Monday, July 6, 2015

Day 5 (Final Day) - Warsaw

Yesterday was our final full day in Poland and we spent the early afternoon exploring the Warsaw Rising Museum. We had read about this museum on another teacher's blog and knew it would be relevant to our research and exploration here in Poland. The museum focused on how the people of Warsaw responded to various efforts of the Germans (and initially the Soviets too) to begin eradicating their presence in the country and ultimately in the continent.

The most fascinating part of the museum was a special exhibit in the basement where replicas of the Warsaw sewer system have been created. In the early '40s, the Germans began forcing all Jewish people into ghettos within their own cities. Over 600 ghettos were created in Poland, most enclosed by high brick walls, wooden fences or barbed wire. The purpose was to cram Jews into tiny spaces where the S.S. could then impose harsh restrictions on their freedoms. For example, food rations were established and they were given fewer calories each day than are necessary to maintain a healthy existence; this was done to intentionally cause sickness and disease which could then lead to mass deaths in the ghetto. As Jews were living in the Warsaw Ghetto, one of the largest in Poland, they used the 25-mile-long sewer tunnel system to move about the city undetected, finding food and other supplies and sending messages to friends and family in other parts of the city. The replicas in the museum gave us the opportunity to walk through these small tunnels. Immediately upon entering, I was struck by how claustrophobic I felt in these small spaces. The size of the real sewers in the city range from a manageable size of 6 feet by 7 feet down to a very cramped and tight 2 feet x 3.5 feet. The labyrinth of replicas we walked through gradually got smaller and narrower, as we were given a very small taste of what it would have been like to crawl through such small, dark and undoubtedly dirty sewers.


The museum primarily focused on the resistance of the population of Poland to Nazi occupation and the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto and rising of Warsaw. As we walked through the museum, we read about various groups that resisted the Nazis in different ways. When the Nazis invaded and took over Warsaw, their goal was to eradicate Polish culture. Immediately street names were changed, and the teaching of Polish literature, history, and culture was banned in schools and universities. Because of these new laws, teaching these subjects became one of the main ways of fighting the Nazi occupation. Teachers within Poland responded by creating the Secret Teachers Organization in October of 1939 and taught clandestine study groups these subjects throughout the war. During the 1943-1944 school year 5,500 teachers were teaching roughly 90,000 students.

While learning about Nazi Germany and the ways in which the S.S. and Hitler tried to destroy the culture of Jews and of Poland, it has become evident that the first attacks were on the intellectuals, so reading about the teachers of Poland and their resistance was very inspiring. We have all discussed why we became teachers and a huge part of our choices were wanting to pass on knowledge, wanting to make our students really think and question the world, and wanting to build relationships with them to help them be better human beings. It's clear that the teachers of Poland rose to the challenge of their circumstances for similar reasons, and I find it truly amazing that they continued teaching despite the danger.

Near the end of our tour at the museum, we stumbled upon a dark, curtained off exhibit, made to feel like we were navigating our way through a dark alley. At the end of this "alley" a Polish man was describing his experience during the Warsaw rising. The part that stuck out to me was when he described his experience with hand-to-hand combat. He prefaced his story with the idea that in such a fight, one must live and one must die. There's no other option, only this. Then, pointing to his neck, he recounted the moment he killed his opponent during the battle. The Polish man said he survived only because he was one second quicker than his Nazi counterpart. After a pause, he said this Nazi man was the most beautiful person in the entire world and that he would never forget him. "The most beautiful person in the world," he repeated then stopped and paused for a while, lost in the memory of the past.

The Polish man reminds me of Vladek (the main character from Maus) as he tells his son about the Nazi man HE had killed during combat at the beginning of the war. He tells of how he stumbled upon the man by chance, shot him, and killed him, reacting before he fell victim to the same fate. After that battle and after being captured by the Nazis, Vladek told the German officers where the man's body lay since it was separated from the others. In class, I ask the students to explain why Vladek does this and to talk about what he may have been feeling and/or why he went out of his way to report where the man's body lay. Every semester, a couple students are able to articulate the mixed emotions Vladek may have felt as he was forced to kill a very real and threatening enemy who was also a fellow man.

When we discuss war, we tend to rely on the safety of statistics when discussing casualties. However, in both of these situations, the casualties are individualized and humanized into one: one man caught in the moment with his one life hanging in the moment of luck and instinctive reaction. One man lost his life, a small number lost in overwhelming statistics, and another man took that life, carrying that memory, the burden of taking that one life from his fellow man. The Polish man in the video (and Vladek, too, in my opinion) recognized this.

When I discuss this with my students, I struggle to understand the weight of such of burden. And, I wonder, how can I help my students understand something that I myself struggle to comprehend? This Polish man (and Vladek) give a voice and a face to the cold facts written on the pages of history books and literature.

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