224 HANDEL
works at Pulawy. Warsaw, destroyed almost completely in 1944, has been resur-
rected as a city of glass and concrete. Kazimierz Dolny, in contrast, with its
magnificent Renaissance granaries, or Wloclawek, with its sleepy old houses on
the waterfront, has changed little since Sebastian Klonowic sailed past in 1595,
but Danzig has disappeared for ever. As Gdansk, it is an entirely new and Polish
city. In the 152 years of Prussian rule, between 1793 and 1945, it lost all active
memory of its erstwhile Polish connections. In the nineteenth century, its German
citizens were recruited to German Nationalism. In the 1930s, their wholesale con-
version to Nazism played an important part in the pre-war crisis. In 1945-6, those
of them that had not fled already were deported to West Germany to make way
for Polish immigrants from the USSR. As a result, the city's population is purely
Polish for the first time in history. A visitor from Warsaw is no longer obliged to
speak in Latin to make himself understood. The ruins of wartime have been
cleared away. The historical monuments have been rebuilt, and renamed. The old
Ordensmuehle constructed by the Teutonic Knights in 1350 is now just the 'Great
Mill'; the Protestant Marienkircbe with its Memling Triptych, is now the
Catholic Holy Trinity Church; the former municipal Artushof, with its famous
ribbed vaulting dating from 1546, is now the 'Dwor Artusa'; the inimitable
Krantor overlooking the Mottlau, is now the 'Zuraw' and overlooks the
Motlawa. The Prussian memorial to the Leibhusaren Regiments No. 1 is nowhere
to be found at all. In view of the horrors of the Second World War and of the Nazi
Occupation, it is understandable that the present-day citizen of Gdansk takes
very little interest in his city's German past. Indeed, the authorities go to great
lengths to conceal it. They would find it very hard to comprehend the time when
German Danzigers were loyal Polish subjects; and for the time being, they simply
do not wish to know. The art of rafting has also disappeared. For this, the mod-
ern traveller must go to Czorstyn on the Dunajec, 600 miles from the sea, where
mountaineers in traditional costume punt groups of expectant tourists through
the rapids of the Pieniny Gorge. There, the flisak or 'raftsman', who steers their
craft through the foaming torrent, wears a hat trimmed with sixteen pairs of sea-
shells. He is fond of telling his passengers that each pair of shells represents one
of the sixteen journeys to the sea which in time gone by was demanded from every
boy before he was allowed to stay at home and find himself a wife. It is a good
story; but like so much else in the history of the Vistula, must be counted little
more than a watery legend.