Going to Berlin 4 days before our JPs were due was a great idea! (Seriously)

First, a quick title explanation. Princeton requires every senior to write a thesis; most departments also require independent research junior year, too. The history department requires independent research both semesters junior year, both times culminating in a junior paper (JP). When we decided a month ago to go to Berlin this past weekend, neither Anna nor I really comprehended how close it was to our JP deadline of May 7. Both of us used Berlin as a major source of motivation, though, and we pretty much had full drafts together by the time our bus pulled away from Prague! (At the end of this post you'll see a celebratory post-JP ice cream picture of me and Anna). 

Though Michèle--mom's friend and my birthday twin--thought we might find the directions from the bus station to her apartment to be complicated, we found a nice German lady to show us how to get from the subway stop to the right street, and crashed almost immediately (though not before eating a kinder-egg!)

In the morning, we took our time waking up and then went for an all-day walk around the Schöneberg and Kreuzberg districts. Kreuzberg is definitely more on the tourist hit-list, but Schöneberg less-so. Among other sites, we saw where the socialist revolutionary/Marxist theorist Rosa Luxemburg was murdered, and ate lunch at the cafeteria in the basement of Rathaus Schöneberg (city hall) where JFK gave his "ich bin ein Berliner" speech (1:44) in 1963. We also walked through lots of parks--some of them secret--including many whose playgrounds were constructed of wood!

Kreuzberg was surrounded on three sides by the Berlin Wall, and when the wall came down, it was smack in the middle of the city. Rent was cheap at first so lots of artist-folk and other similarly-minded people came, but now there are huge conflicts between squatters and local governments--and the gentrifiers who are trying to come in and raise prices. 

Anna and I split off for a bit to wander the Turkish market--a strange mix of tourists buying Turkish delights (us) and fancy jams (also us) and locals buying necessities (fabric, vegetables, sandals, soap). The best part of the market, of course, was that many of the stands had free samples of their produce: the best pineapple I've ever eaten, perfectly-salted crispy cucumber, juicy orange, and lots and lots of jams. 

Very Berlin: outdoor ping-pong tables everywhere! (721 clan, if we come to Berlin for Thanksgiving, everyone can play at once! They do four-person games here, where each person gets a quarter of the table and each time someone hits it you run clockwise to the next quarter). 

I was also very impressed with the street art and murals that seemed to be everywhere; much more prominent than in Prague, certainly, and more purposeful and well-done in Berlin than anywhere else I've been. These faces are painted on the side of an apartment building complex, and each side of each building had a different set of people.

In the afternoon, we headed to the Jewish Museum. After wandering around aimlessly for a bit (the museum is huge and, despite maps, complicated to navigate) we realized that what we really wanted to see was the "The Whole Truth...everything you always wanted to know about the Jews" exhibit. The "Jew in a box/Ask a Jew" part has been pretty controversial--both the New York Times and the New Yorker wrote about it--but unfortunately we weren't there at the right time of day. Although I thought the exhibit was well-done and probably very informative for someone with little Jewish knowledge (it had sections on everything from "Who is a Jew?" and "Why do Jews cover their hair?" to "Is it okay to joke about the Holocaust" and "Can a Jew criticize Israel?"), it was strange to be the object of study. An exhibit on  Jewish history makes sense to me--but an exhibit about contemporary Jewish practice made me feel kind of like a goldfish. 

People have lots of questions for the Jew in a Box to answer.

Before heading to Shabbat services, we stopped in at this Russian dive for a much-needed snack. We got potato-filled fried dough, essentially, and I have no idea what it was called but it was delicious! Huge numbers of Russian immigrants have come to Berlin since the fall of Communism. 

Saturday was a tourist-trap day. Not really, but Anna and I did All The Things You're Supposed to Do in Berlin. Potsdamer Platz was the meeting place of the four occupational zones of Berlin post-WWII. Now, there's a cheesy segment of the Berlin Wall set up there with an even cheesier "get your East Berlin stamp in your passport here!" booth (how is that legal?).

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is right smack in the middle of everything. Like the exhibit at the Jewish Museum, there's been a lot of controversy about this memorial, which opened in 2005. The memorial consists of 2711 concrete-like blocks of concrete of different heights, laid out in perfect, evenly-spaced rows and columns. But, unless you specifically know that the related Information Centre is beneath your feet, you have no idea that what you're walking through is a memorial. Consequently, we saw people our age (!) hop up on top of a block and jump from one to the next. Maybe they were were just being jerks, but it seems like after enough of that kind of behavior the municipality would think to put up explanatory plaques. 

The East Side Gallery of the Berlin Wall is probably the most-touristy place of them all. But we were tourists, so it's fine! The segments of the wall that are there include some original art, but mostly they've been redone and repainted by artists from around the world. This was one of my favorite segments--so many hidden pictures (Galya, made me think of you). 

Trains to Life--Trains to Death, by sculptor Frank Meisler is a dual memorial/commemoration at the Friedrichstrasse train station for those children saved in the kindertransport and those sent to their deaths at camps. There are four similar sculptures along the route of the kindertransport (of which Meisler was part) in which almost 10,000 Jewish kids were rescued and sent to foster families in the UK. 

I thought I was a pro Google searcher, but this apartment eludes me. If anyone can find any information  about a building in the Mitte district near Oranienburgerstrasse that is ornamented with monkeys and flowers, you get a shoutout in the next blog.

The dome/minaret of the Neue Synagogue (for a tour of synagogues I've seen this semester, click here). Thanks to Wikipedia, I know that the Neue Synagogue was built in the mid-19th century, but almost completely destroyed in WWII. What stands there now is almost entirely a reconstruction, and it consists pretty much just of the facade and ornaments--where the great hall used to begin, the building stops. There's an incredible amount of security out front--the entire sidewalk area in front of the synagogue is cordoned off, and two police officers pace back and forth constantly.

We had a bit of time to kill after dinner before heading back for our visit to the top of the Reichstag (more on that in a bit), so we meandered into the Tacheles workshop/gallery/artist refuge/sculpture park. (Again, thanks to Wikipedia, just learned that my original suspicion that the name Tacheles comes from the Yiddish/Hebrew was correct!) It was a bit hard to figure out how to get in--the facade of the building is massive and covered with graffiti, but the actual entrance to the sculpture garden is around a loopy-doopy path through a parking lot. I think we probably would have seen more had we gone earlier in the day, but we still got to see an incredible variety of styles of metal sculptures.

The Brandenburg Gate was one of the old gates to the city; it was damaged pretty badly during WWII, and made inaccessible by the Berlin Wall. For Americans, it's probably most famous as the location of Reagan's "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" speech in 1987 (1:11-2:01). Cool, second American president speech in as many days!

The Reichstag is the huge, impressively imposing building of the German Parliament.  From the end of WWII until  the 1990s, it wasn't used for meetings of the government. Two cool facts about it: 1. It was technically in West Berlin, but right on the border with East Berlin. 2. Hitler never set foot in the building, so it's one of the few things in Berlin/Germany that there's no WWII guilt about.

If you wait in line for a really, really long time (or come at dinner-time so only for a long time) you can get free tickets to go to the dome on the top of the Reichstag, which was constructed in 1997 to represent the unification of Berlin. It weights 12000 tons or something like that! Obviously we waited in line, and we got tickets to go up right after sunset, which was the perfect time because of the beautiful lighting! You could see so far. 

It also represents, however cliche, the transparency of government: from the dome you can look directly down into the room where parliament meets!

Sunday morning was quite relaxing. Again, we took our time waking up and then meandered with Michèle through some lovely urban parks to get to the train station that would take us to brunch with Pinkhead/Anya^2. What a wonderful German brunch! Lots of bread and cheese and jam and fruit...

We took another meandering route to the train that would take us to our bus back to Prague, and happened upon one of Berlin's many weekend flea markets. This one was like 250 one-stall thrifts stores, all squished in next to each other outside. Ever since I read the article in the Times of Israel about the organization Bring it Home and recovering Judaica from European flea markets, I've been hoping that I'd see it happen. Well, that there is a menorah. I didn't buy it; Michèle has a point: At least in Germany, "We're all a little bit Jewish."

The beautiful view on our bus ride home! This is already after crossing back into the Czech Republic, I'm pretty sure. Though this was one of the few views I actually got to see: luckily for us, the bus was fully equipped with outlets, which meant that we could work, uninterrupted by dead batteries, on our JPs for 3+ hours! I got almost all my footnotes done then. Somehow, footnotes always take the longest; first semester I spent like 8 hours formatting them up until I turned in my paper, three minutes before the deadline. The time zone really is a gift here (though I ended up submitting hours before 3pm EST anyway).  

This is the "wordle" from the final version of my paper--basically, the larger the size of the word in the wordle, the more times it appeared in my paper. So in case it wasn't clear enough, I wrote about Jewish students at Princeton University, especially one named Aaron (last name). 

Post-JP celebratory gelato at Angelato, with the creamiest, smoothest, best pistachio (including chunks!) and mango gelato flavors I've ever had! (Though nothing holds a candle to the Bent Spoon's blood orange). 

Sorry this post took so long to go up! A few hours after submitting my JP, I got the scary Blue Screen of Death on my computer. This is, I am told (by Michèle), what the Germans call "Glück im Unglück": good luck in bad luck. More bad luck: I still have 20 pages of final papers to write for classes here. More good luck: my program let me borrow a mini-notebook laptop, so it's better than nothing!

Budapest Part 2: For all you know, these pictures could be from 2008!

When I went to Hungary with Walter Payton College Prep's math team in 2008, it never occurred to me that I'd be back so soon. But, just over 5 years later (wow!) that's exactly what happened. It turned out to be a good combination of revisiting the sites I wanted to see again, but also getting a chance to see the parts of the city that are Off Limits to a high school trip. 

After a bit of a rough start (I'd intended to get up at 5:15 am to shower before leaving at 6:10am for the bus station, only to be shaken awake by my roommate Tess at 6:02am. Oops) we got to Budapest mid-afternoon on Thursday, which left plenty of time for exploring before dinner. I'd checked the weather beforehand and it was supposed to be sunny with blue skies and temperatures in the mid-high 70s the entire time, and it was true--we had gorgeous weather the whole time we were there!

A few of us took a walk from our hotel, located right near the famous Oktogon intersection, to the river and around through town and came upon Ronald Reagan strolling by with the Parliament in the background. (Actually, I'd been warned by Benj that we'd find Reagan, because he'd sent me a fantastic description of what to see and how to get there. I saw almost everything on his list!)

As soon as we rounded the corner and saw the Dohány Utca Synagogue, I started getting déjà vu. When we came to Hungary in high school, we spent only about 3 days in Budapest total. Each person was allowed to give one suggestion of something they really wanted to see; mine, of course, was the synagogue. Apparently, it's the second-largest in the world. This time, we did a tour and came back for services on Friday night--they were really strange, and I wasn't really a fan: despite the separate seating for men and women, and the meticulous covering of women's shoulders with scarves, there was an organ accompanying the cantor, and his selection of tunes seemed unfamiliar to everyone there, so no one sang along. It was more of a performance than a service. Oh well--a few of us went to Chabad for dinner, and somehow were there in time for all of Kabbalat Shabbat, too, so we got to sing in the end anyway. 

Here's a look at the interior of the synagogue. It's enormous, with two levels of balconies for women, and enough seats to fit almost 3000 people. They don't use it in the winter because it's not worth the money it would cost to heat the whole thing; usually services are in the Heroes' Synagogue, which is right next door. Fun fact: the synagogue is also adjacent to the apartment where Theodore Herzl was born.

This is the painted ceiling of the Rumbach Street Synagogue, one of the 18 synagogues still standing in Budapest. Though it doesn't hold services--the interior is currently being restored--there are occasionally events held there. 

Yet another shul, though this one is functional. It's on Kazinczy street, and it's used by a very small Orthodox community. 

After hanging out for a while at Akvarium--an outdoor bar/park fusion where Budapest's young people apparently sit and drink the night away--a few of us went to check out Szimpla, Benj's recommendation for the most popular of Budapest's "ruin bars." It's a very cool  collection of pubs and rooms for hanging out set up in an abandoned warehouse right in the old Jewish quarter. There's not really an overall style for the place; the decorations are a hodge-podge of random things like you can see here: disco balls, Christmas lights, hubcaps from cars, bike wheels, neon lights, etc. There's also an outdoor area, and it's just a very relaxed environment where you could sit with friends for hours and not feel like you have to keep buying drinks. Although I will say that I got a honey pálinka, a traditional Hungarian brandy, because I remember that my dad told me I was supposed to try that when I came in 2008.

Full moon! Or at least, mostly full. This is the view from my hotel window, overlooking Liszt Ferenc tér (Franz Liszt Square). 

The Central Market was filled with clothes and tapestries decorated in traditional Hungarian embroidery.  I didn't get one, but I did find a lovely teacup to add to my collection! Actually, the teacup is made out of wood, so I'm going to have to figure out how to coat it with lacquer so it's usable.

I think our tour guide told us that this little girl in front of Buda Castle--she's a princess--doesn't actually have a lot of significance but, in the past couple of years, she's become an icon in tourist's pictures. 

We crossed the Chain Bridge to get from Pest to Buda, and from there climbed up to Fisherman's Bastion on the Buda side (Pest is as flat as Chicago; Buda's got hills). In the background of this picture you can see the Parliament building which, according to Benj, is "literally always under construction because it is ornamented with actual gold leaf"--good thing we did a tour in 2008! Once we made it to the top, we only had a bit of free time to wander.

Although going inside the Matthias Church sounded appealing (the stained glass and frescoes are supposed to be incredible) I've seen a lot of churches in the past few months, and  the cakes and pastries at Ruszworm--"run by the last, still active Hungarian confectionery dynasty," whatever that means--sounded irresistible. Sara and I split a dobos torta, which was absolutely delicious, and exactly what I wanted to be eating while looking over the Danube.

Sitting in one of the window alcoves of Fisherman's bastion with the Parliament, and the Danube, behind me. For comparison with 5 years ago at pretty much the same spot (although probably about 30 degrees cooler), see the picture below.

March 2008.

A view of the Parliament, etc. from the Chain Bridge.

On Saturday night, I took a three-hour walk alone along the river before circling back through town . Everything was so pretty with the lights and, while the streets and bars were full of people, not many were walking down by the Danube, so it was nice and quiet. 

A bit south of the Parliament building I came upon these cast iron shoes on the promenade. It's a memorial to the Jews who were shot into the river by the Arrow Cross party in 1944-1945.

If ever there was a perfect day for going to an island where cars are forbidden, Sunday was the day. We had a few hours of free time before loading up on he bus back to Prague, and a group of us headed to Margaret Island, where we lay in the sun, played Frisbee, made friends with three-year-olds, and wore flowers in our hair. The day before, we'd gotten to spend a lot of time outside too; after our walking tour of the city, we went to the Széchenyi thermal baths, lazing away the evening in lots of mineral pools ranging in temperature from 65 degrees (so cold!) to about 120. There were also saunas and steam rooms, but I had trouble breathing in such hot air so I mostly stuck to the pools.

How I know summer is upon us: my feet enter a perpetual state of dirtiness because of running around barefoot!

This is my favorite mural that I've ever seen. The color of the painted sky was an exact match with the color of the real sky, and the real trees blended in perfectly with the painted ones. And with that lovely picture, I'll leave you until next time (which will probably be about the upcoming weekend in Berlin, with Michèle and Anna!)

A Week in Poland: Krakow, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Warsaw

As many of you know, I was in Poland this past week with my program. Though I tried to pare this post down to include the bare minimum number of photographs while still doing the week justice, there are a lot. I'll try to keep the captions succinct. The post is divided down into three sections corresponding to the three places in Poland where we spent the week. Before I begin, I should mention that most of the best things that I saw and did while in Poland were thanks to suggestions from Ricky, who spent two consecutive summers there. 

KRAKOW:

Krakow is a city more like what I was expecting Prague to be--and what Prague was until about 10 years ago, apparently. It's sort of halfway between now and post-Communism, with lots of Communist remnants (dilapidated buildings, etc.) still visible around the city. But it also surprised me in terms of how much I liked it. It's roughly the same size as Boston population-wise, and felt kind of similar in a way I can't quite describe. Although Kazimierz--the Jewish quarter--kind of put me on edge because it felt like a lot of it was not authentic (ie: restaurants with Hebrew-style fonts, that serve entirely non-Kosher menus), the rest of the city was a fantastic mix of urban grunge and modern developments trying to fit together.

In front of the Wawel Castle. It was built in the 1300s. Although we passed by it on our tour the night before, it was dark and cold then and I wasn't really paying attention to where it was relative to our hotel. So when I left a souvenir shop in the morning and found myself looking directly at the castle, I decided it was a good time to walk around there.

There were a couple of pictures that actually included the entirety of the clocktower, but this one includes the monument to Tadeusz Kościuszko (the horse statue in the background). Since he helped America win the Revolution, and apparently there's a monument to him in Chicago too, I figured I'd use this picture.

Good thing the internet exists; I just looked up what the deal is with this sculpture. Although it's often referred to simply as "The Head," it's title is actually "Eros Bendato" and it's a sculpture by the Polish-German artist Igor Mitoraj. Apparently it was really controversial when it was first placed next to the Town Hall in Krakow's Old Town Square in the early 2000s (in the background you can see the old market building and the top of St. Mary's Cathedral). Now, though, it's mostly a tourist attraction: yes, I picked his nose, and yes, I crawled around inside the head.

Well, I was wandering along on the streets of Old Town/When a legion of soldiers came marching by, uh-huh... But really, I was just exploring some of the side streets near Old Town in the area of Jagiellonian University and all of a sudden there was a pack of at least thirty soldiers (I'm assuming) in full-on winter weather soldier gear. In the back right corner of their pack, there was a blonde woman with curled hair and a fancy cream-colored dress. I have no idea why they were there or where they were going, but I switched directions and followed them for about 10 minutes (and had a stranger take this covert picture of me with them in the background).

St. Mary's Cathedral has the most beautiful interior of any church I've ever seen, and I've been to cathedrals in Rome, Florence, Jerusalem, and other cities. Unfortunately, you can't go to the top of the clock tower in winter, but luckily Ricky tipped me off that it was a place worth visiting, otherwise I wouldn't have gone. I don't think I've ever seen such an ornate church--each side chapel (I'm not sure if they have a special name) is worth looking at from an artistic perspective. On our tour the previous night, we learned that a trumpeter announces each hour, but that his call is cut off in the middle--allegedly because in the middle ages the trumpet player was shot in the throat in the middle of one of the notes.

Although most Jews lived concentrated in the Kazimierz area of Krakow before the War, the Nazis forced them into a new ghetto that they created in Podgorze, on the other side of the river. This square, Plac Bohaterów Getta, is where they were rounded up before being sent to death camps--the chairs are a memorial erected in 2005 meant to represent the lone pieces of luggage and furniture that were left after the liquidation of the ghetto--each chair represents 1000 victims. 
In the back right corner of the picture you see a stage. The stage is next to what was the Apteka Pod Orłem (the Pharmacy Under the Eagle)--the only business owned by a non-Jew that the Nazis allowed to remain open in the Jewish ghetto. Tadeusz Pankiewicz was awarded the title Righteous Among the Nations for the work he did providing medications and hair dye (to help the gray-haired looked younger) to Jews in the ghetto. The stage is set up for a musical celebration of the reopening of the pharmacy to visitors, on the 70th anniversary of the ghetto liquidation. Unfortunately, I misread a notice so I showed up hours before the opening and wasn't able to get back for the actual opening.

Only a fragment of the former ghetto walls remains standing. They were designed to look like gravestones. I can imagine that it's strange to live in the apartments behind the ghetto wall today.

This is the detail of the recently-restored ceiling on the Remuh Synagogue, which was originally built in the 1550s. It's named for Rabbi Moshe Isserles, who penned a new accompaniment to the Shulchan Aruch. The Rema (Prominent rabbis are often referred to by the acronyms of their initials) must have had a good sense of humor: he names his commentary of the Shulchan Aruch (literally "the set table") the "mapah" (literally: tablecloth).

Next to the Remuh Synagogue is the Old Jewish Cemetery (where Rabbi Moshe Isserles is buried). Though I did take a picture of his grave, I thought this was a more interested glimpse of the cemetery. After WWII, the cemetery was not in very good shape, to say the least. Lots of people came to help restore the cemetery, and in order to preserve the memory of those whose stones were broken and with missing parts, they put them together to create the walls oft he cemetery.

This is the interior of the Tempel Synagogue, which was a Reform shul built in the style of the Vienna Reform synagogues in the mid-1800s. It's only used as a shul a few times a year. The ceiling was amazingly ornate, but you'll have to wait for the Facebook album to see pictures (or just Google it).

The ceiling detail of the Kupa Synagogue, built in the 17th century. There are "frames" for a number of Biblical cities and scenes, and the chandelier (again: wait for the Facebook album) is comprised of a number of intersecting menorahs, which is really cool. We went to Kabbalat Shabbat services here on Friday night. From the balcony (because women sit in the balcony) I saw a stream of probably 50-60 boys walk in and it became clear very quickly that there were a couple yeshivas in Poland for the week. As soon as I'd convinced myself that I wouldn't know anyone because they were all Naomi's age, who should walk in but Kolya--one of Millie Miller's grandsons, and the brother of my best friend from grade school! I managed to catch him after services before the groups split for dinner, and it was so nice to catch up, even only for a few minutes. Who would have imagined that we'd run into each other in Poland, of all places!
(I should note that this was the second time I'd run into someone I knew, and we'd only been in Poland for three days. Two kids who I'd met at Purim happened to be staying in the same hotel as us in Krakow!)

AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU:

Our day started with a bus ride from Krakow to Auschwitz and, like I wrote about the ride to Terezin, it was hard not to wonder what was going through the minds of Jewish families packed into cattle cars as they took the exact same route. 

Going to see the camps outside of a Jewish context was a very strange experience. Although many of the other kids on my program are Jewish, and I am on the Jewish Studies "track" of my program, it is by no means a Jewish environment--I hope that that nuance will be clear through what I write here.  

The barracks at Auschwitz have been turned into museum displays and memorials to the more than one million people murdered at Auschwitz (or its satellite camps). There are cases full of glasses, kitchen utensils, and prosthetic limbs collected from those sent to the camps. One room is filled with 2 tons of hair--hair shaved off the heads of prisoners upon their entry to the camps. Seven tons of hair were discovered in total. For me the most jarring was a register with entries of the numbers of people murdered--when I saw "numbers" I mean their tattoo identification numbers, not the quantity of people.
Walking around the barracks, watching the groups of Israeli high schoolers wrapped in Israeli flags singing Vehi She'amda but not being with them was hard (Vehi She'amda is a liturgical passage that appears in the Passover Haggadah, and thanks God for saving the Jewish people from the persecution that has arisen, inevitably, in each generation). Although our tour guide was excellent, the singing, to me, felt more like what I should be doing, and I found myself singing the words quietly to myself.

Looking down onto the train tracks leading into Auschwitz-Birkenau. One of the things that was stressed on this trip--and which I hadn't really thought about before--was that hundreds of thousands of non-Jews were also victims of the Nazi death camps. Ethnic Poles, Roma/Gypsies, homosexuals, individuals with disabilities, political dissidents, Communists...all were targeted by the Nazis. An interesting nuance that we talked about a lot in Krakow (perhaps more on this later) is that in America you can identify as an "American Jew' (or "Jewish American"), while in Poland your Jewish identity precludes your identity as a Pole--if you extend this analogy, then there were about 6 million Poles murdered in WWII, and half of them were Jews.
Here, too, it was hard to watch groups of Israelis walking around but not to be with them. Although we lit memorial candles at a few locations, they were memorial candles, not yahrtzeit candles. And we didn't recite Kaddish (prayer said by mourners) at any point, which felt really strange to me. And while we really did talk a lot about the non-Jewish victims, the Jewish connection for me is still, obviously, the strongest. 

"Anti-Semitism is a sin against God and humanity," says this graffiti (or government sponsored PSA? Not sure) in Oświęcem.  Oświęcem is the town outside of Auschwitz and is a normal town with houses and schools and grocery stores. "Auschwitz" is just a Germanization of the Polish name (the Yiddish name is Oshpitzin). At the Auschwitz Jewish Center, we met a twentysomething Ukrainian guy who is volunteering there for the year. His English was excellent, and I thought he did a fantastic job telling us about the Jewish community in Oświęcem before the war. Only one synagogue remains, and the museum is built around it.At the center we met with a group of Polish high school students from the area--I think our "dialogue" was part of their Holocaust education. I was surprised by how little they knew about the Holocaust--naturally, the focus in Polish schools is on Polish victims, but they said that Jewish victims receive maybe one or two sentences in textbooks. I was especially surprised that their education is not more extensive simply by living in such close proximity to the camps... 

We had a bit of free time to walk around the town, so I went to the castle (and did a photoshoot of the swans you see in this picture). The castle has a very strangle little museum, clearly not visited very frequently. When I walked in, the security guard rang a bell to alert the desk-person (who was upstairs somewhere) that I was there; she proceeded to turn on lights in rooms and display cabinets as I walked through the "exhibits". There was one room that talked about Judaism--not the Jewish community of the town, but about Judaism--which I thought was really interesting. The best part, though, were the period-rooms that were set up to look like how they would have looked in the early 20th century. Oh, and add Poland to the list of countries where nature has called me to her forests...

WARSAW:

Warsaw was even more of a shock than Krakow was--it's a completely modern city with loud nightclubs, flashing neon lights, and shiny glass skyscrapers. But the post-Communist urban grunge is still very present in a weird mix with ruins left from WWII bombings, when most of the city was destroyed. 

The view from our hotel room: "Stalin's Gift to Warsaw," ie: the Palace of Culture and Science (PKiN), completed in 1955. Warsaw actually kind of reminded me of Chicago (okay, except for the traffic circle. We don't have those)--PKiN kind of looks like the Wrigley Building, but there's no fusion between the architectural styles of the buildings. 

Old Town! Yes, there was snow. The entire time we were there.

Grandma and Gideon, this one's for you: Chopin's last piano! Upon Ricky's suggestion, I went to the Frederyk Chopin Museum! For free! I actually went because Ricky said it was a really great, interactive museum, which is true.

Another of Ricky's suggestions (catching a theme here?): the main library of Warsaw University. Unfortunately, the roof garden (!) was closed because of the weather, but it was worth it to go just to see the building. Each of the panels you see has a passage about books written in a different language, though the two in the foreground are panels with math and music. The interior was cool, too: kind of a fusion student center/library all rolled into one. 

Etgar Keret's Warsaw house! The narrowest house in the world, according to the New York Times! It's not much to look at from the outside, but unfortunately I don't have the right connections to get me inside... Still, it was cool to see. (Etgar Keret, by the way, is an Israeli author who writes really absurd stories). 

The Nozyk Synagogue is the only Warsaw synagogue to survive the War.--because the Nazis used it as a horse stable. Here we met one of the rabbis, an American, and had an interesting conversation about what pre-war Jewry in Warsaw looked like, and what it looks like now. One of the most interesting things was that non-religious, young female Jews were most likely to survive--it was easiest for them to a) know non-Jewish families to take them in, b) speak Polish (not Yiddish) well enough to be able to fit in, and c) be physically unidentifiable as Jews (that whole circumcision thing...). But that makes it really hard to estimate the number of Jews in Poland today--because there are still a lot of people who don't know about their Jewish roots, or who have yet to tell their children. In the synagogue's charter, the sponsoring family stipulated that the synagogue should forever remain an Orthodox one (Reform was, at the time, sweeping through modern Europe) and that someone from the congregation should always say Kaddish for them, since they had no children. 

One of the few places in Warsaw where buildings on both sides of the street survived the War (mostly) intact. The building on the left is covered in photographs of Jewish families who lived in Warsaw before the War. Our guide, I should mention, was fantastic. Helise Lieberman, from the Taube Foundation took us around Jewish Warsaw, and was not only a great guide but sparked really interesting and thought-provoking conversations. One of her ideas was to turn one of the destroyed, dilapidated  on-its-last-legs buildings into a Tenement Museum-style exhibit, whereby you would learn about a couple specific families' lives. [By the way, Helise came to Warsaw about 20 years ago as the founding director of the Lauder School, Poland's first Jewish day school in decades.]  

A few years ago, this memorial was installed at the border of the "large" and "small" Jewish ghettos in Warsaw, at the exact location where the bridge between the two used to exist. About 400,000 people lived in the ghetto, which was, ironically, smack dab in the middle of the city.

A close-up of the exterior of the new Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which will be opening next month (our timing was not so good on this one). Although it will include an exhibition room about the experience of Polish Jews during the Holocaust (and the museum shares a plaza with the memorial to the Ghetto Uprising), it is distinctly not a Holocaust museum--it's supposed to talk about the entire 1000-year history of Jews in Poland. It's a really cool building; if you look closely (or zoom in) you can see that פולין (Poland, in Hebrew) is spelled out on the glass panels. 

The old Jewish cemetery in Warsaw is in awful condition. Although some grave stones have clearly been maintained, with their engravings made clearer with paint, most are in terrible disrepair: broken, falling over, crumbling, uprooted by trees. I managed to see the gravestones of Ludwig Zamenhof (creator of Esperanto) and Adam Cerniaków, who was appointed head of the Judenrat by the Nazis and who committed suicide when he was unable to negotiate the escape of Korczak's orphans (see below).

Memorial to Janusz Korczak at the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw. Korczak operated an orphanage for Jewish children that moved to the ghetto when the Jews were forced to move there; though he was offered by Nazis to escape a number of times, on each occasion he refused in order to stay with "his" children. Together with nearly 200 orphans, he was marched to the Umschlagplatz, from where they were deported to the Treblinka death camp.  

The kotwica was the symbol of the Home Army, which largely orchestrated the Warsaw Uprising in 1944 (as distinct from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943). Now, though, the symbol is mostly a symbol of Polish patriotism and is graffitied all over. (While I"m talking about the Warsaw Uprising, I guess I should mention that we went to the Uprising Museum. Like the Chopin Museum, it was also really interactive; but, like the Schindler Factory Museum, there was way too much there to be able to focus on anything in particular). 

The graffiti/street art in both Krakow and Warsaw was much better than anything I've seen in Prague so far. This is in Warsaw, but I think Krakow's was even better (I just had to be selective with my pictures!)

Eating a huge zapiekanka, an open-faced pizza/baguette kind of thing. 

Our train ride back was 10 hours. Our "cabin" if you can even call it that, was probably about 3.5 feet across, and had a triple-decker bunk-bed in it. The bunks were so close together that I couldn't even sit up properly!