The Polin Museum of the History of the Polish Jews is situated some 500m from Krasińskish square. It was deliberately built in the middle of what used to be the Jewish Ghetto, once again infamous in history as the site of mass genocide and futile resistance when the Nazis initially forcibly move the best part of half a million people into an area that they fenced off before shipping most of them off to Treblinka to be exterminated. The survivors (about 60,000), put up resistance when the troops came in to finish the job but as they were hopelessly outgunned the outcome was inevitable. Brave souls.

The museum itself is an arresting, modern building, designed specifically for this function. It has an ingenious layout inside with a number of galleries that are separate and keep you interested, indeed fascinated. I’m going to find it very hard, indeed impossible to capture all that we learnt and discovered today. We were in there for well over 5 hours and all 3 of us were absorbed throughout. The problem is with trying to summarize a 1000 year story into a paragraph or two is that a whole lot of stuff happens during that time (!) , not least of which is the changing of the borders and rulers of Poland and indeed, the very existence of Poland itself. At least the UK is defined by hard borders ie the sea but here things are much more fluid. The heyday of Poland and its’ Jewish inhabitants was probably in the period commencing July 1569 when Poland formally formed a union with neighbouring Lithuania, resulting in a Commonwealth with  one elected leader and covering a land area of over a million km² and with a multi-ethnic population of 11 million. This commonwealth enabled the Jews to flourish and by 1764, when it all began to crumble with the first partition, there was an estimated population of some 750,000 Jews living there – a very considerable number considering that the estimated worldwide population was only 1. 2 million.

The Jewish story is complex and the museum tries to tell the story through the eyes of individuals that lived during specific periods of time. These are real people, with documentary evidence of their existence and stories, which makes it all the more fascinating. As I said earlier, I can’t really relate all that we read a during the 5 hours that we were inside, rather I will provide a couple of URL’s if you are at all interested :-

Of course, there was a significant section of the museum dedicated to the monstrous goings on of the Second World War, when over 6 million Jews were exterminated by the Nazis. Given that the museum is actually located within the original Warsaw ghetto, the story of the ghetto was covered in some detail and very harrowing it was too. Moreover, even the tiny surviving population of Jews didn’t have a good time in the decades after the war, they experienced pogroms and a State determined to get rid of them by encouraging them to emigrate. However, the story ends on a positive note and today there are numerous cultural events throughout Poland which celebrate the Polish Jewish population, a population which, once again is on the increase.

The museum closes at 18:00 and the first warning claxon sounded at 17:40 so that by 17:50 we were out of the building, looking at the torrential rain that had just started. A dash to a nearby taxi and a ride back to our part of town got us into the apartment by 18:20, time for a quick drink then we went out in search of dinner. We weren’t that successful, we had an OK meal, not really worth describing and then it was bed time, another good day notched up.