Warszawa -- Living Shadows and Scars of the Past

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A Polish man sat next to me on the train from Berlin to Warsaw. He was surprised I was going to see Warsaw, and he talked about how it was destroyed in the war, how Eisenhower said it could never be rebuilt, and how the Poles became known as re-builders because they restored their city. And he said he grew up near the ruins of the Ghetto, and he remembers playing with bones.

The sunset over the Polish countryside was spectacular. The air was heavy with the smoke of post-harvest burn offs--you could see the smoke hanging over the fields. The sun was the colour of the autumn leaves, but it left a trail of pink clouds as it sank.

Warsaw surprised me. The main train station feels like a subway station, with low ceilings, no glass, and cold, grey concrete everywhere. But when you come up to the street, there are neon lights and stalls of vendors. The underground passage beneath a major intersection was full of people tiny shops of food, jewellery, Internet terminals...

It's like a different world here--what Warsaw is trying to become, and what it was before struggling against each other.

The cobblestone streets of Warsaw are hard and uneven--newer because they were probably rebuilt after WWII like most of the city, so they haven't had time to be worn smooth by feet and wheels.

My hostel is just off a main street, which is busy and chaotic. After walking down past the monstrous Palace of Culture and Science, a 'gift' from Stalin, I turned into the Saxon Gardens. Immediately, the traffic was gone, replaced by falling leaves and wide paths leading to a massive white fountain. Beyond the fountain is Poland's Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, complete with guards, flowers, and candles. Nearly all the monuments here have flowers and candles--it's very beautiful.

Closer to the old town there are nuns in habits and priests in cassocks mixed in with the people on the street. The old town square was surreal. It was rebuilt after being nearly completely destroyed. The only clue to the actual newness of it is the dates on the buildings--most of them are in the 1950s. But the rebuilding was so carefully done--the paint colours, the murals, the stonework was all carefully done based on old records.

Just a fews steps away from the old and new towns (New Town is from the 1400s or something), the soviet architecture hits you like a cement wall. Not all of the city got the same meticulous restoration as the historic core. The shadows of the Soviet era are so deep here, maybe because so much of the city had to be rebuilt under their watchful eye.

On my second morning here, I wandered around the suburbs of Mirow and Muranow looking for a few monuments and the Museum of the Warsaw Uprising. I didn't find anything I was looking for, but it was still an interesting walk. These suburbs are where the Jewish ghetto was, before it was razed to the ground in 1943 after the Ghetto Uprising. Only a few scraps of the old ghetto remain, but they are scattered throughout the streets, and not always easy to find.

When I turned down Ul Walicow, narrow street, I found the ruins of a red brick building on one side of the street, and a brick wall incorporated into a new building on the other side. It looked pre-war to me, and seeing the building, with the broken windows and decaying bricks spooked me. I couldn't bring myself to get out my camera. I paused to ingrain the image in my mind, and continued on.

Around the corner was a little neighbourhood coffee shop where no one spoke English. But when I got my coffee, and thanked the woman in polish, I got the biggest, warmest, smile from her. It gave me the courage to go back and photograph the building which I have since learnt was in fact part of the Ghetto. The old parts of the wall on the other side of the street were part of the original Ghetto wall.

I had given up on finding the monuments, and nearly given up on finding the museum too, when I figured out where it was. I had been practically circling around it all morning. As I walked down the street toward the museum, a woman in her fifties approached from the other direction walking her dog. I was watching her dog as she passed me, so it was out of the corner of my eye that I saw her turn her head towards me, and I heard a spitting noise. I thought it was rather rude that she would spit right in front of me, but when I looked down, there was spit on my sleeve--she had spit on me!

The Museum of the Warsaw Uprising (which was in 1944, and is not to be confused with the Ghetto Uprising of 1943), is definitely among the top museums I've ever been to. The exhibits were dimly lit, and there were sound and light effects throughout.

After leaving the museum to head back to the hostel, I found one of the sites I'd been looking for all morning. Ul Prozna is a street that survived the war. It too was part of the original Ghetto. It is shrapnel scarred and bullet-pocked, and it is decaying, but it is the only Ghetto street to have survived the war.

I learnt a life lesson on the streets of Warsaw--in all my wandering, I found what I was looking for only when I stopped looking for it.

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Photos

Mermaid (symbol of Warsaw) in Old Town Square