johan's Journal

But i overslept. I told M. i'd meet her in the lobby of the hotel at 10am. About 10:05 i woke because a strange electronic device was making "doot doot" noises. My vocation for the past 20 years has been to take care of electronic devices that make these noises when they are sick, so i'm highly sensitized to any sort of electronic bleeping or blooping. I opened my eyes. "Hmm..." i thought, "this appears to be a hotel room complete with a phone that wants some immediate attention." As i picked up the phone, i looked out the window and saw grey. About 50m away from wherever i was, a large, also grey building. I could tell that i was very high above the ground.

"Aruh?" i said into the phone.

"Hi!" said M.

Ah, yes, that's M., we're in Poland, where i am visiting, and i was supposed to already be downstairs in the lobby of the hotel... 6 minutes ago, ready to go do and see stuff. Crap.

A short while later M. and i headed out towards her flat for some brunch. We stopped by a market and she bought few things. It was one of those older-style markets you don't see much now in the U.S. -- a covered building with long and wide hallways, stalls lining both sides. They seemed to sell everything. M. bought a few foodstuffs, and we left.

Outside the market is a small snow-covered park, full of various corvids and Mallard ducks. In the sidewalk at my feet, i see a marker of the Jewish Ghetto's wall from the war. I stopped and look at it for a moment. We walk for a few minutes, and the we come to a small memorial that shows the area of the Ghetto in a sort-of sculpture, laid on top of a relief map of Warsaw.

I started to feel a little odd. It's about 11:30am, and i haven't had any coffee yet today, and i'm having difficulty processing this. I was a History major in college, and know more about the history of the Second World War than probably any other period of time from before i was born. I'd been to Europe many times before, and seen a few remnants of the war in Germany and the Netherlands. But this was powerful and sobering. In 1986, i recall that i saw the Anne Frank museum in Amsterdam, but that was quite some time ago, and it was somehow different. Maybe because it's a museum you chose to go to, as opposed to this small, non-descript memorial to the enormous pain and suffering for hundreds of thousands of people.

I started thinking and remembering what i knew. 70 years and a few months before i came to be standing at this spot, the Germans invaded Poland. France and Great Britain betrayed and abandoned Poland, failing to fulfill mutual defense treaties and other promises. A week or two later, the Soviet Union invaded from the East. Germany and the USSR had a peace treaty then, so they just divided up Poland. Of course the Poles fought for the survival of their nation, but up against two of the largest and most technologically-advanced armies of the day, they never had a chance.

A year after the invasion, right where i was standing, the walls went up, and the Jews in Warsaw were separated and confined within the Ghetto. And then, over the next few years, the Germans shrunk the ghetto and its population until there was nothing left. They became some of the millions and millions of people murdered, or starved and worked to death.

It's a lot to take in, especially pre-coffee. We were on our way to M's flat for brunch, so i pulled myself away from the small memorial and we trudged through the snow.

M's flat was very warm (warmer than my house in Austin) -- radiator heat, like i had in Chicago. I ate a lot of yummy sandwiches constructed of various homemade ingredients (like homemade mayonnaise, jam, or peanut butter), and i may have taken a nap. (Apparently all the sleep the night before wasn't enough... or maybe it was all the food and the warmth of the flat compared with the cold greyness of outside.)

Early in the evening, M. took me to see Old Town. I took some pictures but it was dark, this being the middle of January at around 52 degrees North latitude.

In Old Town we saw cool sites like Zygmunt's Column (those streaks behind it are sea birds flying by during the photo exposure) and the Market place .

All of Old Town was rebuilt after the war because the Germans destroyed it: first by the terror bombing and bombardment of Warsaw during the initial invasion in Sept of 1939, and then they completed the destruction, five years later in August 1944, in response to the Warsaw Uprising. Old Town was rebuilt after the war, in its various period styles. It is very strange to look at something that appears to be from the 13th or 15th century, but you know was meticulously pieced back together in the past 50 or even just 20 years.

It was the middle of January, but some Christmas lights and decoractions were still up, and even though it was cold and dark at 6pm, there were plenty of people out. Some of them were sledding down a big hill into a park near the Vistula River.

We walked back along the Royal Route and such a bunch of other cool stuff, like the Presidential Palace and a statue of Copernicus in front of the Royal Academy of Science