, where she learned that the storm had caused damage between Wroclaw and that part of Poland through which my train was coming.

"No one knows when it will arrive," Renata told me.

Because of the uncertainty of my actual departure time, we realized I had to wait in the station. My guidebook says it has a waiting hall nearly 650 feet long. However, it had only a dozen or so plastic shell chairs to serve all waiting passengers, and those chairs were occupied by homeless people trying to sleep in them. Even one of the telephone booths was filled by a homeless person.

The few stair steps to the now-closed stores in the station were filled with people whose trains had not left in the past six hours.

So Renata and I stood in the dingy terminal chatting and glancing this way and that. Some trains did pass through the station, and there were even a few false alarms for my train.

Renata went to the information window again but could learn nothing. So she moved to the ticketing window, to see how else I might get to Berlin.

The clerk studied computers and printed schedules, but the best he could come up with involved two overnight changes of train - with no guarantee this option would depart any sooner than my original sleeper-compartment train.

The hours dragged on, and the only unusual activity was the appearance of two skinheads - oddly, one of them was dressed in a nice polo shirt and clean slacks - who would repeatedly stroll past the homeless people, poking them with an umbrella. Though I saw police in three different uniforms, the skinheads were careful enough to agitate only when the police were not in view.

I told Renata to go home, that I could read the departure board and she could get a night's sleep, but she refused. She most have thought that because I spoke no Polish, I could not be trusted to understand the rapid arrival and departure announcements.

And so Renata was still with me when my "overnight" train pulled in at 6 a.m. She hurried me to the correct car, explained to the conductor that I spoke no Polish, gave him my ticket and passport. As he assumed jurisdiction over me, Renata shook my hand and, before heading down the platform, she warmly asked me to hurry back.

Until I do, I will savor the memory of my guardian angel, and of the admiration some people have for my country. Life, indeed, is great.

- Robert N. Jenkins can be reached at 727 893-8496 or jenkins@sptimes.com

[Last modified December 23, 2005, 09:59:07]