Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2003/08/07
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]In the midst of settling into our new life in the Netherlands I do continue to take pictures--it just takes a bit longer to get them scanned and posted, as SWMBO will make me sleep in the garden shed if I spend too much time on the computer while there are still many undone "honey-dos". So, with that... In week 29 I had to go to Warsaw for a couple of days to take care of some formalities related to my Polish birth certificate. I have not been to the city for 31 years, and obviously a lot has changed since then. Warsaw today is an impressive city in every respect. But what I was interested in during the few hours I had for sight-seeing was the Warsaw ghetto. Before the war, Warsaw had a huge Jewish population. When the Germans arrived in 1939, they confined the Jews to the ghetto, and as time went on, the boundaries of the ghetto were moved to make the ghetto smaller and smaller. In 1942-43 it was the Warsaw Jews' turn to become part of the Final Solution, and the Germans began emptying the ghetto by shipping the inhabitants to Auschwitz. In the spring of 1943 a few hundred Jewish men, knowing that they were going to die either way, staged a desperate uprising. It took the Germans some weeks to quell it, of course with the utmost brutality. At the end, the last 14 fighters committed suicide in their bunker. That was the end of what had been the largest Jewish community in Europe. After the war, the Polish government showed little or no interest in preserving the ghetto or even putting up any memorials to what had happened there. The monuments you see today were all built in the late 1980s or early 1990s and largely financed by American and Western European Jewish organizations. This says something about the Polish attitude towards Jews and also explains why the few thousands Jews who remained after the war largely left the country in the 1960s and early 70s. Here is the the view of the inside of the memorial on Umschlagplatz, the spot from where 300,000 Jews were deported to the gas chambers. It is quite a moving experience to sit inside the stone structure and look out on the normal life going on outside: http://www.wajsmanphoto.com/2003_29.jpg A detail of the inscriptions inside: http://www.wajsmanphoto.com/2003_29alt1.jpg The small stone monument on the spot where the last defenders committed suicide on 8th May 1943, surrounded by apartment blocks. The inscriptions are in Polish and Hebrew: http://www.wajsmanphoto.com/2003_29alt2.jpg The ghetto as such does not exist anymore, except one short street which has been preserved as it looked before the war. There are still small shops on the ground floor, but otherwise the buildings seem largely uninhabitable: http://www.wajsmanphoto.com/2003_29alt3.jpg And finally a detail from one of the courtyards: http://www.wajsmanphoto.com/2003_29alt4.jpg All pictures taken with the M6 and 35mm Summilux, the main and Alt1 on Fuji Acros, the rest on Kodak Tri-X. The complete PAW index is at: http://www.wajsmanphoto.com/indexpaw2003.htm and comments/critique are always welcome and appreciated. Nathan - -- Nathan Wajsman Almere, The Netherlands e-mail: n.wajsman@chello.nl Mobile: +31 630 868 671 Photo site: http://www.wajsmanphoto.com - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html