WARSAW POLAND Back From The Ashes....
WARSAW POLAND, After All That.... What is the That in ...All That? Well, the short answer is death destruction, genocide and Nazi barbarity. After the Jewish ghetto uprising in 1943 was put down, the retreating Nazis did their damnedest to obliterate it -- and pretty well succeeded. The 1944 Polish Resistance fighters were doomed, primarily because Moscow decided that the Red Army should stay out of it until the Nazis, weakened and needing to retreat, were finally able to put it down. By the end of WW II more than half the people of Warsaw, including virtually the entire prewar Jewish population, was dead, and the city was in ruins.
All of this has been covered extensively perhaps, but no by ad Guida Video Productions. tony has always had both a morbid fascination and kind of detached horror (no that is not an oxymoron -- I don't think so, not in his case) with Nazis barbarity and their final solution policy of the master race (yeah, right) systematically carried out against people who, religious of not, the happed to be Jews. Because tony and his Travel Diva Hessie are Jewish and of a certainly age, it has always been hard for him to get his arms around the fact that they would have very likely be been among the millions slaughtered if their grandparents hadn't managed to get the hell out of Mittel and Eastern Europe when they did - so they could grow up protected in the US an ocean away.
It was only because of a missed connection that they found themselves in Warsaw one day (just ~18 hours actually) in late 2007. The opportunity to record what they saw and heard was not to be missed. It is the ...After... in the title. For a resilient people (the Poles and Jews to be sure) life does and must go on - at least for the survivors and, inevitably, the succeeding generations. So that's meant by the title - one which we think just reflects the truth. .
Note: Some Common License and Public Domain photos from the WW II era and some of the music too were incorporated into this video. The photos were downloaded from Wikipedia and Polish Government Archives.
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Warsaw's Best Kept Secrets
Warsaw, the most devastated city after the last war (it was leveled to the ground before the Nazis left), survived centuries of pillage, destruction, and annihilation throughout its long years of existence. Yet many of the city structures, all rebuilt only more than fifty years ago and fully restored to its original design, proudly mirror the people's resiliency.
From the Royal Road to Novy Swiat, many architectural masterpieces (wonders of postwar reconstruction), making this city extraordinary and memorable, have captured my camera's fascination, from the Wilanow Castle, the Staszic Palace (our archives conference venue) to the Royal Castle, down to the old town square on the bank of the mighty Vistula River, and the Barbican. UNESCO appreciated Warsaw monuments and its relics, and honored the City by putting the Historic Center of Warsaw on the World Heritage List. On the modern side, nothing can compare with the awesome Warsaw University Library, all glass, steel and chrome, with a garden on the glass roof and a beautiful view on the river, and four million holdings.
As a country, Poland, the biggest country in Europe, turned out to be quite a revelation. I never expected to fall in love with the country and its friendly people so quickly. From the moment I took a taxi from the airport, whose driver charged me only 36 zloty (9 euros, which, believe me, is cheap when compared to my taxi fares in Amsterdam and in Paris), I was already enamored with Warsaw: the wide avenues lined with century-old trees, the clean metro stations, the friendly passersby who patiently looked into my city guide-maps and gave directions despite the language barrier, and the accommodating bus driver who waived our first bus fare because we only had euro coins.
Poland has a long history of cruel occupations from three neighbors, Austria, Germany, and Russia, after suffering from three partitions, which has reduced its size to a third of what it used to be in ancient maps. So it is no surprise to me to find the people's characteristic traits of fortitude, strength, resoluteness, fierce pride and nationalistic spirit so pervasive.