Heavy snowfalls together with violent gusts and drifting snow paralysed road and rail links across Poland Wednesday and the country's air traffic was also severely hit with two major airports at Krakow in the south and at the Baltic port of Gdansk closed down. Several hundred villages in the northeast were cut off after wind created snowdrifts up to two meters (6.5 feet) high, public television reported. Soldiers were called out to rescue passengers trapped in about 30 vehicles near the northern city of Olsztyn, including snowplows that had earlier been sent out to clear the road.

Heavy snow also made road travel nearly impossible in southern Poland, near the Tatra mountain range. Cars abandoned on the road to Krakow from Zakopane could be seen completely covered by snow. In the Czech Republic, school was cancelled until Monday in what the private TV station Nova termed 'snow holidays'.

The cold front stretched as far north as the Latvian capital Riga where snow falls reached 40 cm (16 in) and temperatures dropped below minus 20C (minus 4F). Winds of 65 kilometers (40 miles) per hour shut down traffic at Riga's port from 0500 GMT. In Bulgaria, as many continued with ski vacations during the end of year holiday period, around 200 tourists were stuck in two mountain hotels in the centre of the country following snow falls which began on Sunday, according to Bulgarian civil defence. Snow reached heights of 50 to 70 centimeters in certain parts of the country which has seen its heaviest falls in 30 years according to metereologists.

Hundreds of kilometers (miles) to the west, eastern France and Germany saw glittering and sunny winter weather but also many rivers flooded. Near the regional capital of Saarbruecken the river Saar flooded roads which then froze to thick ice. Floods also destroyed a stock of 180,000 euros (163,000 dollars) in the vault of a bank in Verdun, northeastern France, after the Meuse river broke its banks on Wednesday morning.