Day Four

This morning we went over to the museum office and had a meeting with Ania, who is working on the campaign of a candidate for the European Parliament. She taught us about the European Union and Poland's place within it. (Poland joined the EU just 5 years ago in 2004.) Wikitoria, who also works for the Museum, taught us more about the EU, its history and the countries which are and are not included within it. It was great to learn more about this institution and it's role in European and Polish society.
We spent the rest of the morning helping out in the office. We worked on editing the English translations of the Polish texts for the museum's exhibits and website. This was actually quite enjoyable, because the mistakes made by the initial translator were hysterical.
Kaja and Kasia took us out for lunch to a milk bar. We learned about the history of the milk bar - it began in communist times, when money was scarce. They began as a place to eat dairy products, but expanded to more products later. Milk bars serve home cooked meals at very low prices.

After lunch we visited the Warsaw Uprising Museum (not the ghetto uprising). The museum is laid out in an interesting manner, that it creates the atmosphere of being in a war zone, ruined buildings and sounds of bombs dropping. It was incredible fascinating to see pictures of places we had visited as piles of rubble. Due to the suppression of the Uprising, the city of Warsaw was 85% destroyed. (All of the buildings which appear today as they did before the war were rebuilt.)

Following our visit to the museum, we met with a filmmaker who created a short film that was displayed in a festival regarding the historical events surrounding March of 1968. We learned how this was the most recent and intense anti-semetic campaign launched since the second world war, and casued 35,000 out of the 40,000 Jews living in Poland to flea the country. We also discussed the other ways in which this project depicted March of '68 through the use of physical objects that represent personal stories. The focus of the projects were more artistic in nature than historical, but there was a lot to learn.
Train to Krakow in the morning. Layla Tov!