March Trip: Penny and CJ do Warsaw

Post date: Mar 22, 2017 5:3:38 PM

Remember my friend Penny? The one with the New Year Resolution to visit somewhere new every month of 2017? Well for March we went to Warsaw!

This post needs to be in two parts. The first is all the fun things we did and great pierogis we ate (spoiler alert: we ate a lot of fucking pierogis). The second talks about the history I learned, and how I continue to be stunned by the massive amount of things I just don’t know.

One thing you immediately notice about Warsaw/Poland is that these people are HARD. As in they, and all their ancestors have suffered and they will not fuck around before they cut you. Hard. Like a rock. It pervades the immediate impressions we got about the culture (note: it’s possible they are all softies inside, but we were only there for the weekend).

We were staying in the “Old Town” which needs to be qualified because it was built in the 1960s. So not really old… but more on that later. However old it was, it was really cute.

The royal palace (also not very old).

The old town square (practically brand new)(also our AirBnB is in this square. It would be hard to have this conversation without talking about how cheap life was in Poland).

The “mascot” of Warsaw is a Mermaid, which is hilarious because Warsaw is VERY landlocked. It’s like if Berlin had a dolphin as a mascot. When our tour guide told us that this was the mascot, I giggled a little and figured he must have been exaggerating. But no, this lady is all over Warsaw.

After a long morning walking in the cold Poland seeing the above glorious sites, we were in need of food. I found some pierogis on yelp. This was taken after we had tried one of each. We were just getting started. (*Note: Penny and I are convinced Polish food expands in your stomach. We would finish when we were satisfied, and then be UNBELIEVABLY FULL for hours afterwards. This meal was one of a few different examples).

One of the other Lonely Planet recommendations is the Neon Museum, so we headed across the river to check it out.

It turns out that bright neon lights used to be super popular in Poland during communist rule, to try to model itself after the modern and progressive cities of Paris and London. But as the communist party fell on hard times, most of the neon signs fell to the wayside. So a group started collecting them and opened up a museum.

There’s our mermaid friend again!

After a day of museums, Penny and I were ready to eat and drink our ways through the city. Luckily one of the walking tours gave us a list of recommendations of places to go to drink, and there is one such place that has a self serve wall of beer (and we got a 10 PLN coupon to go!)(10 PLN is about 2.5… which is about how much expensive beers are in Warsaw :)

So Penny explored the options, and started pouring. I simply ordered the prosecco...

Which turns out was also self serve!

Speaking of food, this little cafe was a surprise right around the corner from our AirBnB and that is a look of happy contentment on Penny’s face.

This was right next to a cross walk. I’m not sure what’s going on. I thought it looked like someone walking with a rocket for an arm. Penny thought it was someone wearing stilts with a gun. Either way, it clearly was not a signal that we are supposed to press this to cross the road.

Before we left, Penny and I had to hit up this landmark. It’s a bell that never rang, and was held in various storage facility for decades (it’s actually old). It’s said that if you jump on one foot around it, while putting your hand on the bell, that your wish will come true. If it’s a small wish, one time around should be sufficient. If it’s something big, three times around is more appropriate.

We both made three circles. I’m not saying what I wished for, but I’ll tell you if it works.

Good food, gorgeous buildings, great drinks! What fun!

If you want to focus on things happy and pretty, stop reading. But the truth of what happened in Warsaw during WWII shook me to my core, in terms of how horrific it was, the sheer numbers of human lives lost, and the echoes of the things we see happening in the US today.

Now, I’m not an idiot. I know millions of Jews died in the Holocaust. I know World War II started when Germany invaded Poland, and therefore that Poland would be hit the hardest by the occupation (just because it lasted the longest). But I had no idea. So we’ll start with the Jewish Ghetto. After the Germans started the occupation of Warsaw, 350,000 jews were relocated to an area of Warsaw that was 3.4 km2. Overcrowding is an understatement. We walked through the old Jewish ghetto, but there is nothing left from the time before the war, besides a bit of wall that was used to separate jewish people from the general population and a monument.

We went to the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which was a gorgeous building and architecturally stunning! It included a long history of how the Jewish culture developed in Poland through the medieval times. Now. I mentioned to Penny that I wanted to go to Auschwitz, and she admitted she can’t do it. So she skipped the portion of the museum that focused on the war. I did not.

In the summer of 1942, over the course of a few months 350,000 jewish people were told that they were being relocated again, to “work in the East”. They were loaded into train cars, taken 80 km to the Treblinka camp, and slaughtered. I’m crying just writing that. There are details that I leave to those of us who love history, such as a Jewish police force meant to keep people calm on the way to the train, and the suicide of the person in charge once he discovered the plan to kill all these human beings. But that doesn’t change the sheer magnitude of the slaughter. And 350,000 human beings is still one order of magnitude less than the number of human being slaughtered during the war. Not soldiers, who died fighting. Just people, slaughtered.

Since the election, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how I can be a better ally. I’m very privileged (I am white, and have three college degrees, largely due to the support from my affluent parents), and I worry that something like the Holocaust can happen again. What if we, like the people of Warsaw, are not aware? What if we look the other way? Can this happen again, can this happen today? To Muslims, to Immigrants, to African Americans? How can I be better at helping those who are threatened, or who are under attack? Am I doing enough? I can't stop those thoughts living where I live right now.

Eventually, word started trickling back to Warsaw that they were not being sent to “resettlement”. German soldiers were sent to round up more jewish people, the remaining 5000 people revolted and attempted to rise up against their captors. They were mowed down, and died on their feet rather than in gas chambers. There was no rubble left over of the ghetto after the last inhabitants were killed, Hitler had it mowed down to nothing but dirt, nothing remained.

You can still see the remnants of hard times in Warsaw, once you leave the nice parts of town (above). But for example, that’s why the “Old Town” is only 60 years old. Because 85% of Warsaw was destroyed in the last few months of the war. Very little went untouched.

Why is that? Well, let me tell you about how I had never heard about the Warsaw Uprising. With the tide of the war turning, the people of Warsaw started to gather a resistance to German occupation. Keep in mind, there was always a shadow Polish Government in London, since the occupation started. But with enough ammunition to last 2-3 days, the people of Warsaw rose up!

They assumed that the Allies were nearby and would come to their rescue. Or that the Soviets were almost upon the city and would bring reinforcements. However, neither of these assumptions were true.

Above, at the Warsaw Uprising Museum, armbands worn by people in the resistance. The “uprising” lasted 60 some odd days. Hitler, angered by the uprising, ordered Warsaw be demolished. By the end of the war, 85% of the city was demolished.

After it was obvious that they were going to lose, the Polish people started trying to flee. They took to the sewers in an attempt to get out of the city. Many died there, as Germans dropped bombs into the sewers. At the end of the uprising, the remaining polish citizens were either killed, or removed from the city (some to be killed later in camps). About 1000 people lived in the rubble until the end of the war.

Think about that for a minute. A city of 1.3 million before the war, almost everyone was either killed (mostly executed), 1000 people remained.

I can’t fathom that. I look at Aleppo, and know that we as a global community will still stand by while things on this scale happen.

Now to take the train back home! Till next time Poland!