A Walk Through the Past

Yesterday we took a walking tour of the old Jewish Ghetto. Our tour guide for the morning was a remarkable man that had a wealth of knowledge. He gave us a brief overview and history of the area before we headed outside. He told us that the area that our hotel is in was where the Jewish Ghetto once was. When it was first established it was relatively small but as more Jews were forced to move into the area it tripled in size. We visited the site of  Umschlagplatz, which was the train was loaded to take Jews to the concentration camps. As we walked through the old Ghetto there were small marble monuments called Memory Lane that lined the streets. Next to each of these stones was a tree from Jerusalem as an added symbol of the Jews that spent time in the Ghetto. There were only two buildings that survived from WWII, one was the SS Building and the Hospital. As we walked our tour guide told us that his father had been taken to Auschwitz at the end of the war and was fortunate to survive until the camp was liberated. His mother had also been taken to a concentration camp, but a smaller one, she also survived. It was amazing to hear his stories and I couldn't imagine what that must have been like for him.

We then continued on to the memorial monument to the Heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto. It was a beautiful sculpture and it was placed just outside of the new Jewish History Museum. We headed back towards the Old Town and our tour guide showed us a few more sites. We stopped to see the mermaid statue in the center of the Old Town town square. The mermaid is a symbol of Warsaw given the legend - As the story goes, two mermaid sisters became bored of their aquatic life and decided to come ashore. One sister decided to go up the Danish straits and she now sits at the entrance to the port at Copenhagen. The other swam down the Vistula River (which is Poland's longest river) and came ashore in the Old Town, she loved it so much that she decided to stay. The neighboring fishermen began to notice that someone was letting the fish out of their nets and they became angry and tried to hunt the culprit down. They were surprised when the found that the mermaid was the culprit and when they heard her voice they vowed never to harm her. The mermaid filled the village with her sweet songs and was adored by the villagers. One day a merchant had an idea to capture her and show her off at a fair to make himself a nice profit. So he tricked her and put her in a wooden box, the mermaid cried for help and a fisherman's son heard her cries and released her. After this the mermaid swore that she would stay and protect the city, so therefore to this day the symbol of the city is a mermaid.

After our tour finished we grabbed some lunch and headed back to the hotel to get ready for our next outing. We spent the rest of our afternoon at the Lazarski University. We had another seminar on mobile technology and we got the opportunity to interact with some more Polish students. It was an interesting lecture and it was neat to be able to talk to some more students and find out more about life in Poland. I've really enjoyed getting a chance to see the different universities here in Poland and to see how they differ from the ones in the States.