I woke up this morning with plans in mind to see some more sights in Warsaw before my flight. I have a difficult time getting out of my room on the mornings of departure. I must think that as soon as I leave I will have to turn back to retrieve a forgotten item. This morning I did manage to get three post cards in the mail to Arizona. If I were five years old, I would want a post card from post-Soviet era Warsaw.
Warsaw is unique for a number of reasons. It have come to think of it like the legendary Phoenix. Warsaw was demolished in the tradition of Capua, Carthage, and Numantia. Warsaw and its inhabitants were made an example of by both Hitler and Stalin simultaneously. The German fuhrer lent every available resource to Warsaw’s destruction, and the Russian premier blocked all aid to the Poles from the Allied side. The results were terrible and horrifying.
Warsaw had 1.3 million inhabitants before the war; a population about the size of modern day Dallas, Texas. There were fewer than 175,000 inhabitants by the end of the war. Today there are over 1.7 million people there. It is an amazing testament to the will of the human creature to thrive where it is naturally difficult to do so. Warsaw might have been a city which perished altogether from the wounds it suffered in the Second War. But, instead it is this warm, friendly, growing metropolis on the Vistula River.
I still do not have a grasp on what the Holocaust means, and neither does anyone, I don’t think. After visiting the Warsaw Uprising Museum yesterday, I have concluded that understanding an event like the Holocaust is beyond me as a human. In public school in the States we study only a few subjects at length; the Holocaust being one of them. I thought I understood. If I close my eyes I can imagine one of my grade school classes on picture day; 30 kids lined up in three rows next to an exhausted teacher, squinting into the sun. Can I imagine that all 30 have been murdered along with all of the other children in that school? And can I imagine that happening hundreds of times? Can I imagine the Jashari massacre of Kosovo taking place thousands of times in a six year timespan?
No.
albaniacalling 