Day two in Warsaw

We spent a rainy and cold day touring Warsaw today.  Most of Warsaw was destroyed in WWII, so much of what you see today is reconstructed.  Our guide Edvard often showed us old photos of rubble in places where now the buildings have been reconstructed as exact replicas of what stood before the war.  The resulting buildings are slightly Disney-like given their uniform construction time and style.

The Chopin theme continued with benches scattered throughout the city where you press a button, and Chopin music comes out.  Very nice exhibit idea!

We toured the area of the Warsaw ghetto, where the Germans had constrained almost a half million Jews at the start of the war.  Several parts of the wall are still standing and there are multiple places with memorials.  I thought the most impressive was near the place where the Jews were gathered before being sent by train to Treblinka to be murdered.  Here, the large wall contains only first names, allowing each David or Sarah to stand for tens of thousands of David's and Sarah's.  Between disease, starvation, murder and rebellion, very few of those half million Jews survived.

We then went to the POLIN museum, the museum of the Jews of Poland.  This stunning new museum was one of our main reasons to come to Warsaw.  Visually it is very well done, with clever multimedia displays using a variety of artifacts.  I enjoyed getting to read about Polish Jewish life before the holocaust, particularly since a large part of my family emigrated from here.  (I believe I may have found a quote from one of my Dolinsky/Darling relatives on the wall!).  There is a long history of antisemitism in Poland, but also periods of acceptance and prosperity.  

We had seen the movie Raise the Roof at the Jewish film festival, where some professors at University of Massachusetts had worked with their students over a long period of time to recreate the colorful roof of a Polish synagogue.  This is one of the central exhibits in the museum.  There is so much here, we could have spent hours more.

After a traditional pierogi lunch, we continued on to see the (reconstructed) old town and a monument to the Warsaw uprising.

I should mention that yesterday we saw a protest demonstration, which Joan and Karl were trapped in trying to get to the museum.  The demonstrations were against the current government and for the European Common Market.  This tension has become a theme of the trip; we heard it in the Czech Republic and Hungary as well.  It seems familiar, given our recent election, Brexit, and the French election.  Simply put, it seems that all these Western societies have a portion of the population that feels left behind by technology and globalization and that are in favor of a more closed and protectionist society.  On the other side are those who want to be part of Europe and the world, with an open, inclusive society.  Both Hungary and Poland currently have governments more inclined to the traditionalist, closed model, and clearly the younger and more affluent parts of the population oppose them.  

On the one hand, this realization made my feel better in that the US is not alone in this phenomenon.  On the other hand, it makes clear how hard the problem is, and that the solution is not obvious.

Donna