Say it slowly tour Day 19: Warsaw, old town, the ghetto

Spent a good chunk of the day wanting to cry.

Warsaw hasn’t had the greatest of pasts, and I’m here just in time for the place to mark 70 years since first the Germans, then the Russians, took half of Poland each. I’m in the right month, too. There are a bunch of exhibitions, displays and other informative bits all around the place. Not too surprising, really, given that between 1939 and 1945, the place was practically levelled, a whole lot of people died of very unnatural causes, many more disappeared and most of the population displaced on numerous occasions.

Poland got it as bad as anyone during the war, and worse than most, so it’s understandable they spend some energy remembering the past. Walking down almost any street in the central part of town and there are wall plaques that read something like: Built 1670, destroyed 1944, rebuilt 1957. A chunk of the town was walled in, stacked full of people who were then pretty much left to starve. When that didn’t work, and they fought back, the ghetto was levelled, and anyone who survived the uprising was shipped off to places like Treblinka. Walking around that area today, there are small monuments on every block to those who died, there’s a large monument, a monument on a bunker that may also mark a mass grave (if I read correctly), and the largest Jewish cemetary in Europe (this is outside the boundary of the ghetto, probably just to piss off the captive population).

I understand that bad things happen in wars: war itself is rarely A Good Thing. People die, it’s in the rules. To go through a population, picking out groups on the basis of birth, habit or preference, people who weren’t trying to attack you before shots were fired, and do all that to them goes beyond an English word for bad.

Then, when the rest of the city could almost smell the body odour of the advancing Russian Army, and decided to do their damnedest to liberate their home, believing that help was at hand, things got even uglier. That a city of poorly armed and poorly fed people could hold off some of the best and worst of the German army for two months, shows they were a determined lot. Sadly for them, the Russians did little to help, content to watch it all get fought out, to let the Poles do their fighting for them, and the Germans to weaken resistance for the eventual Russian take over. The Polish really got screwed over.

I’m deliberately trying to avoid using tags like Jewish, German and Russian, because to me that helps shift the focus, cloud the issue, and dehumanise the whole shebang.

All this happened to people.

It was done by people.

All because of orders given by people.

The folks who gave the orders, set the policy, ran the show, they are the ones I’m pissed at. They are the ones who set people against people, neighbour against neighbour.