Touring Warsaw

Thursday, October 4, 2012

Armed with a day pass for Warsaw’s transit systems, we found our way via tram to the Museum of the Warsaw Uprising.  We spent the morning exploring its exhaustive documentation of the valiant but doomed 1944 attempt of the local population to overcome the German occupiers.  The spirit and determination of the Poles shone through the brutal defeat and systematic, retaliatory destruction of their city and its citizens.  It was a sobering and inspiring morning.

We figured out a quick tram route to the Palace of Culture, a Soviet-era skyscraper that is akin to the Empire State Building of Warsaw, except that, as the occupying Soviets’ “Gift to the Polish People,” it has never been beloved by its “recipients.”   At any rate, the massive structure provides a fine viewing terrace high above the city, and we enjoyed the panoramas on this lovely, clear and mild fall day. (They say that the best view of Warsaw is from the top of the building because that is the only view in which the "Palace" cannot be seen.)

 

After lunch in a beer garden below the tower, we trammed once more, to Lazienski Park, where we enjoyed the palaces, fall leaves, lakes and quiet paths in this large and beautiful urban green space.  Then, through the stylish Embassy Row, and on to Nowy Swiat, an attractive street, banked with flowers, former palaces turned high-end shops, churches, the university, and monuments leading back into the beautiful Old Town.  

 After a stop at the very moving chapel and monument to those of the Polish elite massacred by the Russians at Katyn, we took a bus to our last stop of the afternoon at Umschlagplatz.  This stark monument, granite slabs in the form of the cattle cars that carried three hundred thousand Jews to the camps, is inscribed with three hundred given names, from A to Z, representing the lost.  Not much more needs to be said…

At the end of this long day, we were bushed.  We found a small supermarket that had some great prepared Polish food, so we grabbed some bigos and golabki and headed back to our apartment for dinner with our shoes off!

From Tom-I found Warsaw to be an amazing city. The story of its reconstruction or resurrection is something I had heard but not really appreciated. Almost every church or ‘old neighborhood” is described by when it was first built and then rebuilt after the war. How this country put so much effort into restoring its heritage is amazing and how much it has accomplished since being released from Soviet domination is surprising. One of the things that we learned today was that many of the people who constituted the “home army” that rose against the Nazis in 1944 and survived the war were imprisoned or executed by the Russians because they were seen to be a force that would resist the Soviet occupation - just an amazing story. And it is remembered everywhere in the city. Over 600 thousand citizens of Warsaw died in the war, more than the total number of American soldiers who were killed. It is a beautiful place and an emotional experience for me.