In the hierarchy of the overnight train from Prague to Krakow, only the privileged can be sure of sleep – but there's enough cultural diversity in this small space to keep you occupied, writes RUADHÁN MacCORMAIC
‘FRSEEEEEEEEFRONNNNG train somewhere whistling the strength those engines have in them like big giants and the water rolling all over and out of them all sides like the end of Loves old sweeeetsonnnng,” said Molly Bloom, in one of the most celebrated attempts to pin down the sound of a moving train.
Frseeeeeeeefronnnng train somewhere whistling what the hell am I doing here it’s 4am I can’t sleep remind me again why I didn’t just flyyyy, Molly might have thought, had she found herself in an eight-seat cabin on the sleeper train from Prague to Krakow on a Sunday night in July 2011.
Overnight trains have their own entrenched class system. The haute bourgeoisie move in the rarefied surroundings of the high-end sleeper carriage, where they can close themselves off from the rest of the passengers in comfortable two-berth ensuite cabins with a complimentary toothbrush. A subtle internal hierarchy – subtle to those on the outside – separates them from those in the four- and six-berths further along the train who have to share with strangers and run the risk of taking a flying suitcase in the head every time someone moves. And then, sitting upright in their fake leather seats behind glass doors at the back of the train, are the masses in cattle-class, consigned to a poor night’s sleep but consoled by the knowledge that they’re at least in the most sociable place on the train.
Two Spanish students on an interrailing trip, Elisabeth Moreta and David Gómez from Vitoria, are sharing my cabin on the train to Krakow, along with a succession of single Czech and Polish passengers who come and go through the night, boarding in one deserted country station and getting off at another. They liked Prague, David says, except the hostel, which turned out to be a strip club. “You had to walk past the girls to get to the hostel part,” he says. “At night we heard the music, and we didn’t need to put on the lights because there were so many red ones coming from the street . . . It was fine, but we were thinking, what are we doing here?” So they left. Next stop: Krakow.
It’s impossible to cross Europe by train without hearing someone rightly marvel at the cultural diversity contained in such a compact space. And yet it becomes more striking every year how a veneer of homogeneity is encroaching farther all the time, from people’s clothes and mannerisms to the pidgin Euro-English that greets you at every turn. In the new shopping centre next to Krakow train station, nearly all the shops are the same ones you’d find in Portlaoise or Portsmouth, and the locally-owned ones are such hilariously brazen imitations of American market leaders you wonder how they get away with it.
The only cafe open in the area at 8am is a Polish chain whose homage to Starbuck’s is so faithful – the menu, the decor, the buckets of sugary coffee – that it’s hard to tell the difference between the two.
Back at Krakow station, after a walk around the medieval old town, I find my first group of Irish interrailers so far — seven college students from Dublin who are starting a three-week journey around central and eastern Europe. This being an Irish encounter, we establish after five minutes that one of the girls’ mother was once my boss and that her father grew up on the same street as me.
The group hasn’t got off to the best start: it has rained constantly since they flew into Krakow and two of the girls have already been robbed, says 19-year-old Claire Doyle. But they don’t seem too perturbed. Catherine Murray, relieved of her purse and passport on a local tram, has been told she can pick up an emergency travel document at the Irish embassy in Budapest, where they’re headed on an overnight train. From there, the group plan to move south to Ljubljana before some of them make their way to the Exit music festival in Novi Sad and the others travel on to Vienna.
The InterRail pass has been a boon to Europe’s rail companies. Created in 1972, on the 50th anniversary of the International Railway Union, it initially offered anyone under 21 unlimited 2nd-class travel in 21 western European countries.
The idea’s success surpassed expectations. It gradually took on rite-of-passage status for young people, and, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, its boundaries pushed eastwards. Today, the pass is available to people of all ages and its zones encompass 30 countries, from the Atlantic to the Caucasus. Some 244,000 Europeans bought one last year.
Elsewhere in Krakow station, Yehuda Huberman is pacing up and down with his rucksack, trying to figure out where to find his train to Lodz, in central Poland. Huberman, a 25-year-old student from Vancouver, is in the country to retrace some of his family’s footsteps. His grandparents are Holocaust survivors who emigrated to north America, and apparently his great-grandparents, who died in the early 1940s, have marked graves in the ghetto cemetery in Lodz.
“It’s been very emotional,” he says of his first visit to Poland. “It makes what happened very real . . . I wouldn’t say it weighed on me – I had a very happy childhood – but it was definitely always there.”
He paid a visit to Auschwitz yesterday. “The scope of it was mindblowing. It was also cleansing in a way – to see it, to be able to move on, to say that you have a life to live.”
Yehuda’s grandmother escaped from the Lodz ghetto with her sister, and they stayed with relatives for a while before being caught and brought to a work camp. There, she met his grandfather. But the two sisters were the only members of their family to survive – their parents and three brothers were all killed.
Krakow’s annual Jewish Culture Festival, a huge celebration of music, literature and cuisine, has just ended; Yehuda says he was glad to have been around for it. He wears the kippah, and says it has elicited reactions from two people on his travels so far. There was one man who made an anti-Semitic slur in passing in a restaurant the other day, but there was also the quiet gesture of an elderly man.
“I was sitting in the central square here in Krakow. An old man came up to me and asked if I was Jewish. I said yes, and he just patted me on the shoulder gently, like that.”
Yehuda finally departs on the train to Lodz; I take the next Warsaw departure. It feels like a luxurious commuter service – a smooth three-hour express in clean, airy carriages where an attendant offers complimentary tea and coffee as we zoom past the small villages and flat green farmland of central Poland.
On arrival, Warsaw itself feels like a building site. With less than a year to go before the European Championships, which Poland and Ukraine are jointly hosting, the station is being renovated, roads are being rebuilt, and the sight of so many cranes in the sky is reminiscent of Dublin about 10 years ago. “Polish crane industry rises from recession,” declared a recent edition of the authoritative Cranes Today magazine.
The Polish capital tends to be underrated by travellers, overshadowed by the postcard beauty of Krakow or the picturesque mountains in the south. The views from Warszawa Centralna station, a vista of grey blocks, and the towering Palace of Culture and Science (a gift from the Soviet Union in the 1950s) admittedly conform to the old cliches, but the modern city is dynamic, progressive and brimming with energy.
The powerful Warsaw Rising Museum, which describes life under Nazi occupation and the unsuccessful Polish rebellion of 1944, is one of the best of its kind. The medieval old town, reduced to rubble by 1945 but lovingly rebuilt, stone by stone, after the war, is itself a monument to Varsovians’ unshakable will.
The Iron Curtain may have been consigned to history and continental European border controls have mostly disappeared, but travel far enough into Poland and eventually, where the European Union goes no further, you reach two sets of armed soldiers separated by the river Bug and a wide patch of virgin forest. It’s a frontier freighted with the echos of history. Cross it and you’re in Belarus, from where you could begin moving eastwards and not encounter any more visa controls until you reached the Pacific port of Vladivostok, more than 7,000km and eight time zones away.
It’s an incomprehensibly huge landmass, as intriguing to outsiders now as it was 200 years ago. Its attraction is so powerful that the sheer banality of stepping on to the “Polonez” train on a wet Tuesday afternoon in Warsaw somehow heightens, rather than dampens, your sense that you’re about to take one of Europe’s great journeys. Nineteen hours later, you’ll be in Moscow.
