A Poland diary

A trumpet blast from a tower at the corner of Market Square begins powerfully and ends abruptly. They still commemorate the moment when a dutiful watchman warned the city in the 13th century that the Tartars were invading Cracow. The abrupt end came when a Tartar arrow slit the watchman's throat. The story has a happy ending, which presumably is why they remember it. The citizens rallied and repelled the Tartars on that occasion, but of course the Tartar invasion of Poland has many more chapters. There are still some 10,000 Muslim Tartars in Poland.

The square is dominated by the Church of the Virgin Mary, unprepossessing outside but resplendent inside. On Sunday they celebrated the 25th anniversary of the papacy of Karol Wojtyla, their most famous priest and now Pope John Paul II. Faith may have disappeared from the rest of Europe, but Poland remains a deeply religious country. Even Stalin did not dare eliminate the Church from Polish lives. He remarked that putting Poles under communist atheism would be like placing a saddle around a cow. The splendour of the Church of the Virgin Mary was doubly dazzling in the light of a live service. Every generation contributed its genius to a social monument and museum of faith. The two imposing towers at the entrance begin symmetrically but end differently; one is higher. The story goes that they were built by two brothers, competing for the glory of God. When the elder completed the north tower, he killed his younger sibling to prevent the south tower from rising beyond his structure. The knife he used is preserved in the church.

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Poles take their faith seriously, but never so seriously as to deny themselves a joke. A rabbi was invited by a cardinal to see the glories of his church. Each wall, each corner, each square inch of space was packed with treasures: a feast of jewellery, paintings, tapestry, chandeliers and rising altars in gold. The rabbi looked around at the packed church and asked the cardinal: "Where is the space for God in this church?"

The only skyscrapers in Cracow are church steeples, which is a good thing. Plaster peels off the walls of innumerable homes, which is not. The city is an extraordinary mix of castles, cathedrals, and compounds that look like a backdrop from a Fifties' neo-realist Italian movie. All this will change in five years, when the economic and social laws of the European Union take over the city. This has been Poland's consuming mission ever since its liberation from the Soviet empire at the turn of the Nineties, and it will realise its dream on 1 May next year. Not every Pole was keen to join the Union, with its laissez faire attitudes. One of the slogans of the nay-sayers was: "Vote for the European Union! It will become much easier for your son to find a husband!"

But the need to join NATO and then EU was understandable; Poland wanted iron-clad guarantees for its independence from Moscow. Curiously, after having achieved this, Poland now wants guarantees of independence from the European Union. Well, maybe not that curiously. Germany and France have partitioned Poland as eagerly as Moscow has swallowed it. The new mantra therefore is the United States of America. This craving for a special relationship has persuaded the Polish government, against the will of the majority of its own people, to send 2,000 soldiers to guard Iraq on behalf of Washington.

Ease overlaps with unease in this decision. Having been a victim of occupation, Poland erases the word from public discourse; its troops are a "stabilisation" force. There is great eagerness on the part of officials to underline the difference, and suggest that their contingent is under local command for all practical purposes. This then is why Polish soldiers did not intervene in a firefight of the kind on Friday that left three American soldiers dead. On the television screen a Polish officer in Iraq says that he has nothing to say to the media. At least in this respect, they are different from the Americans. In Warsaw, officials stress that a large number of NGOs have gone with the soldiers, and that they are busy opening schools for Iraqi children.

This is yet another baffling aspect of the American intervention. The Iraqis never had any shortage of schools under the Baathists or ever since the second Abbasid emperor established Baghdad more than thirteen hundred years ago. Every occupation needs to justify its presence by promising 'civilisation'. It is undeniable, however, that the Poles are more sensitive to local sentiment than their superpower ally. There have been no casualties so far in their contingent. But then again, they have been posted in the Shia regions of the east and the south, and the real war may not have even begun there.

Cracow University was built in the 14th century and thank God they have not tried to improve it. The curse of modernisation was one of the principal socialist temptations, and Cracow side-stepped it. All that it needed was heated rooms, and that is a welcome change. Professors no longer have to be celibate, or sit silently in square cells either reading or hearing the Bible as their principal means of education and entertainment. I am in Poland for a series of lectures and everywhere the faculty is open, discursive and enlivened by the necessary touch of the eccentric professor. Learning is a serious business, but not a grim one. The students are attentive, thoughtful and involved. I was surprised at the turnouts for the lectures, since the subject -- Islam and the West -- was not especially glamorous. True, the presence of their soldiers in Iraq must have played its part in provoking interest, but their eyes were genuinely in search of an alternative view. They responded positively when I pointed out the first fallacy: that Islam was a faith while the West was a geography, and then suggested that this is where the thesis of civilisations might have misled them. One very real problem is that the dialogue has got trapped in words that mean totally different things in different environments. The word 'fundamentalist' for instance. A believer is defined by the fact that he believes in the fundamentals of his faith, so fundamentalism is not an accusation but a compliment. Is the Pope a fundamentalist, then, for being the guardian of the faith? A lecture never hopes to answer all questions, but if it can open the door to some questions about previously held convictions, then the effort is worthwhile.

The week had aged, and the season changed. The sky had absorbed the grey ink of oncoming winter, and a cold wind searched the tolerance levels of the body. A group of children laughed as they raced out of the stark, sprawling complex of prison camps, a steaming cup of coffee in their hands to challenge the cold. Children have their own ways of dealing with shock. They are less sentimental about evil than we think. They were schoolchildren from Israel, and this visit to Poland was part of their transition, a defining moment in their individual and collective history; and a reminder that they were fortunate not to have lived in the times of their grandparents. We were at the Nazi concentration camps in Auschwitz.

Knowledge can never prepare you for reality. I must have read many many thousands of words about these camps, and all of them simply evaporated in the face of what I saw. What I saw was only shards of preserved evil; the weight of the full truth leaves you crushed and helpless. The Jews were the prime target of the racist Nazis, but not the only one. The poet has not been found who can describe such barbarism. Instead of words an image appeared in my mind from some distant closet of memory, a photograph of the first encounter between a group of prisoners and the first soldiers to reach Auschwitz as the Nazis fell back on the eastern front. There was absolute incredulity on the face of the liberator. There was absolute immobility on the face of the prisoner, a complete indifference to the freedom they had dared not contemplate a minute before and could not yet comprehend as real. Those prisoners had died too often in the concentration camps for them to believe anymore in life. There were times that afternoon, as I walked through the gas chambers, and halls of photographs of gypsy children, and mute hills of shoes and suitcases which the condemned had brought, when I felt violently ill. But you cannot even throw up when there is only emptiness inside. Anger filled the vacuum. Nothing made me angrier than the sheer banality of Nazi evil. The sign that welcomed prisoners to Auschwitz said: 'Work makes you free'. It was a joke upon the slaves, most of whom would prefer death before long. The smirk on the faces of Nazis sitting at committee meetings to count the numbers they had killed was beyond guilt. They were in a zone outside humanity and outside morality. But you could sense an undeclared sense of guilt among those who had heard the screams of their being picked up from the city ghettos and turned away to protect themselves with silence. It is always thus when demons embark on genocide.

What were the children saying as they skipped or raced back to their school bus, protecting themselves from their own feelings by a burst of energy? That life goes on? Sometimes it seems that only death goes on, whether in a Palestinian camp or a restaurant in Haifa. There are days when life seems too long.

MJ Akbar is Chief Editor of the Asian Age.