April 21st

What exactly am I looking for? What is the reason for all my walks around the city and local areas? For my walks everywhere? Where I am looking for not only landmarks but mostly just walking aimlessly trying to find something, to feel something about that particular place. What is the reason for all that I read — and in that case all that I read about local history, local changes — urban, social, infrastructural. I am trying to find something, to create in my head some multi planar maps that combine current places and sights with all that was there in the past but is gone now. I try to imagine and remember — for as long as at least one person still remembers — nothing and nobody is really gone. I try to imagine and remember how all that I see was before — looking for some clues and memories and particular feelings about all kind of places.

The photo above is just a regular, average church located away from the center of Bialystok. A parish church of Sacred Heart of Jesus — that is the current name. It’s located right by the cargo train station. This station is in a terrible disrepair and completely dilapidated. It’s hardly used for cargo anymore and only twice a day (from May to October) by local train that goes to Waliły. Originally it was built in 1888 on the grounds of army barracks that was then there as an orthodox church, it becomes a roman Catholic Church in 1918 after the end of the First World War.

Just one of many, many, too many churches in Bialystok and Poland in general (but that is another story).

During the Second World War during periods of Russian occupation in this area (September 1939 — June 1941 and then from summer of 1944) from that train station by the church, tens of thousands of local people — partisans, intellectuals, undesirables and others caught by NKVD — were sent to the east, to Siberia or Kazakhstan or prisons in Lubyanka. Most of them never returned home, they died along the way, or in Siberian winters or central Asian dust storms. Or just shot or hanged by communist executioners. The best of the society were destroyed on purpose and the effects of that can be felt in this local society even today.

Once the train leaves this train station going to the east, it goes through, still even today, uninhabited forests and woodlands and marshes for 70–80 kilometers before coming on to the Belarusian plains.

That church was the last sight for many before they were forced into the cattle cars, the last memory of the country for those who never returned.