After a spontaneous detour to a curiously empty national shrine and a scrape with the law, Mary Dejevsky suspects that the Madonna is still willing to offer her protection The plan was to drive from Krakow to Wroclaw, two cities with complicated histories that sit little more than three hours apart. Krakow is the gloriously restored old capital of Poland and remains its intellectual centre to this day. It is a city of spires and squares, the place where the future John Paul II found his vocation and then ignited a revolution. But it is a city, too, that housed the German occupation government and is only now rediscovering its Jewish heritage. Wroclaw, the former Breslau, is more Germanic and more patchily restored than Krakow, with the ravages of the Second World War not yet quite erased