Wanderings: Ferry to Hel

June 10, 2022

Across the bay from Gdansk at the end of a long thin peninsula lies the town of Hel. The seasonal ferry began running this week (1). As the boat cruised from Gdansk to the sea, the enormous scale of the busy shipyards was revealed, with extensive repairs both in the water and in dry dock. The boat reached the sea at Westerplatte, where the first shots were fired in World War II (2), before proceeding up the coast to Sopot and across to Hel.

A lively group on deck were engaged in some sort of drawing game, trying to copy a very angular picture of a cat. As we approached Hel, one of the group members (many of whom had orange bells suspended from their belts?), dressed as Neptune to welcome the group to Hel. Copious quantities of the local beer enlivened their spirits (riding a ferry is thirsty work, even at 9:15 a.m.)

Ordering fish and chips at an a oudoor restaurant in Hel, I asked for a glass of red wine. "No" the waitress replied peremptorily "you're eating fish, you need white wine: Pinot grigio." I agreed (I don't think I really had a choice).

A stroll to The Plaza (as the very end of the peninsula is called) was through a more honky-tonk part of town, with game arcades and bars. Along the way, a number of military installations dating from the 1950s are preserved, built to repel a Capitalist/ Imperialist American invasion (3). Just over the horizon from the point (about 35 miles due east) is the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad (4).

Unlike the ferry to Hell, the ferry to Hel permits return journeys. I had planned to take the train back to Gdansk (the longer but quicker way), but the trains were running late, so I returned by sea.

(1) The geography is similar to the relationship between Boston and Provincetown at the end of Cape Cod.

(2) The German city of Danzig (Gdansk) was declared a free city after the first World War, and was phyisically separated from the rest of Germany by a strip of coastal Poland (a), known to the Germans as the "Danzig corridor" (b). On September 1, 1939, the German naval training vessel Schleswig-Holstein, which was in port for a "friendly visit," opened fire on the fort at Westerplatte, firing the first shots of WWII (c).

(a) Poland had ceased to exist as an independent nation in 1795, being divided between Russia and Prussia until the end of World War I, when many nation-states emerged or reëmerged upon the dissolution of the German and (especially) the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

(b) Hitler's unmet demand for the return of the coastal territory (the "Danzig corridor") to Germany was one of a main pretext for the German invasion of Poland.

(c) Some historians argue that the Second World War began with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria almost a decade before. This was more of a bilateral war. The Asia-Pacfic theater of WWII (as a large scale war involving many nations) began with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and subsequent invasion of British territories in Asia in late 1941.

(3) The defense pact of the former communist bloc countries was named after the Polish capital: Warsaw. After communism collpased, Poland joined the NATO alliance in the 1990s; they had been Russia's neighbors for a long time and still had a sense of mistrust.

(4) The city was called Könisberg until the end of WW II. Part of the German exclave of East Prussia, the territory was taken by the Soviet Union in 1945. Wedged between Poland and the Soviet Republic of Lithuania, the territory was assigned to the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic. Kaliningrad thus stayed with Russia upon the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 (d). The exclave is physically separated from Russia, with NATO territory between the exclave and the rest of Russia.

(d) The area is believed to be heavily armed. The proximty of the Kaliningrad exclave to Swedish territory is one of reasons commentators have given for long-neutral Sweden's recent request to join NATO.