Warsaw...the Akwarium

Excerpt from The Rare Earth Series, Volume One:  On the Job Training - Berlin to Vladivostok



     Reportedly owned and operated by a policeman but, more likely, by a member of the Polish National Security, the KGB basically, information about everything that was happening in Warsaw could be gotten and everything could be arranged at the Akwarium...especially if you made the right friends from the crowd that frequented it. The Akwarium was literally in the parking lot and across the street from the Palace of Culture, and was such a hotbed of information ranging from where the latest shipment of Western washing machines would be coming in to where the next Solidarity protest was going to be held.

     The Akwarium was one of those scary places that couldn't be categorized alone as a place where the militiamen hung out but also had their arch enemies and cohorts in crime hanging out planning their next "numer stulecia". Unable at the time to understand that they were all in it together - the anarchic mix of Solidarity, anti-Solidarity, economic and political strife ridden landscape, with a little bit of the Klondike and Old West thrown in for good measure - I generally steered myself clear of places like the Akwarium except to enjoy one of those great shish kabobs, a salad, fries, and few beers when it was available. I saw my environs and world in a very black and white way.  There were good Solidarity Freedom Fighters and victims of Eastern European Soviet hegemony waging war against General Jaruzelski and his gang. There were KGB, SB, and UB agents waging a cultural and political war against the West and western influences in the country. And there were students and thought leaders fighting for free thought and education against the forces that were holding on to an already antiquated way of thinking coming from the East.


     The Akwarium welcomed all.

    
     One other secret during the martial law years and afterward that I found out much later, around the time of the Kennedy Family visit, was that Marines assigned to guarding the American Embassy considered the Akwarium their own and would frequent it in plain clothes garb together with the CIA staff at the Embassy. (This was one reason why I took the Kennedy Family to the Akwarium frequently during their visit.)