Last day in Warsaw ~ Sunday, June 15, 2014

Sunday was a day that we got more immersed into Polish life, coming face-to-face with people to learn about Poland in a personal way.

One of many beautiful Polish churches

First thing in the morning, we walked up hill to the main street and entered the Holy Cross Church for Sunday mass.  That one single church service provoked a wide variety of reactions.  Some found the mass “wonderful,” while others found it boring or irritating or hard to relate to – then again, it was entirely in Polish!  Those familiar with Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy noted the slight differences in the service and rituals.  We could see that many Polish congregants were deeply moved, including the two Polish people from the hostel who attended, but the school-age kids who were led inside clearly did not want to be there.  All of us agreed that the church was pretty, though not that ornate – where was all the stained glass??  And how could you ignore the fact that there, in the marble pillar next to us, Chopin’s heart was interred?  The rest of his body was buried in France.  Doesn’t that provoke religious feelings in you???

Joseph trying and failing to fit in with the local Poles

From staid, conservative Catholicism, we entered the world of loud, proud, evangelical Christianity.  This is a new phenomenon in Poland.  Our contact was not planned.  Hundreds were gathered in the plaza in front of our destination, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, but they drew us in with their contemporary pop rock, red shirts emblazoned with “Jezus cie kocha,” and inexplicable waving of world flags.

Since we are Americans and used to such in-your-face religious expression, we walked around them and gathered around Donal for a lesson about the Polish Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the key battles commemorated on the plaques.  We strolled through beautiful Saski Park.  We found statues representing fields of knowledge, and all the history majors and Prof. O’Sullivan posed in the shadow of their historical muse. 

Smile for the camera!

They have legos in Poland too?

We continued our journey through town until the Warsaw Uprising Monument, broke for lunch, and met together in Castle Square.  The afternoon’s activity was to be a tour of the city of Praga across the Vistula. 

Once there, we discovered another side of Warsaw.  Praga is like a city in transition, composed of different types of buildings side by side: decrepit old elegant buildings, concrete Communist-era blocky structures, and modern colorful office buildings.  Unsuccessful at finding a renovated Jewish bath house, we did find a building that still had a mezuzah container on the entrance gate. 

But the highlight of the day was hanging out with Polish college students from SWPS (Warsaw University of Social Sciences and Psychology). 

Students from all corners of the world 

Four of them had volunteered to meet us in the college cafeteria, and in short order they offered to show us around Lazienki Park and the Palace of Culture.   

Man, I look good!

The park had interesting wildlife.

We saw peacocks, red squirrels, tiny mice with stripes down their back that darted around the bushes, and friendly ducks.  Bridges arched over beautiful ponds, and fountains sprayed.

Waffles, cream, and warm
toffee sauce - the best!

It was gorgeous, but of course so
was dessert at the café.

We had to hurry to make it to the Palace of Culture look-out tower before it closed at 8 p.m., and we got in the door with 2 minutes to spare.  Luckily they let us stay up there (33 floors high) to marvel at the perfect view of Warsaw on the sunny and clear day.

Stalin's "gift" to Warsaw 

   

The spaceship is actually a soccer stadium!

“Speak to us in Californian,” one of the students asked.  This is strange.  We have accents?  Nonsense.  Our English is the standard version!  While half of them practiced their English on us, the others spoke Spanish to some of us.  What an opportunity it was to meet sweet and friendly people like us who took time to show us around.  We all had a great time.    

Seeing another world together 

The Warsaw Uprising and national art ~ Saturday, June 14, 2014

Poland Pride! 

Go, Poland!  On Saturday we learned about Polish history, nationalism, and food.  Here are the years Poland was independent between 1772 and 1918: zero.   Here are the years Poland was independent after that: from 1918 – 1939, then from 1989 to the present. 

Those side-long looks

Poles have erected monuments and museums to display the war heroes and political leaders of the past.  The museums that we visited on Saturday, the Warsaw Uprising Museum and the National Museum, emphasized Polish ethnicity above all, and they neglect to bring attention to the fact that Poland was also home to Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Jews, and Germans.   Poland today is much more homogeneously Polish (94% of the population), and that’s one reason our group attracts so much attention.  And we’re so obviously American: clothes, hair, backpacks, language, and smiles.  Courtney was pestered by a boy who kept running up to her and shouting random phrases he had learned in his English lessons: “Right turn!”  “Open the door!”

The British Liberator 

As you walk into the Warsaw Uprising Museum, the room vibrates with a heartbeat, immediately sucking into the intensity of the events that occurred.  The museum is full of visuals (photos, videos), documents (letters, lists, maps) and items (weapons, uniforms, sewer covers) that tell about the revolt in an exciting manner.  Riveting objects in the museum include the classical BMW motorcycle with a side car.  Each and every person in our group happily sat on it for a photograph (see our Gallery).  In the basement was a sewer pipe you can crawl through to experience how kids and smaller adults stealthily made their way under Warsaw to bring messages and supplies to people on other sides of the city – lucky for us, the pipe was unrealistically clean. A fighter plane was suspended from the ceiling with moving shadows to simulate spinning propellers.

Rauhman, Jonathan, Lovia, and
distracted Dylan drinking a cup of kawa

Want to travel back in time to 1940s Warsaw?  Stop at the elegant café, complete with ornate decorations and photographs of the sophisticated actors who refused to perform for the Germans, and so served as waitresses and waiters.   Actually, some of the displays were truly frightening, showing Hitler’s collective punishment of thousands of Poles.  To top it off, at the end we saw a short film that showed aerial views of the piles of rocks and bombed out buildings that was Warsaw after the Uprising, resembling the unreality of a Hollywood action movie set. 

Hey Courtney! Who was Jan Matejko?

Jeanette makes a figure come to life (notice the hair)!

After the Uprising Museum we took a tram downtown to eat lunch on our own.  The day was on-and-off rainy and windy, and it was too wet for our planned bike ride, so we went to the National Museum.  Courtney presented her research on the painter Jan Matejko.
His most famous painting was gargantuan, spreading from wall to wall and ceiling to floor, showing the victorious Polish battle against German knights.  There were elaborate, detailed statues of Jesus and other New Testament scenes (one had actual hair on the characters!), Catholic saints, and other biblical figures.  Polish national art includes romanticized pink-cheeked peasants and also more realistic portrayals of the rich and poor.

That evening, we had our Polish pub meal.  We had great appetizers!  We played bonding games.  By then everybody was hangry: that means, hungry and angry because it took so long to get the main course.  When playing Telephone, Krystle chose the phrase “when’s the second course?” and the platters of meat finally landed in front of us. 

Filled to the brim, exhausted beyond our imagination, we retreated to the hostel.  Everybody got a second wind and stayed up until all hours!    

Or you'll be sleeping outside with the Poles! 

Introduction to Warsaw's Jewish history ~ Friday, June 13, 2014

No day is better than Friday the 13th to have our first full day in Warsaw. Most students awoke with the sunrise at 4 a.m., bright and energetic partly wondering why we were all up so freaking early.  Some went out to explore the neighborhood, to find coffee and croissants, and to gaze at the buildings.  The hostel served breakfast at 7:30: fresh rolls, slices of cheese and meat, tomatoes, cucumbers, butter and jam, OJ, tea and coffee.  By 9 a.m. we assembled outside the hostel to walk together to the bus stop unprepared for the long emotional day ahead of us.

The day’s program took us from hell to heaven!  Our Warsaw guide, Kasia, works as a translator of documents hidden in the Jewish ghetto of Warsaw that are held in the archives of the Jewish Historical Institute, and so lucky for us, we got special access to the Institute’s holdings. 

Kasia

First we watched “912 Days of the Warsaw Ghetto,” which showed original photo footage and maps about the fate of Warsaw’s Jews after Nazi Germany conquered Poland.  About 30% of Warsaw’s population was Jewish, and so the walled region of the city in which the Jews were forced to move was pretty large.  It was very difficult to hear about the terrible deprivation and cruelty, to see the photos of emaciated people and dead bodies, the “deportations” of Jews onto trains that took them to death camps, and the massive destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.  For a film being only 37 minutes long, it felt as if we had all aged ten years. 

Unearthed milk cans

Emotionally numbed, we went into a room of photographs of the Jewish people of Poland when they were alive and well.  The historian Emmanuel Ringelblum, who had lived in the Warsaw Ghetto, had hidden Polish and Yiddish documents and reports from Jews in Warsaw and from other Polish ghettos in three metal milk cans and small metal boxes and buried them underground.  Recovered after the war’s end, the documents give the world a glimpse into the lives of these Jews who were so mercilessly killed.  

Anthony absorbed in study

After such a gut-wrenching experience, what greater relief than to go to a cemetery? We took a bus to the huge Warsaw Jewish burial ground dating back to the 17th century. The area was overgrown with tall trees that surrounded the graves that were covered in vines and moss. 

Where o' where could he be?

Many of the gravestones were toppled over and so eroded that they were impossible to read. Unexpectedly, the cemetery evoked feelings of calm and positive sentiment towards the past. The great grandfather of Adam, a member of our group, is buried there, and although we searched, we eventually concluded that it would take a lifetime to find that stone!

Memorial dead tree at the
Gestapo Pawiak Prison site

In hindsight, it is astonishing to remember the next few activities, so we will just list them here and let you all gasp:

(1) we took a tram to the center of town for lunch, stopping on the way to gawk at the memorial site where the Gestapo imprisoned and tortured Polish dissidents;

(2) we took a bus to the Warsaw Ghetto Fighters Monument;

Warsaw Ghetto Fighters Memorial 

(3) seeking cover from the rain, we went into the unfinished Museum of the History of Polish Jews (nice gift shop!);

(4) we walked through the rain to the remains of the bunker of the Warsaw Ghetto fighters, who blew themselves up rather than submit to the Nazis;

(5) and it was all climaxed by a rainy visit to the Umschagplatz memorial — that’s where the Jews were forcibly loaded into trains.  You get the idea.  Thank goodness it was time to return to our cozy Hostel Helvetia!   

The mood of the day changed with the Sabbath evening service and meal at the Nozyk Synagogue in Warsaw.  The regular Jewish Sabbath joy was elevated by a young boy’s Bar Mitzvah celebrated during the service.  In the men’s section on the first floor, our guys joined hands with the other male congregants and guests to dance, and up in the balcony the women in our group urged them on with pride!  Afterwards, we ate together with the Bar Mitzvah family, the chief rabbi of Poland Rabbi Michael Schudrich, and regular members of the Warsaw community — about 45 people crammed into a small dining room with a 5-course meal.  In addition to the lively conversations, we were treated to the boy’s Bar Mitzvah chanting and his father’s loving and warm speech.  The family was so grateful for our presence: we magnified their happiness, and they were a balm for our spirits.

The long festivities caused us to miss the last bus, and we walked back to the hostel in the cool night air.  It was a very good first day with memories that will last a long time.

There are just no words for this.

We're Here!

(L-R): Donal, Dylan, Mily, Jeanette, Glenda, Jack, Lovia,
 Courtney, Jody, Aleisha, Jeremy, Adam, Daniel, Krystle,
 Anthony, Jonathan, and Joseph

Our flight to Warsaw was on Lufthansa, on a huge plane that had two stories with individual movie players for each passenger.  Everyone could get up and walk around, and some students snoozed, others took advantage of the free movies.  German airline allow alcoholic beverages.  Since it is against CSUN rules to drink, of course none of the students imbibed the wonderful beers or wine!  After a stop in Munich, where we checked into the European Union with our passports and enjoyed the free beverages and discovered yet another style of bathroom (the circulating cloth hand dryers were a novelty to this young set of students, not so for the elders!), we took the short flight to Warsaw Chopin Airport and met up with another student and our Warsaw guide, Kasia.

Watching the World Cup, Brazil v. Croatia

After settling down at the hostel, we took a walking tour (led by Donal [Prof. O’Sullivan]).  We walked along a street with beautiful and full of old-looking historic churches, gates, statues, buildings, and gorgeous vistas.  It seemed like a fairy tale!  We spent the evening enjoying scenic Old Town Warsaw. 

University of Warsaw main entrance

Some people watched the World Cup in a bar, others ate authentic Polish food in outside restaurants and were eaten alive by mosquitoes!

Old Town, getting dark

Babakan - historic gates of Old City

 Cultural differences we noticed:

1. All that public transportation, so readily available, was astonishing.  We took a public bus from the airport directly to the neighborhood of our hostel.  Can you believe that University of Warsaw has no student parking lots??  Just trams leading up to the arches at the university entrance. 

2. Polish society is very white.  The black students among us got special attention: on two occasions, people asked very politely if they could be photographed with the black students.  The rest of us just either blended in (we thought!) or felt obviously darker, smilier, or obviously American. 

3. The night life in the area we were in was very different!  People stay up later and eat later.
 They seemed far more laid back: no one is in a rush in the restaurants, and people were outside in “patio dining” restaurants enjoying the cool evening air.

Then we all went back to the hostel for an attempt to sleep before Friday’s busy schedule.