All Saints Day and More

On Friday evening we had two ladies come over to dinner. They are part of the Fulbright program as well. Both are from the Sacramento area. One is living here in Gdansk, teaching English at a different university than Myles, and the other is teaching English at a University several hours south of us. We had a lovely evening chatting about our different experiences. Hopefully, we will see Jennifer (the one who lives here in Gdansk) a little more often. We will see Leanne (the other one who came) and quite a few other Fulbrighters in Warsaw in December.

Also on Friday, the US Navy accidently fired a weapon from a ship into the town of Gdynia. That is very close to us! Gdansk is part of a "Tri-city" which includes Gdansk, Gdynia and Sopot. We have not been up to Gdynia yet, and I'm sure glad we were not up there on Friday! Fortunately there were no injuries and no damage. And from what I understand it was determined to be a complete accident. So hopefully there are no hard feelings!

Yesterday, Ben went over to a friend's house. This is a kid who attends the British International School. He is Dutch and lives quite a little ways from us. You have to take a tram to downtown, which takes about 15 minutes. Then you have to get on a bus for about 40 minutes. Then you have to walk about a mile to his house. We met Ben's friend downtown. While we were waiting for him, we came across a statue of children getting ready to take a train trip. It is dedicated to those Jewish children during WWII who were sent to England to have a chance to live. They were put on trains without their parents so that they could escape. Taking these children to England was called "Kindertransports." I cannot even imagine! And yes, that's a KFC behind the statue!

So Ben met Nick downtown and Myles went with them to see how to get to this family's house. I had already met Nick's mom, and Myles got to meet her and his dad and visit with them for a while. Then Myles came back home. Since yesterday was Halloween, Ben and Nick decided to watch scary movies all night long. Meanwhile, here at our house, the other three had to answer Polish questions to get their Halloween candy! They didn't mind missing out on trick or treating too much. No one does that here. Today is All Saint's Day and it is a very big deal in Poland. No one bothers with Halloween--All Saint's is what it is all about.

We went to Mass this morning at our church that we have been going to (St. Stanislaus) while we are living here. We found out some history of this church today. It was built around 1924 and was part of the free city of Danzig (the German name for Gdansk--so same city/different name). It's a little fuzzy here, but we do know that the parish priest, Bronislaw Komorowski, was arrested by the Nazis in the early morning hours of September 2, 1939, the day after WWII started right here in Gdansk. With other Polish priests, he was beaten and taken to a concentration camp nearby called Stutthof. It was the first concentration camp established and the last one to be shut down. Many citizens of Danzig/Gdansk were arrested on the streets and taken to Stutthof. We have not been to this concentration camp yet, but it is on our list of things to do. Eventually, this priest and many others were murdered by the Nazis. He was shot to death on Good Friday of 1940.

There is a cemetery that is less than two blocks from our house. This cemetery is for those who were murdered by the Nazis from 1939-1945. It is a small cemetery but amazing to walk through. We found the grave of this particular priest.


Everyone brings lanterns to the cemetery on All Saint's Day and lights them by their loved ones' graves. We went in the afternoon and took our lantern (they have oodles of them for sale at the grocery stores). We walked around and saw several memorials. One is in honor of the 52 postal workers who were the first to resist the German occupation on September 1, 1939. They holed themselves up in the post office and fought off the thousands of German soldiers for seven days. Finally, they ran out of ammunition and had to surrender to the Germans. Then they were immediately "tried," convicted and shot on the spot. They are considered Polish heroes.

We found a grave that did not already have a lantern and we adopted that man as our family for this day. His name is Jerzy Simianow and he died on Sept. 13, 1939.


So we lit the lantern and prayed that he rests in peace. The vast majority of graves had at least one lantern. Graves like the parish priest, and the memorials had huge numbers of lanterns around them. There were lots of people walking around the cemetery in the afternoon. We went on home and then when it got dark we went back. It was an inexplicable sight. There were lit lanterns everywhere. It kind of looked like Christmas decorations. There were many, many people there in the evening. I took a couple of pictures, but they did not turn out great. Also, it is not possible for a picture to do the scene justice. We walked back to where we left our lantern. It still was the only one there. The thing that is unique about this cemetery is that every single person buried there was murdered between 1939 and 1945 by the Nazis.

Tomorrow is a school day. Everyone is excited to see their new friends again!