The Hooks' Adventure Continues!: Walking in Warsaw

(Sorry! This got out of order in the blog, but was the first Poland post)

Notes about Warsaw: I had not realized this specifically, but Warsaw was flattened during the second world war. As in, complete rubble. As a result, it had to be rebuilt. The citizens made the decision to rebuild the city as it had been prior to the war rather than using more modern architecture and materials.

Having experienced the earthquakes and having debates about whether and how to rebuild (and, in the case of rebuilding, whether one could call it the "historic" building), I was curious how Warsaw would "feel." Would it be like Disneyland, completely artificial? Would it seem "real"?

I came away from today feeling that the choice they made was good. In a way, it was a defiant statement of "You can't take away our heritage. This is ours and we will prevail." Not really the phoenix, but it works as a beautiful testament to the courage of the survivors. During the course of the day, we visited reconstructions of various buildings and saw photos of what the starting point had been in the early 1950s; looking at what is there now, you would never guess.

A little pond just outside the walls

We started our day at the Citadel, a fortress built in the 1830s to maintain Russian domination. It is now a military base and a museum to commemorate the Katyn Massacre of 1940. This event (actually, the massacres occurr was just shocking in its enormity, even in the context of WWII, which had so many atrocities. Approximately 22,000 Polish prisoners (officers, intelligentsia, and some everyday citizens) were executed by Russian soldiers one by one, with a level of documentation that really personalizes it. The Russian executioners reportedly took each prisoner, wrote down name and date of birth, sentenced death automatically, and took to an execution chamber where the prisoner was killed via a pistol shot to the head. And, next in line! The killing was deliberate and methodical and absolutely horrific.

The bodies were then buried in mass graves. Of course, the coverups began immediately. The Russians blamed the Nazis. The Nazis publicized the massacres as a warning of the dangers of communism, and so on. It was only in the 1990s that Russia acknowledged culpability and permitted excavation of the sites.

The museum was beautifully done, although not speaking Polish was a hindrance. One of the really interesting aspects of the display technique was the use of square clay pipe to make cells in which individual artifacts were housed. The sheer number of combs, toothbrushes, religious items, and more spoke volumes for the individuals who died in this event.

After this was a series of memorial plaques for victims of the gas chambers (we think; that wasn't entirely clear).

This way of displaying the artifacts was so effective:
moving just because of the sheer volume of cases,
as well as some of the very prosaic items that were
carried: it really personalized the horror.

One of the halls

We thought the snails were just lovely!

Heading into "New Town"

We then took a lovely walk to New Town (actually architecturally seemingly Napoleonic), where we had lunch. We wandered back through Old Town, including the reconstructed 14th-century fort, and ended up back at the apartment, thoroughly wiped out! Fortunately, we found a fruit vendor on the way who had fresh raspberries...