By Adam
Fularz from Zielona Góra, Poland
23 years
lapsed, but if anything changed in the Polish- German order region, it only
turned worse.
Adam Fularz
(33 y.): "I still walk from train station in Frankfurt Oder for some 45 minutes to
be able to get to bus station on the Polish side. I walked over the
frontier bridge already several thousand times in my fife. 23 years
lapsed, nothing changed."
grew up in the frontier region, attended to schools on the other side
of the border. After having returned to his region, he found that it is even
more difficult for people living in the area to visit each other than it was a
decade ago.
Gubin and
Guben- one is Polish, the other is German. Both are viewed as located on the
end of the world. One world is Polish, it ends up on the river Neisse, dividing the countries, the other is respectively
German world, and Guben is its very end. It lost nearly half of its former
inhabitants (downsized from 37 to 20 thousands), blocks of empty flats are
demolished.
This end of
the world was once in its centre. The town was once on an important high-speed
rail link connecting Berlin with Wrocław (in 2 h 30 minutes) and Silesia (in 4 hours 30 minutes). Now from
the sleepy railway station in Guben there are no connections to Polish side.
The high speed rail line is even partially dismantled on the Polish side, where
rails are widely stolen from unused lines. If you see the destroyed line on
Polish side, you hardly believe that once trains passed it with 100 mph. Also the regional
mainline Guben- Zielona Góra is closed, although a decade ago it was in use.
If you take
a journey further north, You find that the region generally lacks bridges or
ferries that would connect the communities separated by border riviers . For
over 50 kilometers
between Guben and Frankfurt there is no link.
On our journey we passed through the ferry in Połęcko, to find sleepy villages
in the end of Polish world. Bridges, that once linked the communities there, 60
years after the WW2 are still left in ruins. In Kłopot, local bridge ending
somewhere in the very middle of the Odra river, is left as it was exploded by
retreating German Army in 1945. It became known as the “półmost”, half-bridge,
a local curiosity to be seen except for the local stork museum in this
touristically attractive area. However, tourists are a rarity here. On the
Polish side of the border public transport is practically not existing, there
are no restaurants, pensions, hostels, cultural offer is absent. Local
community centres, that existed in the German times, have been turned into
churches or stay abandoned.
Another
missing link is the former ferry in Urad, formerly connecting Aurith and Urad.
Nowadays in order to contact the people gathered 130 meters further on
the other side of the ferry passage, You have to shout loudly over the waters
of the river. A bridge for lorries was planned here, that in local viewpoint is
unnecessary as it endangeres the local wildlife (this area is beloved by
storks). A bridge or ferry for local traffic would change here a lot, help the
local community, of which some laugh at the strangers from the banks at local
grocery- a meeting place for local communities in such villages.
Next
curiosity could be seen in Kunice. The local railway line, that once linked
Cybinka with Frankfurt, serves nowadays only
freight traffic. It has a branch to Kunice, where the tracks suddenly end up in
a river- a train could from here simply jump into the border river, but now some of the tracks were stolen.
There are
many more missing links in the border region, such as those in Lebus/Lubusz,
Górzyca, Siekierki/Bad Frienwalde. Until now the rail traffic between the
regions is practically non-existant, it is marked by poor schedules with 2-3
trains daily, dramatically slow speeds, very high fares, much higher than the
fares on the German side. Until now, in order to get to the German side of the
border (for example to nearby Berlin),
Polish people often have to take the most expensive EuroCity trains. Fares are
as high as these to Warsaw, and journey time
from Zielona Góra to Berlin (140 km) is not much shorter as the travel time to Warsaw (440 km). The only
inexpencive way to travel from Polish side to German side requires a 4-km long
walk from bus station on the Polish side of the border in Słubice to the German
railway station in Frankfurt (Oder).After 23 years, we still walko over the border, when travelling to Berlin. It takes about 45 minutes.
Nearly two
decades of coexistence lapsed, and still no public transport exists between the
neighboring towns, twin-cities such as Gubin-Guben, Frankfurt(Oder)-Słubice,
Kostrzyn-Kuestrin/Kietz. Before the WW2 these links were so frequented, that in
all 3 cases were served by tramway lines. Nowadays sometimes you can find only
remnants of unused tracks as in Gubin. Currently
these two countries are connected with each other only for motorized traffic,
and public transport connections are seldom- as far as I know, only two such connections exist, and there are no transborder busses at all between regions Brandenburg and Lubuskie.
