Day 82 POLAND War Uprising Museum and Bialowieza

We went to the War Uprising Museum in Warsaw before we picked up our car rental for the 3½hr drive Bialowieza National Park.

War Uprising Museum was very heavy, emotionally draining and sad. It was when the people of Warsaw had an uprising against Hitler and were promised help by Stalin and Chamberlain, neither came to their aid. The poor Poles, young children and old, Jews and the educated suffered atrocities beyond comprehension and imagination. We avoided the visit to Auschwitz for this reason, and weren't prepared for this museum to be so very confronting. They had a replica of a bunker and sewer where the untrained and ill equipped, brave young women and men fought the Nazis and lost. Even little kids at 9-15 year old helped in the uprising. It was a very interactive museum with lots to read. We were pleased to see a lot of school groups being exposed to the horror but more surprising for us, was that we saw a few lots of small independent groups of youth patrons.

It is most disturbing that we have an individual in Australia who is heading in this exact direction. She is using the prejudices and fears of the people to incite more vilification and hatred.  The more such hate speech is heard, radical extreme ideas will be normalised. Individual and collective human conscience will be diluted, silenced, justified. Eventually all good sense and conscience disappear. I cannot believe that we have learnt nothing from history, that such atrocities are still perpetuated in the world.  I do not believe that Australia will be immune from the consequences if we continue in this trajectory. Enough of my opinions and rant.

After the museum we picked up the car and drove to Bialowieza without lunch because not even we could eat after that experience. Half an hour before arriving at Bialowieza we were stopped by 2 border police. I must add here that Bielowieza is at the border with Belarus. We came here as it has one of the last stands of primeval forest in Europe. The patrol guards took our passports and checked the rental papers of the car. They returned the rental papers but kept our passports and did a thorough check of it. We saw the lady officer thumbing through the passports whilst on  the phone. The large male soldier wielding large rifle came to our car to say something in Polish but Google Translate could not do a proper translation. We managed to find out that it's just a routine check but would take 10 to 15 minutes. We were not too worried as the large soldier clutching the large firearm developed a very amused smile on his face. We took this opportunity to stretch our legs and walked a bit while we waited. We think that they were checking that we were not over staying our schengen visa as they asked for our departure date. They apologised for taking a while as they waved us off with big smiles.

After the day we had, we finished our day at the relaxing spa of our hotel to wind down.Read more