Warsaw

The Warsaw Uprising museum deserves its own post as it is so sad and we also learned a lot about the history of WW2 from it. Its a great museum and we were warned beforehand that it is quite sombering.

As part of WW2, the Polish Resistance attempted to liberate Warsaw from Nazi Germany by staging the resistance now known as Warsaw Uprising. The resistance lasted 2 months (August - October 1944) until the Polish finally surrendered. Approximately 16,000 army and 200,000 Polish civilians were killed during the Uprising. After the surrender, the Germans came in and destroyed almost all of what was left of Warsaw. By 1945 85% of Warsaw was left in ruins.

We also learnt about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943. In 1939, German occupational authorities began to concentrate Poland's population of over three million Jews into a number of extremely crowded ghettos located in large Polish cities. The largest of these, the Warsaw Ghetto, concentrated approximately 300,000–400,000 people into a densely packed, 3.3 km² central area of Warsaw. Thousands of Jews died due to rampant disease and starvation even before the mass deportations from the Ghetto to the Treblinka extermination camp began. The Jewish were told they were being transported to eastern labour camps- 7000 Jews a day. It took 2 months for the Jewish resistance to realise the Jews were actually being taken to extermination camps, and that's when the Ghetto Uprising began. The uprising last less than 1 month, until the Jewish resistance failed and the entire ghetto was liquidated by the Germans :-( Between the extermination camp and the uprising, over 350,000 Jews were killed.

It was very sobering to learn of Poland's part of WW2. Poland suffered the biggest losses of life out of all the countries in WW2- The death toll is estimated at 6.3 million (total death toll resulting from WW2 is 72 million- the biggest cataclysm in all of mankind). Very very sad and not something we think about often.Read more