Roots Tour Part XII: Warsaw, on our own, in the group, and the Museum of Jewish History in Poland

Warsaw is a big, rebuilt city, full of monuments and parks, stores of every kind, banks, apartment houses and neighborhoods.  I don't think my grandmother ever made it here, and if she had, she probably wouldn't have recognized it in 2015.  A huge ugly skyscraper, a gift from the Soviets in the fifties, dominates one part of town.  A restored and charming old city swarms with tourists, priests, fountains, plazas, restaurants, and sketching students in another.

Trams go through wide multilane boulevards, and parks cover a lot of what was once the Warsaw Ghetto. Words imbedded in the sidewalks show where the ghetto walls stood.

A large grassy mound in a pocket park at 18 Mila street, two blocks from the museum and accompanied by engraved boulders, marks the bunker and the actual last stand of the
Warsaw Ghetto resisters. You could easily miss it;
it's in the middle of a residential neighborhood.

Other huge monuments commemorate the Other uprising against Germans;
the general Warsaw Uprising, made by regular Poles against Nazi conquerors. 
Bronze statues of that uprising occupied a large square. 

 In one part, separated from the other figures stepping
through bombed-out walls, were figures of women,
men and a child.

An adorable little toddler in a sundress, in babytalk Polish that even I could understand, pointed to each figure, telling her big sister, "This is the mommy,this is the daddy, this is the baby."  It was such innocent sweetness, so 
oblivious to the suffering and fear the monument was meant to commemorate. 

It made the perfect epilogue; you wanted history to stop right there. 

The End.  Sunshine and flowers and baby bonnets.

We dragged ourselves back to the Radisson, showered, napped, and went out again, spending a couple of hours in the new Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews -- very recommended -- which shares the plaza with the Warsaw Ghetto monument erected in 1948.   The museum's poetic design and rich, experiential exhibits show  the collaboration of Jewish and Polish scholars, curators  and historians from all over the western world, and similarly impressive international fundraising muscle, with internationally recognizable contributor names.

If you're looking for evidence of current Polish anti-Semitism, you can find it in the Google translations of online comments on Polish news sites, complaining how the Jewish Polish museum gets prime Warsaw real estate and hundreds of millions of dollars, while plain Polish museums starve for funds in inconvenient locations. 

But if you're looking for evidence of current sympathetic Polish interest in the Jewish Polish past, you can find it in the museum itself; most of the people we saw reading the walls, viewing the exhibits and pressing the buttons on interactive displays were using Polish to do so. 

And the museum is quite determinedly retelling the story of Jewish life in Poland, from about 960 up to the re-nascent present. Using writings that start with early Jewish traders from Muslim Spain, it tries to recreate some of the feeling of medieval Jewish quarters of Krakow and Kalisch and Poznan.

The call of Zionism; a radiating sun that too few followed in the 30's

It has more modern sources in representing the Jewish textile industry of Lodz,or the Yiddish literary hum of Warsaw. It puts Jewish Polish history where it properly belongs, in the context of the wider world. And like most modern museums, it's not so much about artifacts and exhibits as it is about stagecraft, screens and theme-park-like recreations, with streets you can walk through, train stations you can sit in, sounds you can hear, videos to watch and tools you can operate. It is also most deliberately telling this story to Poles as well as tourists, Jewish and non. Making this point, its web site opens first in Polish, although English is just a click away. And for all its concern with life, and for all the many places in Poland that describe the death of the great majority of its Jews, the Polin museum gives full weight to tragic ending, too, with resources that are unique to Warsaw.  Chief of these is the Emanuel Ringelblum archive.  Quotes from those buried testimonies narrate Ghetto-related exhibits, and with special force, go into more detail than you'll find elsewhere.  You'll also learn what total ruin looks like in a 20th-century city.

The final word in the exhibit is given to present-day Jews in Poland, in videos displaying attempts at cultural revival in a handful of cities.  (Historical restoration is being carried out in many others.) The thing to note is that where Jews are concerned, Poles are only 25 years past an imposed historical blackout, Nazi occupation having been immediately followed by Soviet suppression.  And Poles may not have had Jewish history uppermost in mind after the fall of communism. They are quick to tell me how that epoch was followed by years of economic chaos from which they have not yet fully recovered.

We got back to the Radisson just in time to meet our tour group at dinner, Americans from all over, with a fair number from Pole-rich Chicago. Our tour manager, Michael, was a forty-something husband, father, and natural educator from Vienna, a full-timer with Gate1Travel.  A European academic (PhD in economics, if I remember correctly) slightly more post-war (i.e. younger) than us, with what I sensed as guilt-free, cross-cultural sensitivity and bonhomie. I'm glad I have videos of some of his backgrounders on the bus, and I strongly recommend his tours.

After touring the restored old charming part of Warsaw the next day, with its squares and church towers, and learning some modern Polish history at the statues of Chopin and Pilsudski,my husband and I spent another four hours in the Polin museum on our free afternoon.  There might have been five or six other Jews in our group, but as far as we could see, none of them made it there. 

We couldn't believe it.