Coincidences again. You read the story of Lech Walesa, no longer President of Poland, going back to the Gdansk (formerly Danzig) shipyards to reclaim his job as electrician. Or does he really want it? Or was he making a point that there was then no provision for a pension for ex Presidents? Or was it all just a sentimental journey?
The coincidence is that in helping to turn out a cupboard (someone else's) a pile of cuttings appear, among which is a page from the Listener dated April 1945. On March 30th it had been announced that Danzig, where the first shots in World War Two were fired on the Free City, as it then was, by a visiting German `training warship', had now been occupied by the Russians on their sweep westwards. There were nearly a million people in an area which, pre war, had at most four hundred thousand. Now swelled by refugees from East Prussia and Pomerania, who hoped to get away by sea.
Alexander Werth, one of the most notable of war correspondents recalled a visit to Danzig and the nearby seaside resort of Zeppet a few years before the war. The city itself, he says, was thronged by thousands of brown shirts "waving flags, shouting defiance to the whole world and singing the Herzt Wessel song. At Zeppet, hundreds of self satisfied Germans sat on the sea front, in front of the casino, drinking beer and listening to a brass band playing selections from Wagner's The Ring.
"Now this same casino is being shelled by German Warships, for no very useful purpose. In a dressmaker's shop the Russians, to amuse themselves, arranged the dummies with their arms raised in a gesture of surrender. The Kaiser's Eagle Restaurant there still displays a recent menu, consisting of `Bread and piquant fish paste, potatoes, a piece of Tilsit cheese and beer'."
Danzig was one of the priceless architectural gems of the Baltic, or indeed of Europe. Its destruction was largely through Russian artillery, and fire. The Poles, into whose territory it fell again after the war, very sensibly and commendably restored the whole of the old city centre.
An Irishman was High Commissioner for Danzig under the League of Nations for three years in the Thirties: Sean Lester, from our own Department of External Affairs, as it then was. A Carrickfergus man.