I first read James A. Michener’s ‘Poland’ under lockdown in 2020, having just returned to Poland from Japan. Learning a country through a book while that country sits outside your window, inaccessible, prepared for me what was outside and lit a fire in me to get to know it on the same level as the author.
The book speaks of Poland’s occupation, its partition, it erasure from the map, and speaks of a national character based on endurance, always against the odds. It’s a great first step for anybody planning to visit Poland.
Michener’s method: he simply tells the story of one patch of earth across centuries, letting the same fields absorb Teutonic knights, Swedish invaders, Napoleonic conscripts, Nazi occupiers, and Soviet liberators in turn. Poland requires the reader know how to read its landscape. Let Michener be your teacher. And interestingly, it’s quite possible that Michener’s book is set in the area near the Holy Cross Mountains. The central/fictional village of Bukowo is broadly between Krakow and Warsaw on the river as it turns north. That all checks out.
A River Runs Through it- The Vistula
The Vistula River is the spine of Poland, geographically and emotionally-every invading army has crossed it or been broken against it. Mitchener’s book puts the focus on 3 different ways of being Polish; the Lubonski magnates, the petty noble Lubonski relatives and the peasant Buk family. Michener’s characters endure not through obvious heroism but through attachment – to a field, a church, a family name, a language spoken quietly when forbidden outdoors.
Mitchener’s book can help define a journey to Poland but what the book can’t give you is a direct experience of how it feels here. The wind off the Łysogóry on an October morning, the smell of beech leaves and woodsmoke, the particular light in the Nida valley at dusk, the bread in a village guesthouse, the conversation with a guide who knows which forest path was used by partisans in 1943 and which by pilgrims in 1243. The book prepares the vessel. The land fills it.
The best journey to any place begins with the slow work of understanding, reading, imagining, placing yourself in the long story of a landscape before you set foot in it. Pack the book. Read it before you travel. When you arrive in Poland, look up from the page and out the window- the country Michener imagined will be right there, in the real.
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