July 19, 2013

July 19, 2013

Last night we had a Welcome dinner to meet the Insight Tour we will be joining for the next two weeks.  We ate stuffed sausage and beets.  Every meal seems to be an adventure here in Eastern Europe.  As we suspected we are not the youngest participants but we are very close.  Well, at least I can say I am travelling with the cutest girl by far.

This morning we rejoin the group for our first organized tour of the trip.  We take a bus ride around Warsaw with a local guide.  Unfortunately we retrace a lot of the sites we saw yesterday.  I should have planned a little better.  At least we got a local's perspective on some of Warsaw history.  Just before lunch we leave the group in Old Town and walk next door to New Town (the town that grew outside the Old Town walls). We then stopped for a small lunch at an eatery known as a Milk Bar.  These were cafeterias typically supported by the communist Poland state to serve the masses inexpensive food.  That is right up my alley.  We both order a hearty bowl of soup.

From New Town we catch a bus to the Uprising Museum on the city's west side.  It is a disorganized but humbling remembrance of WWII in Warsaw.  As Americans we mostly get a sanitized, heroic John Wayne view of the Western front.  The Eastern Front was where 80% of the fighting took place and was six long years of unimaginable chaos, bloodshed, and sheer terror.  It makes you wonder how mankind could be so cruel to each other.  Warsaw was heavily damaged when Germany invaded at the start of the war.  In 1944, with the Soviet Union about to liberate the city, Warsovians saw their chance and rose up against their occupiers using the city sewers to move men and supplies about the city. Stalin sat on his hands while Germany smashed the uprising.  In an act of sheer vengeance, Hitler ordered any monument and historical building left standing dynamited.  A city of 1.3 million people was reduced to a mere 1000.  To make matters worse, when the Soviet "liberators" finally rolled in, they rounded up the Uprising combatants and shot them.  Stalin wanted a Soviet Poland.  All memory of the Uprising was suppressed until the Soviets left in 1989.

The climax of the museum is clearly the last three minutes when a film of a B-24 Bomber's flight over the city in 1945 is shown.  It has been digitally transformed into a 3-D production showing Warsaw to be one massive pile of rubble.

From the museum we walk back towards our hotel. On the way we search out the few remnants of the Jewish ghetto wall and buildings left standing. Warsaw is truly a Phoenix reborn.  There are few scars left in this huge bustling vibrant city.  As we were eating dinner, Aimee made the comment that the city is almost all young residents.  The reason didn't dawn on me till now.  Few older Poles survived the war.  A very sobering perspective!