Day #34: Poland

 Poland was definitely one of my favorite pilgrimages thus far. I knew it was going to be a difficult pilgrimage from the start. A week before our pilgrimage we were required to attend a talk by one of our professors, Professor Cassady, a native of Scotland, where he spoke about the importance of experiencing the Poland trip. I was in tears just listening to him speak about Poland. He said that if you squeeze the soil of Poland in your hand, the blood of the martyrs flows out between your fingers. He said, "Why Poland? Why should you go to Poland? Because you need to learn the lesson of Poland: the lesson of St. Maximilian Kolbe, St. Faustina, and John Paul II." He spoke about Auschwitz, and of the sign above the gate Work makes man free. "Rubbish! Garbage! Christ makes man free! Freedom is for love ... Execute it. You must decide how you are going to love. [You must face] the great battle to find out the truth about one's self."
I would not say I was excited to go to Poland, but I was drawn there nevertheless. I wanted to go. We left for Poland at 8 pm. We would drive through the night and arrive in Czestochowa around 6 in the morning. There were 3 buses traveling to Poland : I was on bus 3 along with my household sisters and the prethes. They were a good group with whom to travel. Our bus also had Fr. Brad, one of the Franciscan Friars, as one of the passengers, thus labeling it the Glory bus. What is the Glory bus? The bus with the guitar and the Gospel music, LOL. We sang for part of the trip, but we also watched a movie about John Paul II by Universal Pictures, Karol: A Man Who Became Pope, one of my favorite religious movies. It has so many great lines in it, and it definitely put us in the mood for the pilgrimage.

Our Lady of Czestochowa Church, Jasna Gora

Little sleep occurred on the bus, and by the time we had reached Czestochowa,  I was starting to come down with a sore throat. As soon as we arrived, we had to run to make it to the unveiling of the image of Our Lady of Czestochowa at 6 AM. Nothing like running through a snowy Polish morning with a sore throat to wake you up in the morning! The church is called Jasna Gora, which means Holy Hill. The church is surrounded by walls, so you have to go through several archways and gates to get to the actual church - it's like a castle protecting Our Lady within. Each archway was adorned with an image of the Madonna and child. As we walked through the darkness, we could hear a rooster crowing, probably owned by the monks who live there.
We passed through the huge dark doors of the church from the darkness of the wintry night into what seemed like a room of gold. The walls of the chapel nave were burgundy, but they were covered with little religious articles of gold, silver, and other precious stones and metals: mostly rosaries and medallions. The actual chapel of Our Lady of Czestochowa is a small chapel within the church itself, separated by an iron grate through which we could pass but it seated only a few people. The icon was covered by a gold curtain engraved with an image of the Garden of Eden, representing the old Eve, and Mary as the new Eve. We gathered outside the chapel, some of us in folding chairs and some of us kneeling outside the black grating. We waited in prayer for a few moments, then a trumpet blast sounded, accompanied by a drum roll as the curtain was slowly lifted. We knelt there for a few moments, but Mass started right after the unveiling, so we hurried out to get some breakfast at a nearby hostel. It was so wonderful to get some hot food and coffee and wash up - it honestly felt like the March for Life - driving all through the night like that, accompanied with the cold and snow outside.
After breakfast we were divided up to go on brief tours - which basically meant we learned about the history of the image as we walked back to the church again. The icon was painted by St. Luke using the wood of a table Christ had made. The icon was discovered by St. Helen, and enshrined in Constantinople for 500 years. It eventually came to Poland in 1382 when the Polish army was fleeing the Tartars, who had struck it with an arrow. The image was attacked again in 1430 by the Hussites (pre-Reformation reformers) who slashed the Virgin's face with a sword and left it desecrated in a puddle of mud and blood. When the monks pulled the icon from the mud, a miraculous fountain appeared , which was used to clean the painting. The icon was repainted, but the arrow mark and the gashes from the sword would not be painted over. Many other miracles have occurred through Our Lady. There are numerous crutches on one of the walls left by those who have been healed because of her intercession. She is known as the Queen of Poland.
As we made our way back to the church, we got a better look of the city of Czestochowa. There was a park located outside the walls of the monastery, blanketed in snow. Coming closer, we saw a huge statue outside the walls of a kneeling Polish cardinal (I don't remember his name at the moment, but he was the other Cardinal who was put in prison by the Communists. He was cardinal before and during the cardinal-ship of John Paul II. There were also several statues located around the walls of the monastery depicting what I think were the mysteries of the Rosary. These were relatively new but I liked them.

The Glorious Mystery of the Resurrection

The Cardinal

One of the archways leading to the monastery

The chapel to the Sacred Heart of Jesus

A painting of a Polish saint who was also a queen, I think she is buried in the Krakow Cathedral.

Our Lady of Czestochowa, The Black Madonna

Th chapel next to the chapel of the Black Madonna

The actual chapel to the Black Madonna

Inside the church, they were doing some repair work so it was hard to make out the layout of the place. It seemed like a maze to me, with little side altars and chapels located here and there. There seemed to be two main chapels, one to our Lady of Czestochowa, and another one, which was where a lot of the construction was going on. I found up a flight of stairs a small chapel to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, with a stained glass window of St. Faustina. The next thing I found was the other main chapel, where a Mass was being said.
But I could hear the sultry tones of the Credo III wafting through the walls from the Black Madonna's chapel next door. My heart was tugging me in the direction of the music, so I followed. It turned out that there was another Mass being said in the little chapel to Our Lady, a Novus Ordo Mass in Latin with chant and polyphony. There was a walk around the sides of the chapel that went behind the wall enshrining the image which pilgrims could do on their knees. This walk took the pilgrim right next to the Black Madonn'as little chapel, separating them only by a marble rail. I went on my knees through part of the walk and paused when I had reached the tiny chapel. I stayed there until Communion (fortunately there was no one behind me, though they could have slipped past me), as our school Mass was to follow and I wanted to be able to be near the image. I was enchanted by the beauty of this Mass, the chapel, the music. I softly joined my voice with that of the singers when I knew the chant. You couldn't see the singers - they were either behind a screen or in the choir loft - making it seem as if it were wafting down from heaven itself. The organ was accompanying some of the music as well. The Mass was for a religious group or pilgrimage it seemed, as most of the people in the chapel were nuns or sisters. I leaned my head on the railing and looked at the image of Our Lady. Her garments were adorned with a mosaic of precious stones and metals, as were the Christ Child's - recalling to mind a play the university had put on last spring titled The Kitchen Madonna, which I still rank as one of the best plays I have seen. Both Madonna and Child wore golden crowns. Christ's right hand was raised in blessing. Mary's face radiated serenity, and kindness shone in her gentle gaze. I have never felt so close to heaven in my life, surrounded by such beauty, gazing at Beauty Himself and the most beautiful of His creation, His Mother. I thought to myself, "Every Mass should feel like this - feel as if heaven has come to earth and caught us up into the communion of love between Father, Son, and Spirit." I finished the walk, and waited for our Mass with the rest of the Franciscan students as the previous Mass ended. The last motet they sang was a Renaissance polyphonic setting of Ave Regina Caelorum.
For our Mass I was able to get up very close to the image, which I was glad of - one of the students, Justin, was kind enough to offer me his seat as he would be returning to Poland for ten-day. I prayed for the strength to meet the silent terrors of the day that awaited us in Auschwitz, for God to teach me what He desired me to learn through the lesson of Poland.
After Mass we were allowed to look around for a little while. The monastery had a couple museums, which we went through. The museums contained exquisite chalices and monstrances from the previous popes and saints, as well as articles owned by the monastery over the years. We then boarded the bus for Auschwitz.

A rose on the train tracks of Auschwitz

Auschwitz was, as my friend Joey said, the best part of the trip, as it was the most spiritually growing. There was a chill there that pierced through my layers of clothing to one's very bones. Ravens were perched in the trees outside the entrance. There was an intense stillness there, unlike anything I have ever experienced. We were separated into groups for tours of the place. We walked beneath the famous entrance, beneath the famous words, "Work makes you free." Near the entrance was a spot where a band of prisoners who were musicians were forced to play music as the soldiers checked and counted the prisoners to see if any had escaped. The musical band of prisoners reminded me of Olivier Messiaen, who wrote a quartet during his time in a concentration camp in France and performed it with a group of musicians in the camp. I think it's called The End of Time.We saw photos of so many of the prisoners on the walls, each of them with their own stories, families, their lives lost, brutally cut short. We saw their "beds," washrooms, cells, and one of the gas chambers. We saw the cells where prisoners were kept or executed. The entire place seemed flat, lifeless, dead.  The air was damp, cold, still and the weather overcast. There was no wind, no movement save for the tourists. It was as if a shroud had covered the place, a shroud of death. We saw the thousands of shoes, suitcases, pots and pans the Jews had brought with them when they had first come off the trains. They had thought they were coming to live and work there, but many of them were executed. When the Russians were coming, the Germans tried to burn the evidence of their crimes, mostly the clothes, suitcases, and shoes but they didn't have time. There was a pile of eyeglasses - a rat's nest of glass and wire. There were so many atrocities within that death camp, to look at it was sickening. How could people do this to one another? This work of satan? THey couldn't see these people as humans but saw them as animals, but in reality the Nazis were the animals and they the humans. I could see a person either losing all belief in God or being convicted of God's existence and strengthening their faith all the more, nothing in between. It shows the strength of the human will, of faith. It was so hard to imagine the horrors there, the millions of ghosts, the shots ringing from the machine guns at the execution wall. And even when the land had been desecrated with the blood of the innocents, God sanctified it with the sacrifice of his beloved saint, Maximilian Kolbe. The man signed with the cross of Christ went gaily in the dark, singing hymns with his fellow prisoners as they were starving to death in Cell 21. It was a great testimony to the power of God, how He could take the worst of men and bring out the best. To conclude the tour we went to Birkenau, known as Auschwitz II, an extension of the camp where most of the mass extermination occurred. There was a monument to the victims at the end of the railroad tracks where the trains came with the Jews and the other victims. There was a rose on the tracks at the gate house, a dark red rose. We prayed the Chaplet of Divine MErcy at the memorial, then drove to KRakow to check in to our hostel. Hopefully one day the abortion mills will be just like this place, a memory to a horror that is no more.