Wilanow Palace & Jewish Tour

Wilanow Palace & Jewish Tour, a set on Flickr.

A beautiful day in Warsaw today, sun shining, jackets unzipped/off and more learning! We had a great time in the Wilanow Palace gardens this morning. First we visited the Chopin Monument before making our way through the park grounds. There were heaps of squirrels and the odd peacock in the gardens. Leo and Corban enjoyed trying to feed the squirrels they were pretty friendly, however Leo just couldn’t help chasing them when they got close. He would run around and around the trees after them, it was so funny. All of the ponds are frozen; we saw a few ducks slip sliding for food, also funny! After the palace garden we did another tour, this time it was a tour of the Jewish Ghetto area. There is basically nothing left other than a small piece of brick wall and monuments that began going up in 1948. We walked along the street that was the richest Jewish street in 1938 and saw a photo; it is now just a park with only the cobles and tram tracks left. We also visited the sight were The Pianist played. There are many small up and down hills in the Jewish area, it is where dirt was put over all the rubble as there was just too much to move. Some bricks where used to rebuild some of the current buildings. Many of the stone monuments and structures are in Polish, Yiddish and Hebrew. The newest building which is the National Jewish Museum is not yet open however it depicts the red sea parting and the Israelites being led out of Egypt. We heard a number of stories about Polish and German people who tried to help the Jews. One in particular was Irena Sendler, at the age of 20 she began saving Jewish children from the Ghetto. As a nurse she had access to the children and made a special wagon to get them out of the Ghetto. She would put them to sleep with sleeping gas and also trained dogs to bark when they saw Nazi soldiers. This way if the children woke up crying, it would be drowned out by the dogs barking. She smuggled 2500 children out and into orphanages during WWII (more the Schindler saved). Warsaw had 350,000 Jews pre WWII, it now has about 5000. It also had 130 Synagogues, now there are 3. It still amazes me how much of Warsaw/Poland was destroyed in the war and what a hard time the people have had to live through. It is now a relatively normal city, but with a very bloody history.