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  • Day 6

    Museum of 2nd World War

    September 1, 2021 in Poland ⋅ ☁️ 16 °C

    This is an extraordinary place, and I happened to visit on the 82nd anniversary of the beginning of world war 2, commemorating the date when the German army began their attack on Poland. Gdansk (or Danzig as it was known then) was where it all began.
    The museum traces conditions from before the war right up through the fall of the Iron Curtain, which is when many Poles consider the war to have finally ended.
    I have no way to capture the extent of what is here. There are exhibits about occupations of Germans, Italians, Soviets, Japanese, as these are all part of the war. The Holocaust is here in all it's gory detail. My pictures here are an inadequate glimpse at the place.
    1st is the museum itself. 2nd is a statue commemorating the postal workers who fought the Nazis and we're eventually executed. The 3rd picture is of a reconstruction of what the main street looked like after the Soviets overran the city.
    The 4th is an original Enigma code machine. The museums make much of the fact the the Poles were the ones who cracked the Enigma code and passed their work on to Bletchley Park.
    The 5th picture is of a famous photo of Polish woman grieving over her sister who had been gunned down by a strafing German aircraft while she was harvesting potatoes.
    The last picture is of another memorial to those postal workers. Art students created a series of hand prints where the workers were lined up against the wall and executed.
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