My day started out badly — I missed, somehow, the 6:00 bus to Kraków so I ended up going first to Nowy Targ and then catching a mini-bus to Kraków from there. I got a few supplies for business English and a textbook for Gosia, the new English teacher, as well as three books for me: Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Man of the Century: the Life and Times of John Paul II; and Denying the Holocaust.
I’ve started Hitler’s Willing Executioners, and I have to say I’m already intrigued. Goldhagen makes the point that none of the studies of the Holocaust deal with the people who carried them out, except for the upper ranking officials like Himmer. None of the things I’ve ever heard or read about the Holocaust deals with who actually carried it out. We know who ordered it, and we know a great deal about them; we don’t know who really did the actual deeds, and we know nothing about them. At least we did — I think HWE is/was an effort to begin to remedy that.
I took a private bus from Kraków to Jabłonka and spent about two hours at Kinga’s house. Her brother is getting married this weekend, so everyone was busy making cakes and such. Since I couldn’t just sit around and watch them work without doing something myself, I helped make a few things. Kinga promised to save me some of the fruits of my labor. I guess I’ll get to try them Sunday, because I’ve been invited over for Sunday obiad, which of course I wouldn’t miss for the world.
As I was walking from Kinga’s house to the “rynek” to catch the bus, I saw Agnieszka (who used to work at the store across the street) as she was taking in flowers from the florist shop where she now works. I just walked up to her and said, “Cześć” and she returned the greeting, at first without looking at me. Then she looked at me and recognized me and was more than a little shocked. She had no idea I was back. We chatted for a bit, then rode the bus back to Lipnica together. She’s really a sweet woman. I like her a lot — something of a “country girl” I guess.
Today was an easy day as well. The fourth year students had the próbna matura in English or German (yesterday it was in math, I believe) and so I only had three classes, starting at 12:40. The lessons were somewhat useless, but I’m going to get a grade out of them nonetheless — at least I’m planning on it now. We’ll see. Anyway, it was the listen-to-the-music-and-write-the-scene-you-see lesson. A lesson with little or no preparation, and that’s why I chose it. I don’t know what I’ll be doing tomorrow and Friday, though. With class four maybe a little matura debriefing, but I don’t know. Anyway, I’m hoping that the matura will scare some of the kids into better behavior, but I doubt it. Dominika dropped by this evening to leave some stuff for Kinga and she told me that there might not actually be a new matura. “It depends,” she explained, “on who wins the election. Some of them want to change it, some don’t.” Who knows?