Day 11 - Yet More Uprising

Today is our only full day in Warsaw - Tomorrow we fly to Paris in the evening. Because we were so jet-lagged our first day in Warsaw, we decided to make up for lost time by doing two of the suggested walks through the city.

One of our first stop was a fragment of the original ghetto wall. Warsaw too, had an active Jewish Population, fourth in the world after New York, Moscow, and I forget the Third - Israel, I would assume. The wall was build between houses, and the homes themselves became part of the baricade. In order to keep people from just going in one door and out another on the Aryan side of the wall, first floor windows and doors were boarded up. Typhoid and TB were rampant, but often unreported because any home with even one case of the disease was immediately quarrantined, and all of the inhabitants were almost certainly doomed to the disease or starvation.

After the wall, we visited sites honoring the various resistance fighters, both from the Ghetto, and larger Warsaw population. One monument to the Ghetto uprising was carved in 1948 from a piece of stone originally designated to be used for a monument to the victory of the Third reich. Another was a bunker in which all of the uprisers perished fighting, or commited mass suicide rather than be taken. In this case, as many, they remained where they fell, the bunker becoming a mass grave. This particulare monument is the actual bunker, mounded with the rubble from Silas Street, once the most active street in the Jewish quarter.

Our next stop was a deportation point for many Poles, Jew and Gentile alike. Agin, the wall was inscribed with the names of some of the poeple who had passed through there.

An unusual Monument, of a broken wagon bearing crosses, honours the murdered and fallen in the east.

The parks around Warsaw are dotted with various statues comemmorating the soldiers of WWII. This one tries to look dignified as it becomes an impromptu jungle gym for several small boys. (the direction of the sun prevented us from getting a good picture showing the kids crawling all over him).

It was a lot of walking, but with the exception of the occasional school group, we did not run into any other tourists. That may not be a good marker, but I felt as if I was seeing a part of Warsaw that the Poles themselves are quietly proud of, not a part put intentionally on display for the western crowd (such as the castles and parks are, which we will visit tomorrow).