away from my PC most of the time, and when I was at home I was either too preoccupied or too tired to bring this journal up to date. While I was in Poland I made handwritten notes on my tour but I can’t be bothered now to transcribe my impressions of Warsaw, Lodz and Cracow, or of my encounters with Polish academics and their students. These topics seem of trivial interest in the light of what happened at the very end of my visit, and subsequently back in England, which is what I’m going to recall now. Of the tour, it’s enough to say that my talks were well received and I coped with my hearing problem reasonably well - it was more difficult in informal social situations like restaurants and receptions than at the lectures and seminars. Most of the Poles I met spoke good English, though sometimes with disconcerting accents, like Estuary or Brooklyn, depending on where or from whom they had learned it. I ate a lot of meat and game and sausage and drank too much wine and beer and vodka. The Poles and the British Council between them worked me hard and I was beginning to tire by the time I got to Cracow.
The city is as beautiful as everybody says, but I didn’t have much time to appreciate it, being kept busy at the Jagellonian University and the British Council Centre. I did manage to see the inside of St Mary’s Church, with its astonishing carved and painted high altar, and the outside of the Cloth Hall, and Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine in the Czartoryski Museum, and a few other famous sights, but I had reserved my one free afternoon for the visit to Auschwitz. That was my first mistake, because in January the site closes at three, a fact I discovered belatedly in my guidebook on the way there. Nobody in Cracow pointed this out to me when I said I was going to Auschwitz on my last afternoon. Or more likely somebody did tell me and I pretended I had heard them but I didn’t. I was left very much to myself for this excursion. There were plenty of volunteers to show me the sights of Cracow, but nobody offered to accompany me to Auschwitz. Not surprising, I suppose: if you’ve been there once you probably wouldn’t want to go again. But I wondered how many of the Poles I met had in fact visited it themselves. When I told them I was going they nodded politely and changed the subject. I got the impression that it was a bit of an embarrassment to them, living in this lovely old civilised city so close to a place whose name is a metonym for genocide. It has been declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, but it’s not one that Poland wants to claim as part of its heritage, even though a lot of Poles died there.
I gave a lecture at the University at ten in the morning that Friday, followed by coffee with some of the faculty, and didn’t get back to my hotel till 11.45. I had been advised by Simon Greensmith to hire a taxi to take me to Auschwitz and bring me back because the public transport is slow and inconvenient, and I had ordered it at the hotel reception desk for 12.15, giving myself time to have a sandwich in the bar. I had acquired a false idea of how near Auschwitz was to Cracow - that was my second mistake. When I asked the young woman at Reception how far it was I thought she said ‘thirty minutes’, but as the journey dragged on and on I decided I must have misheard - perhaps she had said ‘thirty kilometres’. After a few miles of motorway towards the airport, the road to Oswieçem (the Polish name of the town of Auschwitz) became a congested single carriageway. There had been a fall of snow in the night, and the fields and trees were virgin white, but the road was slushy, impeding progress. My taxi was an old black Fiat with a noisy diesel engine and worn-out shock-absorbers. The thick-set, leather-jacketed driver spoke little English and seemed disinclined to improve it by practice. ‘How much longer?’ I kept asking, and he would shrug and grunt and lift his hands from the wheel in a gesture signifying, ‘It depends on the traffic.’ Near Oswieçem we were held up for