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).

Day 10 - Prague Highlights

Since it was our last day in Prague, we decided to spend our time walking to a few of the sights that we had skipped earlier in the week.

Our visit to the Jan Palach memorial (the burned cross from a few days ago) inspired us to seek out the monument to the uprisers of the velvet revolution. The Velvet revolution happened in 1989 when police beat several hundred protesters, some of them to death. The subsequent uprising led to the fall of communism in the Czech Republic. We found this plaque tucked away under ad arcade down the street from a rose garden tended by Fansciscan monks.
From there we sought out a wine bar that was supposedly very good and very cheap, but it was such a pretty day that we walked back into Old Town instead to watch the Astronomical Clock do its tricks. Every hour on the hour, Death tips his hourglass and rings a little bell. As the bell rings, a parade of Apostles passes by the upper windows of the clock.

Even though it was early in the day, Cz and I were both feeling nappish. There was a cathedral near the square that we had wanted to check out, but unfortunately it was closed. Fortunatly, it did had a low ledge outside that was not closed, and provided a perfect napping perch with a view up the towering walls.

After our little rest, we headed into the Jewish quarter. Over 80,000 people we deported from Prague. Pinkas Synagogue has commemorated their passing by painting their names, adn the dates of their birth and deaths on the interior walls. The names of the heads of the Family were in red, followed by the rest of the family in black. There were so many that it made the cream walls appear grey with little red dashes. Much how the Vietnam memorial derives its power simply by giving names to the faceless soldiers who died, this place had a powerful reality. My own association was a little personal in that my Grandmother was born in Berlin in 1928, and remembers children dissapearing from her classroom. My father's family is Jewish, and though pretty much everyone had already emmigrated to NY by the turn of the last century, there were still several people on the wall that shared my surname. It was unsettling to say the least.

Upstairs, there waws an exhibit of art made by Children both in Prague's Ghetto, and the camps they were subsequently sent to. It is a testement to the resiliance of children that several of the drawings still featured smiling suns and bright colours. The display was a powerful mix of despair and hope - hope in the drawings themselves, and in the small type under few that read "survived", despair in the many that didn't.

Behind the synogogue sits one of the oldest Jewish cemetaries in Europe, with tombstones that have been dated from as far back as the 1500's with more believed to be even older still underground. The dead are buried in layers, and over time, the earth has shifted, puishing older and older stones up to the surface, where they lean on one-another's shoulders at crazy angles.

After so much heavieness, we decided to go for a walk down to the river, where we bought ice creams and then took a tram along the water's edge to Frank Gehry's Fred and Ginger Building, or The Dancing House, as it is also known. Gehry is known for his sinuous shapes and very modern design, and Fred and Ginger was no exception. Touted by some as a modern masterpiece, by others as an eyesore on an otherwise very classical European Street. We leave you to form your own opinions on the matter.

It was a very full day, and we were happy to discover that we had, in fact, bought tickets to the sleeper car, not just seats, on our overnight train back to Warsaw. On the train we met a couple of very nice Aussies who would be visiting New York soon. Being know-it-alls, we inundated them with advice. Crossing fingers that it was correct! We will be in Warsaw until tomorrow evening, and then off to Paris!