BORNE SULINOWO, Poland — Set in thick forest, surrounded by pristine lakes and free of violent crime, the northwestern Polish town of Borne Sulinowo has an undeniable bucolic charm — save for the ghosts on every eerily quiet street of Nazi soldiers and then Soviets who built it.
Ruled for the last 30 years by Poland, the town was controlled by and was part of Germany before World War II; it was taken over by the Red Army in 1945; and occupied by the Muscovite forces until 1992. For a while, he embraced his dark side, eager to lure visitors and money into a previously off-limits, abandoned area so secret it wasn’t mapped.
Military reenactors, including enthusiasts from Germany and Russia, visited each year for a parade, dressed in Soviet and Nazi uniforms, the public display of which is prohibited in Germany.
A Polish businessman opened the Hotel Russia, decorating it with photos of himself and a friend dressed in Russian military uniforms and holding banners decorated with images of Lenin.
Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine put a stop to all that.
“Everything changed very quickly,” said Monika Konieczna-Pilszek, manager of the Hotel Russia. Online reviews, she said, went from “commenting on our food to talking about burning the place down.”
“Instead of attracting people, it was repelling them,” he said. The inn is now called Borne Sulinowo Guesthouse. A large Soviet banner in the hallway next to his restaurant has been turned so that Lenin is no longer visible.
Unlike many Poles, the residents of Borne Sulinowo often harbor little personal animosity towards Russians. They are shocked by the bloodshed in Ukraine, but blame it on the President of Russia, Vladimir V. Putin. During the Soviet era, the town, home to more than 10,000 soldiers, was a world unto itself, wiped off the maps and off-limits to Poles without special passes, though many slipped in to buy food and vodka.
When the town was part of Germany, Hitler visited, arriving by train in 1938 to inspect what was then a secret military training camp, set up in the woods so that Nazi commanders could sneakily practice blitzkrieg tactics that, only a a year later, they would plunge Poland and then the rest of Europe into World War II.
They left behind a ghost town of empty barracks, silent firing ranges, and fields littered with tank tracks.
After a year under the control of the Polish Army, Borne Sulinowo reappeared on the maps in 1993 as just another town, inhabited by some pioneers such as Dariusz Czerniawski, a former teacher who moved to Borne Sulinowo shortly after the last Russians left. . “He was so calm that he wanted to scream,” he recalled. “The silence and emptiness were terrifying.”
Over time, more Poles arrived, attracted by cheap housing and the chance to start over. The town today has nearly 5,000 residents year-round and many more people during the summer. He still feels empty and isolated.
The main street, Adolf Hitler Strasse during the Nazi period and Stalin Street after 1945, is now Independence Street.
Lined with Soviet apartment buildings interspersed with stout villas left behind by the Germans, it has a few shops, a shuttered pizzeria and Cafe Sasha, run by a Russian-speaking man from the Ukraine. Czerniawski today operates the museum and has spent a lot of time thinking about how to deal with the past.
“Maybe it would be easier to demolish the whole town,” he said. “But what would that give us—just a big empty space with no memory of anything?”
He believes that Borne Sulinowo needs to survive as a “singular site built by the two most brutal totalitarian systems of the last century”, and as a reminder of where those systems lead. “Generally to war,” he said.
By: ANDREW HIGGINS
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6718051, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-05-17 22:40:08
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