Warsaw

The hostel in Warsaw is in Praga Poludnie, an affluent, leafy suburb of the city, a few minutes’ walk to the Polish National Stadium. It is a large, 3 storey family house, built in the 1930's and the owner, Ewe, lives upstairs on the top floor with her husband. On the middle floor, there are 5 large bedrooms (I think) and two bathrooms, which is a pretty generous ratio. It is immaculately clean and very quiet. There are many restaurants and small bars close by and I eat each evening in a Turkish restaurant that does fantastically succulent lamb chops with freshly baked Turkish bread, salad and sweet EFES beer. Lovely. I try to extend the 2 nights, but she is fully booked, so I resolve to get a flavour of the city and to revisit on my way back from the Baltic States.

I spend the morning wandering around the Old Town, a maze of squares and cobbled streets, nestling against the imposing city walls. Most of the area was deliberately and systematically ruined by the Germans in the Second World War, in that time honoured tradition of trying to destroy a people’s spirit by obliterating their historical buildings, but much remains of the original buildings and much has been carefully and sympathetically rebuilt, so it is hard to spot the difference between the two.

Randomly, I find myself walking out of the Old Town and spot a sign for the Polish National Museum (at least I think that’s what it says), so I head in that direction. The main exhibition is one charting the history of Jews in Poland since the 12^th Century. It is a rich and long history, with extended periods of peace and tolerance punctuated by short, sharp phases of oppression. Seeing it as a continuous whole, however, puts those short periods of intolerance into a wider historical perspective and perhaps helps demonstrate that Jewish History is more than just The Holocaust. The exhibition is skilfully and cleverly done, interweaving, audio and visual elements with documents and artefacts, so it is an immersive experience which I guess is supposed to make you feel part of that history. It is a fiction, of course and a welcome one, as not all periods of history would have been fun to try and exist in.

Indeed, one can’t help but be compelled and repulsed by the history of the Jews in Europe between 1933 and 1945. Part of the exhibition chronicles the life of the Warsaw Ghetto, where, in the 1940's, approximately 400,000 Jews were contained in a walled area of around 3 square kilometres until its ‘liquidation’ in 1943, when most of the inhabitants were sent to Treblinka. There was an armed uprising and an SS Officer called Stroop was despatched by Himmler to put it down. He produced a remarkable report (The Stroop Report) on the work carried out, contained in what was intended to be a leather bound commemoration album for Himmler himself. It details with dry, cold accuracy the systematic destruction of the ghetto, block by block, house by house in matter of fact, nonchalant prose. There are lists of people killed and equipment captured, of houses raised to the ground, of bunkers where people tried to hide, being emptied or burnt. The album contains an astonishing collection of around 52 photographs which bear witness to the activities carried out, each with a hand-written description beneath: a group of people, mostly women and children, being removed from a hiding place, hands raised in surrender, a young boy looking both frightened and bemused, a German soldier looking directly into camera (‘Forcibly pulled out of dug-outs’), three people, a young man and two women, probably in their early 20's, captured by German soldiers (‘These bandits resisted by force of arms’). The photographs are incredible and unique spots of time, sometimes beautiful in their composition and always chilling in terms of their content. They are clear, sharp-edged and it seems that the only thing that separates me, now, from that event, then, is the split-fraction of a second it takes for a shutter to open and close.

The National Stadium

Hostel balcony view

Old Town

Royal Palace

Colourful Restaurant

City Walls

Polish Hokey Cokey Champion shows how it's done

St John's Church. What a fantastic door!

Bar candle holder. Beware the dangers of alcohol!

Monument to Unknown Ghetto Heroes

Museum of Polish History. Located at the centre of what was the Jewish Ghetto

'Forcibly Pulled Out of Dug Outs'

'These Bandits Resisted by Force of Arms'


Stroop report information and pictures