POLAND, WARSAW: ROYAL PALACE

June 27, 2019

Old Town Market Square, where we were staying in Warsaw, is only a block from the beginning of Castle Square, which is the starting point for the Royal Route, a 7-mile road that leads from the Royal Castle to King Jan III Sobieski's 17th-century personal residence. A main artery of the city, it is chock-full of things to see. 

The first thing we noticed when we entered Castle Square was a 72-foot-tall column topped by a statue of King Sigismund II of Vasa, who moved Poland's capital from Krakow to Warsaw in 1596. The column was erected in 1664 and has the distinction of being the first secular monument in column form in modern history. You'll notice, however, that although the king has a sword in one hand, he is carrying a cross in the other hand. Not much separation between church and state in those days.

Sigismund made it through the 1939 Nazi invasion of Poland, but on September 1, 1944, during the Warsaw Uprising, the column was demolished in bombing raids. Miraculously, the figure of Sigismund more or less survived. 

Photo from Wikipedia

Sigismund had some reconstructive surgery after the war and was re-elevated to the top of a new granite column in 1949. Today the column is a popular gathering site. Every time we were near it, there was a busker of some sort playing on the steps and dozens of people languishing on or near its base.

To the right of the column is a huge red brick building. This is the Royal Castle, once the home of Polish monarchs (including Sigismund, the dude on the column) and now a Polish art and history museum. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The castle's clock tower is almost 200 feet tall, and its base dates to the mid-14th century. The castle was hit by bombs during the initial invasion of Warsaw in September 1939, which destroyed the roof and turrets. Immediately after the Germans seized the city, they cleaned out everything that was valuable from the building, sending some items to Germany and giving others to Nazi officials living in Warsaw.  However, some of the art was secretly smuggled out by Polish museum staff at great risk to their lives. The Nazis dynamited what was left of the 600-year-old building in 1944 in retribution for the Warsaw Uprising.

POLAND, WARSAW: CHOPIN

June 27-28, 2019

Quick, name a famous musician who was born in Poland! 

Did you come up with Frederic Chopin? That is who I think of first, but you may have thought of Ignacy Paderewski or Arthur Rubinstein. But I doubt it. Chopin is one of the major figures of the Romantic period, right up there with Beethoven, Brahms, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Verdi, Wagner, Dvorak, Strauss, Grieg . . . It's a big list.

Chopin was born in a small town about 30 miles from Warsaw in 1810. He grew up in Warsaw, where he was quickly discovered to be a child prodigy, much like Mozart. (In fact, Chopin is sometimes referred to as "the Polish Mozart.") He began composing and giving concerts at age seven. At age 20, he left for Italy just as war was breaking out in Poland, but unrest in Italy caused him to go to Paris in 1831. Tragically, he was never permitted to return to Poland. He died at age 39 in 1849. The cause of death was listed as tuberculosis. He had been sick with respiratory problems most of his life, but scientists and historians have speculated on many other possible causes of the composer's final illness. A examination of Chopin's heart 165 years after his death, however, established that he did, in fact, likely die of complications of tuberculosis.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. More on Chopin's heart later.

Poland ADORES Chopin. In the US, we have John F. Kennedy Airport, Reagan Airport, and George Bush Airport, among others, but Poland's largest international airport is Lotnisko Chopina w Warszawie, or Warsaw Chopin Airport.

Picture by Adrian Grycuk, from Wikipedia

And guess what you can buy there? Chopin chocolates, of course! It reminds me of Austria's Mozart chocolates. Sadly, I didn't buy any. This little box cost almost $35. Sigh. 

POLAND: SLEEPING AND EATING IN WARSAW

June 26-28, 2019

After flying to Warsaw from Krakow, we spent most of the first day at Treblinka and then checked in to "Stone Steps Apartment," which acted as our base in Poland's capital city for the next two days.

The apartment is at one end of the charming Old Town Market Place, a square that is the oldest part of Old Town Warsaw. The square almost made it through the war, but immediately after the Warsaw Uprising, which began on August 1, 1944, and lasted 63 days, the Nazis completely decimated the city, systematically burning or blowing up every single structure in Warsaw, including private homes, churches, and historically significant buildings. By the time they were done, 85% of Warsaw's historic center was gone, along with 150,000 of the city's citizens who were killed in the suppression.

Old Town Market Place, with its roots in the late 13th century, was obliterated. The arrow below shows the location of Old Town Market Place:

Here is the square from a different angle.  (These photos are from information stands that are placed around the Old Town district of Warsaw.)

Eisenhower visiting Warsaw's Market Square.
Photo from Wikimedia Commons

These are photos of other areas of the city that our guide had:

Some believed the remains of the city should be left as a memory of the war and that the Polish capital should be relocated. However, in one of the most moving stories of post-war Europe, this city square and surrounding Old Town buildings were meticulously rebuilt by locals during a five-year period ending in 1952. They salvaged what they could from the rubble and used 22 historical city landscapes painted by Italian artist Bernardo Bellotto in the late 1700s and other historical documents and photographs to reconstruct their beloved Warsaw. While many were employed in the reconstruction, it is said that the entire population of the city, and indeed of the country, contributed labor and materials.

And how was this massive building project funded? The sole source of financing was donations made by mostly Polish people to the Social Fund for the Rebuilding of the Capital (SFOS). In 1980, Warsaw's Old Town was selected to be part of UNESCO's World Cultural Heritage List.

Our view from the front steps of our apartment was this:

Compare that photo to this one from 1945. The tallest three-window level on the left of the above picture is the re-creation of the three-window level below.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

POLAND: TREBLINKA EXTERMINATION CAMP

June 26, 2019

We met our driver at 6:30 AM for transportation to the Krakow John Paul II Airport. We had a short flight to Warsaw--about 40 minutes--and were picked up by Kasia and a driver who drove very, very, very fast. We left the airport and headed straight to the Treblinka Extermination Camp, completing what is usually a two-hour drive in an hour-and-a-half. Needless to say, I was a little on edge when we arrived.

Treblinka was a Nazi extermination camp from July 1942 until August 1943. In that 14-month period, around 800,000 Jews were killed in its gas chambers. About 300,000 were from Warsaw, and the other half million were from all over Europe. In addition, 2,000 Roma people, whom we would call gypsies, were also killed there. Overall, Treblinka was the second deadliest Nazi camp after Auschwitz.

Besides the gas chamber deaths, many of the inmates who worked in the penal camp portion, either in the gravel pit or cutting down trees in the forest for the crematoria, also died. In the three years the camp was operational, about half of the 20,000 laborers died from hunger, disease, overwork (over 12 hours/day of exhausting labor), and excessive punishment. Most of those who lived were evacuated to other camps when Treblinka was liquidated, and many died in those camps.

Treblinka was divided into two parts. Treblinka I was the labor camp opened in September 1941. The workers were mostly Polish civilians who were arrested at will and sentenced to work for at least six months in the gravel quarry, which supplied material for road construction.Conditions were horrendous.

Treblinka II was the extermination camp, one of three Nazi camps specifically built to facilitate mass murder.

We started our tour at a bare-bones visitor center looking at maps, seeing a few artifacts, getting background information, and watching three short videos.

There were not a huge number of barracks built at Treblinka like there were in Auschwitz. Only 1,000 prisoners were in the camp at a time. Everyone else who arrived was herded straight from the train to the gas chamber without even being recorded. None of the gas chambers remain at the site. The Nazis tried to destroy all the evidence of what happened here, dismantling everything. They even plowed the ground and seeded it with grass and flowers before they left.

Treblinka I

  

At first, the bodies from both parts of the camp were buried in mass graves, but when the Nazis realized bodies could be used as evidence against them, they had prisoners dig them up and burn them in huge cremation pits that can be seen in the reproduction below. There were no crematoria here like the ones at Auschwitz--just open pits of burning bodies.

Treblinka II