Warsaw

So Warsaw - i will definitely miss you. We did not have nearly enough time together (one day). I wanted to see a lot in my spring break so i split if up the best I could. I'm glad I did it because I get to see so much, but I wish I had another 2 days in Greece and I wish I would have had another week in Poland.

First I'll dispense with the humorous part of my day. After leaving the cemetery (explained below) I was on the tram when it stopped unexpectedly. I started to see people get off and murmur. It wasn't until I saw them take out their cameras that I wondered what was going on...So I disembarked and there it was! The old man who had driven his car onto the tracks! They are trams, but are built just like train tracks. The ballast rock was low at one point and his car got stuck on the rails. Don't ask me how he got on those tracks. On one side separating the tracks from the road is a 3 foot fence and on the other side is the sidewalk and platform next to a big park. Everyone was saying he must have driven through the park and over the sidewalk! I don't understand! It was pretty funny though. And apparently a sight that not many Warsawians see every day - they were all grabbing their cameras and their phones to take pictures too! One of the rail mechanic trucks showed up pretty quickly and wenched him off the tracks onto a sidewalk in an intersection and left him! Where he drove away!

I am SO surprised to say that I think Poland might be one of my favorite places in all of Europe! I never expected that really. The country is beautiful. I know in my previous blog I talked a lot about how depressing it was to see Auschwitz and see where all the Jews, Poles, Roma, political prisoners and Soviet POW's were killed. Today I started my day at the Warsaw Rising Museum - the museum that commemorates the uprising in Warsaw against the Nazi occupation. And today it was sad yes - but it felt exciting and hopeful and proud.

I've often wondered how I would react to a situation like that. If some aggressor came in one day and took over - told me I wasn't American anymore; told me that I couldn't study certain things in school; told me that I couldn't choose what religion and church to go to; told me what work I was allowed to have; told me when I could leave my house and where I could go. How would I respond? Would I be as brave as the Warsawians (yes that's what they're called - lol)?

College professors -banned from teaching in colleges (college wasn't necessary anymore and was a way for people to organize so it was banned) - started taking their classes underground - teaching in streets and parks and homes. Learning was a way to resist. To the Germans, unlearned people were easier to control. The Warsawians resisted.

They didn't stop there either. They started forging Polish Zloty (the currency) and used it to buy things abroad and in Poland. They Germans wanted to keep the people poor and they controlled the money supply (so they thought) until the "Dark and Silent" among other things started forging the bills. They infiltrated the money into the economy and people were able to spend and live again. They could afford necessities and the economy began to rebound.

They didn't stop there either. They organized. They organized resistance groups and took the weapons from the military and police and whatever personal weapons they had and they fought. They fought and they died together in the Uprising. It was 4 years after occupation and it looked like there was no end in sight. The Allies were too busy fending off Germans from France and Britain to worry about Poland. The Soviets had already pulled out of Poland after Germany attacked. The only fighting back they did was to airlift some weapons to Warsaw, but dropping them from planes without parachutes meant most were damaged.

Girls acted as couriers and delivered messages back and forth, transported and cleaned weapons and were nurses to the injured. Some girls fought too. Children fought. There is a monument here to the "small fighters" to mark all the children who fought and died. 8, 10, 12, 15 year olds took rocks, guns whatever they could use and they fought German Gestapo and the German military.

The Warsawians used the sewer system to move about the city largely undetected. The Germans didn't know the system like the Warsawians did and they exploited that. The Germans fought back hard though. They captured the hospitals (some were operating in churches) and they killed the doctors and nurses and patients too. The blew up all the churches. The church, much like what I learned in Greece, through many occupations served as the point that retained the Polish identity and language and culture. There is a unifying and solidifying force in religion. And the church in Poland was ACTIVE in the uprising. Priests marched out with the fighters, churches operated as hospitals, churches housed the resistance armies, they were a rallying point for the people.

The Germans finally left Warsaw after 5 years and only 15% of the city was still standing. They had all but razed it to the ground. But the people - the people! They never gave up. They didn't go quietly into the dark. They fought. There was a quote in the museum that just gave me chills. It said, "All we wanted was our freedom. Freedom that we owed to no one but ourselves." They realized the West was too pre-occupied and they knew that freedom would need to come from themselves. They fought to give themselves that freedom. The country started to liberate pieces of itself and soon after the Germans were defeated and a complete withdrawal happened.

I just had such goosebumps in the museum. The Jewish Ghetto had their own uprising too. That is commemorated in the city and in the museum. They were already locked away in the Ghetto and so their uprising came earlier and was their own. By the time the Warsaw uprising happened, the Ghetto had been emptied - all of them sent to camps. Their story is much less familiar because so few lived to tell about it. But I visited the Jewish Cemetery in Warsaw and saw just how full it was.

I explored the rest of the city too - the Old Town and the New Town (the old downtowns) and saw so many beautiful monuments and parks and buildings and churches and the old Citadel and walls that protected the city for centuries. It is a really really beautiful city. The public transportation is easy and cheap and oh my - have I told you about how good the food is! Perogis and sausages and potatoes! YUM!!!!

The things I had read weren't quite true. Yes - much of the city was rebuilt to "look old", but unlike I had heard, it doesn't look fake or tacky. There are signs with pictures, or paintings outside most every building to show what it used to look like. And for the most part, they nailed the reconstruction. Its not surprising that they want their city back to the way it was. History and memory to not easily give in to modernity. In a way, you could say this is a modern day extension of the Uprising - first they resisted, now they restored.

Tomorrow I'll give you my reflections on Poland as a whole!