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Published: July 11th 2016
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I'm sure you've been anxiously awaiting my blog post after visiting Auschwitz yesterday. I just can't find the words to describe what I saw and felt. Rita offered to write about it as a guest post and to share her pictures. And hopefully she will...she got pretty far in her writing last night but what she wrote magically disappeared. I have also had that happen so I think there's a glitch in the website...couldn't be our tech skills, I'm sure.
So I'll leave our very long, emotional day in Auschwitz to her and I'll tell you about Warsaw. We arrived here late last night and my first impression is that it is a very modern city with tall new looking buildings, busy streets, all it up. Warsaw was almost completely destroyed in WW II so it has been rebuilt..explaining the modern big city look...very different from Krakow that was mostly untouched by the war. We did start the day at the Warsaw Jewish Cemetery but it was a very different experience. It's huge...one of the largest in Europe and mostly well maintained. It has graves of a number of important Warsaw ghetto leaders and resistance fighters but it also had graves
of people famous for their contributions to culture in Yiddish theater, literature, etc. We then walked along the area of the Warsaw Ghetto...saw the umpschatzplatz, from where people from the ghetto were sent to Treblinka, the site of Mila 18, where the last of the resistance fighters committed suicide rather than be captured. The ghetto itself no longer exists but the story of the 400,000 Jews that were forced to live there and their terrible fate does.
The rest of the day was spent in the new Museum of the History of Polish Jews...sounds like an exciting place, right? There's been a lot written about it as it opened in 2013. Rita and I were not so impressed. It does have lots of different media in its exhibits but between a guide who wasn't very good and maybe being tired, it doesn't get favorable reviews from us Although the fact that it exists at all in this country and that the contributions Jews made to Poland and the part they played in its history is something.
Dinner on the other hand...was one of the better meals we've had. We've been trying different local beers the last couple of days...Apple,
lemon and today cherry flavored...and we finally had the pierogies that everyone's been talking about. Dough filled with potatoes and cheese, or feta and spinach, or mushroom, quite good but not for a low carb diet.
Tomorrow is the last day of our trip. We'll be touring around Warsaw some more. To be honest I'm kind of done with touring and ready to go home. I do want to write about the other people on this trip that we've gotten to know and maybe some of what I'm taking home with me, but I'll save that for a final post...maybe from the airport.
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