Warsaw Day I (II)

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After walking around a bit more I headed back to the entrance of the Old Town area to visit the Royal Castle, which previously served as the residence of the Polish kings and later as the seat of parliament. It was also decimated during WWII and subsequently rebuilt.



Next, I headed to the adjacent Nowe Miasto (“New Town”), which is actually a bit of a misnomer as it dates back to the 15th century. The area was outside the fortified walls of the Old Town (pictured below) and was where many of the poorer inhabitants of the city lived.

The reconstruction of this area supposedly wasn’t as authentic as that for the Old Town, but I still found it to be very nice. The area is also historically significant in that it witnessed some of the fighting during the Warsaw uprising during 1944.

For the afternoon I left the Old / New Town area to see some of Warsaw’s other sights. Given the beautiful weather, I decided to walk and along the way passed the Palace of Culture and Science, a towering building commissioned by Stalin in the 1950s as a “gift” from the Soviet people.

My next stop was one of the few remnants of the ghetto wall that the Nazis built during WWII to imprison the city’s Jewish population. This is the same ghetto that was portrayed in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist.

The section of the wall that I visited isn’t readily accessible to the public, as it’s inside the courtyard of an apartment building. While I was looking for it, however, I happened to ask a lady for directions and she proceeded to lead me to a door and then input a code to gain entry to the building. By pure chance, I happened to ask a resident of the right building and she was willing to let me inside.

Here are the pictures that I took of the wall. Being near it was a very eerie experience knowing the underlying evil that had led to its construction.

After my visit to the ghetto wall I walked to the Warsaw Uprising Museum. It chronicles the city’s uprising against the Nazi forces towards end of the city’s German occupation during WWII. The video footage captured by Polish videographers during the uprising was particularly moving.