The Real Gdansk

The true story behind "Gdansk: I Came to Disappear but the Italians Objected." In the fiction, a laid-off American named Katie flees to the Baltic to be no one for a while, and a loud club volleyball team from Naples refuses to let her. Here's the real Gdansk underneath the story, plus the genuinely ridiculous reason a tale about a Polish shipyard city started two continents away, in a hotel lobby in Orlando.

Where This One Actually Started

Not in Poland. At a work conference in Orlando, in a Disney-adjacent hotel that had been double-booked with a youth volleyball tournament, so the lobby was wall-to-wall athletes in matching warm-ups. I joked to a colleague, a former college volleyball player, that she should keep her options open, because somebody in that building was going to need a ringer. And then, standing in the most relentlessly cheerful place on earth, I found myself thinking about the exact opposite of it: somewhere gray and weather-beaten and real, a city that has survived things Orlando will never have to imagine. I love those places. Gdansk is the one that surfaced. The volleyball joke and the Baltic quietly fused somewhere over the Atlantic, and the story grew out of the collision.

So before any of the real travelogue below, the honest confession: the fiction's entire DNA is a bad pun in a Florida hotel. Travel writing is strange that way, the story is set 5,000 miles from where the idea for it was born.

Here's the real city.

A City of Beginnings and Endings

Gdansk keeps a kind of cosmic ledger. This is where the Second World War began, Hitler ordered the attack on the Westerplatte peninsula on September 1, 1939, and the shells that fell on this port opened the deadliest chapter in human history. The occupation that followed was brutal, and by 1945 the city had been bombed nearly flat, much like Warsaw. There is a monument at St. Mary's to the 2,779 Polish priests the Nazis murdered, and it does not let you look away from it.

And then, improbably, this is also where one of the century's great endings started, the end of communism in Eastern Europe. It began with an electrician. Lech Wałęsa, a shipyard worker here, pushed for independent trade unions, and the Solidarity movement he set in motion so frightened the Soviets that they declared martial law and threw him into an internment camp for eighteen months. It didn't take. With a Polish pope and an American president cheering from the wings, the shipyard won. The city's airport is named after Wałęsa now, which still feels like not quite enough.

I'll admit the personal reason the ledger landed so hard on me: Gdansk was the final trip of the two years I spent living in Europe. I drove to that same gritty little budget-airline airport one last time thinking about beginnings and endings, the war's, communism's, and my own small one. A city that is literally built on that theme is not a bad place to end a tour. It turned out to be a very good place to set a story about a woman at the end of several things, trying to find the beginning of something else.

The Solidarity Centre (Where the Loud One Had the Best Idea)

The European Solidarity Centre is the city's essential stop, and it is a brilliant, strange building, clad in weathered steel the color of a ship's hull left out in the salt air, which is exactly the point. Inside, it walks you from the Nazi occupation through Soviet rule, martial law, and the shipyard strike, with the original list of the strikers' twenty-one demands displayed like scripture. In the story, Katie comes here alone hoping for a good cry and gets handed perspective instead, which is somehow worse. There are some chilling exhibits, like a crucifix with a bullet hole in it, and a jail cell you can pose in.

Standing in front of Wałęsa's story, I kept thinking: every group has that guy. The loudest one, the one who won't let it go, the one everyone quietly wishes would sit down. And every now and then, maybe just once, the loudest one in the room turns out to have had the best idea all along. Keep that in mind when you meet the Italians in the story. And in your life.

The Old Town, the Water, and the Wheel

Below, the old town is the reward for all that heavy history, lovingly refurbished, walkable, lined with the amber shops Gdansk is famous for. The Neptune Fountain anchors it, and I'll issue the same challenge I did in my old blog: find a better shot of the sea god anywhere in Europe. You can't. Along the Motława waterfront, cafés and crowded restaurants run right up to the water, and the Polish beer, genuinely, wildly underrated, is good and cheap. Really good. A pint ran me under two euros.

Looming over it all is the AmberSky wheel. I am afraid of heights and ride these things anyway, purely to feel something, usually after the aforementioned liquid courage. (My favorite wheel is still Vienna's, but I'll grant this one a spectacular view.) It turns up in the story too, because a Ferris wheel is where you take people when you are trying, and failing, not to care about them. In the story the wheel turns in daylight, to fit the team’s afternoon off; the shot here is the one I actually rode, the same wheel after dark, over the black water.

Reagan Park

In Park Prezydenta Ronalda Reagana stand two bronze figures mid-stride: Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II, the foreign president and the native son the city credits with helping topple the regime. Most Americans have half-forgotten that this ever happened. The people here have not forgotten a second of it, which is maybe the truest thing I can tell you about Gdansk. It remembers everything, the victories and the losses, and it keeps walking anyway.

The Pensive Christ (the Hinge of the Whole Story)

Inside St. Mary’s, off to one side, sits a small stone Christ, crown of thorns, shoulders hunched, head dropped into one hand in the exact posture of someone who has had a very long year. The pose has a name in this part of the world: the Pensive Christ, Chrystus Frasobliwy in Polish, Christ sitting down to think, alone, before the worst day of his life. I photographed him without knowing I was photographing the center of a story. In the fiction, Katie finds this figure and recognizes her own posture in it, the quiet hinge the whole thing turns on. She came to Gdansk to be no one, and instead ends up eye to eye with a piece of stone doing precisely what she has been doing, and chooses to sit with it anyway.

Why a Grief Story Belongs Here

I didn't set a story about a woman at the end of her rope in a sunny, easy city, because a sunny, easy city would have had nothing to say back to her. Gdansk does. It's a place that was ended, twice, violently, and rebuilt itself into something vibrant and young and absurdly cheerful, with a wheel and a Hard Rock Café a short walk from monuments to the murdered. That's the exact arc Katie needs and can't see yet: that an ending and a beginning can be the same cobblestone.

The loud Italians are the city, really, grief wearing a warm-up jacket, insisting you come to dinner, pouring you the wine first. The last night of my own trip, I heard a woman playing solo violin by the entrance to the old town, something sad and triumphant at the same time, and that single sound is the whole of Poland to me. Katie answers to a new name by the end of her story. Gdansk has answered to several, and survived all of them.