Dreams live on behind these walls: entrance pavilion of Gdańsk railway station in Warsaw, where David Bowie stranded in 1973.
Picture: A. Savin
Longing stop: David Bowie spent only three hours in Warsaw and showed how much culture can mediate between East and West.
Dhis train station has always been a place of dreams, says Beata Kamiński, who is waiting for her regional train here. Trains to the West and the Soviet Union ran from Warszawa Gdańska until the 1980s.
“That was the wide world that only existed in our imagination,” says the little woman, who was born in 1963. But she wasn’t aware that a story was happening here that culminated in one of the most famous pop songs in music history. This story begins with a simple phobia: David Bowie was afraid of flying. “I will not fly because I had a premonition that if I did, I would be killed in a plane crash. If nothing happens by 1976, I’ll start flying again,” he told the American press in the early 1970s.