How neatly

(Summer notes)

It was late afternoon and an extremely hot day had just become bearable, or even pleasant. I parked my Peugeot outside the village church.

It fell over before I managed to reach the low entrance gate. I turned back, picked it up and leaned it against the stone wall, anxiously checking for possible scratches or dents - I hate seeing my favourite bike hurt. But it was fine.

The church was open. It was just being cleaned by two middle-aged women who kindly let me take a quick look inside. The interior must have been renovated not long before - it looked modest and charming. It had no ambition to be coherent, but was frank about it. There were some simple, countryside Gothic, bits of Baroque and something else that I couldn't quite place (my fault, not the detail's). Eclectic, but stylish - I liked it.

I stopped by a Roman soldier. I caught him cutting his coat in two and giving one half to a beggar - and I was moved. "How amazing!", I thought. Hundreds of years after it had happened, his compassion and generosity still made ripples - in this village and in thousands of other places across the globe. "How amazing!", I thought again.

When I left the cool of the temple, I walked around it. There were a few traces of an old graveyard there and I tried to study some of the Schwabacher headstone inscriptions, but soon I gave up. It was too painful to see all those forgotten histories and neglected souls.

Across the quiet road, in the shade of a big lime tree there were a few people sitting on a bench. Behind them was a low house that I imagined to have been an inn before the war. I approached them and said I'd like to talk to the oldest person in the village. They looked at the lady sitting next to the bench on a separate chair. She was the oldest one, I was told; or to be precise - the oldest one that could still talk sense, they explained.

Before long I learnt a lot about the woman and her old home settlement - the others, or their parents, came from the same place, it turned out - near Lwów; about how a third of their neighbours had been slaughtered by Ukrainian nationalists(a few of whom ended up not too far from there as a result of Akcja Wisła); about how another third had been shot dead by the Germans as a pay-off for helping some AK partisans. (There was shooting all around, when a young Wehrmacht soldier ran into the house. He aimed his gun at a woman with a baby in her arms and a young girl - who was telling me this - clinging to her side.

The gun was aimed at them, but at the same time the guy holding it noticed a cross on the wall behind them. His eyes went from them to the cross and backwards. Finally, his expression changed and the barrel of the gun instead of death showed them where they were to hide, which they did. The German turned round to check if none of his mates or officers had noticed what he did and if this wasn't going to be a twisted qui pro quo - his life for adding a few minutes to theirs. Then, he put a few rounds into the wall and ran out). But still, what a great place it was! One man had in his wallet a few pictures taken during his last visit and he showed them to me.

"How about your first impressions here?", I brought the conversation back to Lower Silesia. "We stayed a few weeks in Wrocław first. We were put in a place opposite a block of flats full of German people, it's still there. I remember doing my homework and hearing German women scream when they were being raped by Soviet soldiers", said the old woman. Another, slightly younger one confirmed that with a nod.

We talked a bit more and they gave me names of people to talk to if I wanted to know more, which did and I planned to come back next day; or next summer. I said good-by to them.

"How neatly", it struck me when I left behind the last farm houses and looked at the setting sun, in front of which stood the calm, low mountain that lent its name to the whole understatedly beautiful land that had been so conscientiously cared for by the successive peoples - until they wrecked it all. "How neatly", I mused amid golden corn fields soon to be harvested by the sons of the girls who'd been distracted from their homework by the women being raped by the soldiers whose leaders had expelled the girls' parents from their homes and gave them the farms and fields of the violated women's fathers who had - just before putting that vicious circle in motion - managed to plant the long rows of apple trees flanking the serene road down which I was happily cycling now on to the next village, to hear more stories. "How neatly", I thought, "we make the world go round."