Rummaging in the Polish Revision Centre

16 November 2024 ~Is the Poland-Kaliningrad Border Open Yes But?

The answer to the question is ‘yes’. Yes, it is possible to access Kaliningrad at the Polish-Kaliningrad border and vice-versa. The only caveat is that before you go, stock up on patience.

Not too many months back, the bus from Kaliningrad going to Gdansk was held up at the Polish border for as long as it took to miss a flight at Gdansk ~ a plane-missing seven hours in fact. Whilst this particular case may be the exception to the rule, lengthy delays are not, and in response to this and other inconveniences generally assumed unnecessary, and some infer deliberately obstructive, a petition has been launched, which you, dear reader, can access here: Against the intolerable conditions on the Russian-Polish border (Kaliningrad)! {Note: to read this in English, you will need to click on ‘Translate’ and change the language from German into English.}

Is the Poland-Kaliningrad Border Open Yes But?

Not all border crossings are as bad as the last one you experienced, but some can sometimes be worse, and some can be worse but interesting. Take a crossing I made earlier this year, for example.

We cleared the formalities at the Russian border without let or hinderance and trundled off with great expectations, fifteen of us in all, onto Polish territory.

There were no other vehicles in transit, only our bus, and the usual procedures went smoothly enough. We were gawped at, our credentials were examined, we had our mugshots taken (again!) and, after 30 minutes, we were back on the bus.

We took our seats; brum, brum (that’s the sound of the bus starting up); and off we went.

Traditionally, this is the point on the journey when, with the inquisition over, the invisible stays shared by all release themselves collectively, letting relaxation spill palpably out in a sigh-giving rush of relief. The advent of this release is customarily celebrated by proper professional travellers in possession of proper professional travelling cases with a dignified mass unzipping, whilst those of us who own neither proper cases nor dignified travelling standards have to be content with rustling through our carrier bags. The end result is the same, however, stress being given the elbow, it’s time for comfort eating.

Is the Poland-Kaliningrad Border Open?

I had just begun to tuck into my penultimate cheese sandwich when, ay up mother!; what’s going on? Instead of hitting the open road, our bus was being siphoned off into a fenced and gated compound. 

“Ay up?” I thought again. Well, you would think that, wouldn’t you.

I cannot say for certain whether it was my fault or not. Perhaps I want to believe it was for the sake of an impudent ego. But the question kept repeating itself: Were we locked away inside this compound, sitting in front of this big, this bland, this ominous, non-descript building because of something I said?

When the clam-faced female in the Polish border office fired “Cigarettes? Alcohol?” at me, my facetious reply had been, “Yes please?” And then when she did not get the joke (What joke exactly would that be?) and barked the questions again, I had waived them away with an Englishness, simpering yet polite, which Leslie Phillips would have been proud of, but possibly she was not.

Cigarettes? Alcohol? Never touch the stuff!!

Whoever was or was not to blame, there we sat on the bus, and we sat there for a bad 10 minutes, us and this dull, brick, window-less building.

There was something about our situation and the building confronting us that nudged my imagination.

‘Work sets you free’. No, the sign at the entrance to the compound did not state that, but what exactly did ‘Revision Centre’ mean?

The bland building gave nothing away. Indeed, there is nothing much more to say about its external aspect, except that high upon the roof it had a prominent funnel-shaped air vent.

I could not see clearly as the sun was in my eyes, but I am almost willing to swear on anything other than a stack of beer bottles that for one second I saw, or bore the conviction that I saw, poised at the mouth of the air vent, the shadows of two men. They were crouching down at the sides of the vent, leaning in towards it, and each had something in their hands, something that looked like canisters. I had just begun to focus on the labels of these canisters when a shard of light leapt out of the sun temporarily blinding me. Through the eclipsing halo that followed, and with the bus now moving in reverse and altering my perspective, the words on the label were reduced to a blur, and all that I could make of them was a capital ‘Z’ at one end and a capital ‘B’ at the other.

How to Get to Kaliningrad from UK – Expat in Kaliningrad, Russia

Our bus had not entered the building by the floor-to-apex roller door in front of which we had initially parked. It had taxied around to the back of the building, where it slowly disappeared through a similar portal at that end. Creeping at a snail’s pace, it inched its way gradually in, permitting me to regard at will the character of the chamber into which we were being swallowed. We were saying goodbye to the outside world; one hoped temporarily.

We were passing into an alley, just the right width for the size of the bus. To the left of us was a platform, solid, broad and deep, not unlike one you would loiter upon whilst waiting for a train. It was not the height of the vehicle’s windows, but just a little below it.

At the back of this platform at regular intervals were two or three large doors. They were big doors, metal doors, with handles of such prodigious proportions that the only way to open them would surely be to enlist the brawn of two thick Polish men with arms that did not fit. In a corner close by the doors stood a bag that seemed familiar. It looked like one I had seen before on the lorry of KG Smith & Son, Northamptonshire’s premiere coal merchants.

Until now the bus had been trickling forward, but it suddenly drew to a shuddering halt. The driver got up from his seat, made an announcement I did not catch and opened the doors of the vehicle.  Before you could say Polish sausage, especially before you could say it in Polish, a man in paramilitary uniform had bounded up the steps and standing at the front of the bus, all officious-like ~ did I hear someone say ‘full of piss and importance’? ~ was presumably ordering us all to get off. Simultaneously, a larger man armed with a big black dog had stationed himself strategically next to the door at the side of the bus, from which the young and old, couples ~ some with children, two or three middle-aged gents and a peculiar sort of Englishman with a grey and straggly beard were struggling to alight laden down with their bags and chattels.

The platform to which this innocuous group had descended was considerably narrower than that on the opposite side. Folk were bumping into each other as, ‘Roust! Roust! Schnell! Schnell!’, they were ordered to take their travelling bags from the hold beneath the bus.

Nobody quite seemed to know what it was that was expected of them. A big man, looking not unlike Hermann Goering’s brother, had already started rummaging through one of the passenger’s bags. He had the item perched on a table placed at the side of the wall and was going through the contents as if he was pulling the entrails out of a late-for-Christmas turkey. He looked much more like a TV villain than a man with respect for the public. 

Hermann’s brother had a very loud voice, which he used to good effect. Stopping in mid-rummage, with his hands inside some lady’s lingerie, he bellowed at the meek, the innocent and inoffensive, over whom he lauded ultimate power and whose only crime today was that they wanted to get from A to B.  Obediently, one by one, they fell silently in line.

During this demonstration of ‘I’m a man in a uniform’, two other guards had joined the jamboree: a flint-eyed woman in a boiler suit spoilt by its insignia, and one of those strutting cockerel types: ‘I’ve got tattoos on my neck, and I’ve come to throw my weight about’.  

The carnival commenced: The man who had the sniffer dog was sniffing; the cockerel was in and out of the bus as if someone had knocked him off his perch; the flint-eyed thing was glaring, ‘Look at those eyes! Those eyes! Those eyes!’; and  the mountain man with a skinhead haircut who went by the name of Hermann’s Brother was rifling through one’s personals as if he was mixing cement.

His brawny arms were in there, his paddle hands a-swirling. He had obviously learnt his cultured trade from washing his pants in a tub.

Fortunately for me, no such ignominy would besmirch my person. I was, as they say, travelling light. I only had a carrier bag, in which I had placed my laptop and the sad remains of a pack-up meal prepared for me by my wife. 

Most of what had been packed for me, I had already scoffed. All that remained was a lonely sandwich, lolling half in and half out of one of those thin plastic boxes routinely used in supermarkets for the display and sale of cakes.

Although I was not in the least bit hungry, having eaten just minutes before, the thought of the Polish strangler rinsing his mitts about my sandwich, spurred me into action. Better to eat the sandwich now than have it used like a paper towel hanging next to the gents’ urinals.  The problem was that fatty arms was getting through those bags like Joe Stink from the Secret Service, and the combination of cheese and bread being not the easiest thing to masticate resulted in a situation of alarming prematurity, an unfortunate occurrence which is not entirely limited to such incidental matters as love, life and death but also, or so it would seem, the crucial business of crossing borders.

Thus, when the big you-know-what turned to me and barked, “Cigarettes? Alcohol?”, it was an effort of no small magnitude for me to reply, “Yes please”.

He glared at me contemptuously ~ well can you blame him really ~ and pulling his girt big shoulders back in a show of manly authority (he had done the same with the 80-year-old standing frail and tired in front of me) said slowly and precisely, “We will wait until you have stopped eating, then you and I will talk!”

““Oh, really, what about?” I spluttered, choking on my sandwich. “The weather? Football? Religion? Politics? ~ er, no, anything but politics.” 

The sandwich safely swallowed, he sang the refrain again: “Cigarettes?” and  “Alcohol?”

Do you know what I think? I think that he was asking me whether I had such items concealed about my person or stashed inside my laptop. When I answered in the negative, first he looked suspicious then profoundly disappointed.

I took a swig of mineral water. He probably thought the alcohol was hidden in that bottle ~ as if! ~ and that I had hurriedly eaten the cigarettes between two slices of bread. Whatever it was he didn’t know, and I think it was a lot, he was not a happy man, which is hardly surprising really, looking and acting the way he did. But he wasn’t finished yet.

He glanced furtively down at my little one ~ I mean at the bag that I was carrying ~ and a tiny ray of hope shone briefly through his cold pork pies, though it was tinged with disbelief by the answer he anticipated but did not want to hear.

“No big baggage?” he asked.

I could, of course, have just said ‘no’, thus putting him out of his misery, but Bernard Manning answered for me, “Just the wife,” said Bernard, “and she’s at home at present.”

Hermann Rummage pursed his lips, shuffled, scowled and then dismissed me. I climbed back onto the bus.

Ten minutes later, no contraband having been found, we were out on the open road again, steaming towards Gdansk: the young and the old, couples ~ some with children, two or three middle-aged gents and a peculiar sort of Englishman with a grey and straggly beard.

Those lovely chaps at the Polish border, I mused, stood more chance of finding a rational thought in a liberal’s head than illicit fags and booze on the God-fearing lot on this bus, but I wouldn’t want to bet on it. Who of us can say with any degree of certainty what goes on in the cranky minds of liberals?

Yet the trees were green, the sky was blue, and every cloud has a silver lining: after all, we hadn’t been gassed, just inconvenienced and harassed. 

It was just another sourpuss day at Checkpoint Proper Charlie.

How to Get to Kaliningrad from UK – Expat in Kaliningrad, Russia

Image attributions
Outline of a building: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Outline-vector-of-a-house/3503.html
Moonshiner: https://loc.getarchive.net/media/effects
Caveman statue: https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/free-download.php?image=caveman-statue&id=161215
Hearts: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Hearts-for-Mom/8942.html

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