Europe Summer 2023

We started our morning with delicious breakfast in one of the cafes and then we took a Jewish tour with Walkative. The Jewish community of Warsaw before the war was 380,000 and it was over one third of the entire Warsaw population. All of them, plus another 80,000 Jews from nearby towns were squeezed into several streets of Jewish ghetto, which in 1942 became shut. We learned heart wrenching facts and statistics - such as that the food rations were 250 calories per person. The sheer scale of the murders and atrocities was very hard to comprehend. By late 1943 there were only 60,000 left Jews and there were 800 of them, who under the leadership of 24 year old boy, launched the Warsaw ghetto uprising, which lasted a month. Of course, they couldn’t have succeeded fighting with smuggled weapons, and as modern day Masada, they committed suicides. We saw the recent excavation to their bunkers. We then had lunch and walked in the Warsaw main park, where there was a summer Chopin concert in the park.Lue lisää