The history of neon signage in Warsaw goes back to the 1920s. By 1933 more than 70 signs existed, most to be destroyed during World War II. A renaissance occurred during the Cold War, when the colorful lighting offered a state-sanctioned opportunity to brighten a still blighted city.
Neon and bars go together like scotch and soda, or rum and coke.
We crossed the Vistula River to visit the Neon Museum, traveling by tram through neighborhoods of Soviet-era blocks of drab apartment buildings.
The ramshackle interior feels a bit like a barn. There's the Warsaw mermaid in the rear.
The museum rescued many of the signs from the 1960s and 1970s that were being discarded as building development took off in Warsaw and other eastern block cities in the early 2000s.
This guy, in traditional Hungarian dress, had advertised the Lottery Department Store in Budapest since 1959
A hipster Puss in Boots sporting cat's eye glasses advertised a local shoe store.
Even the Soviets understood branding. Consider this logo for a now defunct 19th century textile factory in Bielwa, a town in southern Poland located at the foot of the Owl Mountains.
Designed by a Finnish architectural firm, it's located in the former neighborhood of the Warsaw ghetto, and opened in 2013 on the 70th anniversary of the uprising there.
Some say the huge external gash which continues inside the modernist building symbolizes the parting of the Red Sea by Moses, who led the Jews to the promised land.
In Hebrew, "polin" means "rest here." The letters spelling the word in both Hebrew and Latin can be seen silkscreened on the glass and copper exterior of the building.
Exhibits divided into eight chronological sections examine Jewish life in Poland going back a thousand years when trade routes established in the Middle Ages first brought them into the area around Kraków.
Persecution of Jews in Western Europe persuaded them to settle there and later, Warsaw, when the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania, founded in 1569, was more welcoming. But they weren't allowed to live in the Baltic port city of Gdańsk, although public records indicated their trade was welcome.
A Polish language proverb circulated at the wedding of Sigismund III Vasa in 1605, declared "The Polish kingdom is: Paradise for the Jews, Hell for the peasants, Purgatory for the burghers, rule by Servants." Scholars have cited this both as evidence that the years from 1569 to 1648 were "Jewish paradise" in Poland, and as sarcasm indicative of the anti-semitic progroms to come.
The Cossacks were particularly brutal during the Khmelnytsky Uprising, and primarily recruited from the ranks of peasants in what is now Ukraine who resented Jewish leaseholders and merchants. By the time the conflict ended, the region tilted toward Russia, an early forecast of the commonwealth's partition a century later, after a long period of decline.
Once the progroms ended in 1657, Jewish life thrived in many Polish villages or shtetls as it had in areas where the Cossacks did not hold sway.
Temple, of course, was central to Jewish life. This beautiful reconstruction of an elaborate bimah and painted ceiling from the Gwoździec synagogue, made from wood in the 17th century, induces expressions of awe.
Nevertheless, anti semitism is never very far away. This painting depicts blood libel, a common trope.
It was a little surprising to see a portrait of an Revolutionary War hero, Tadeusz Kosciuszko, displayed but he fought hard to maintain the commonwealth's independence with less success than he had as a young military officer in America.
The failure of the Kościuszko Uprising in 1794 resulted in the Habsburg Empire, Prussia and Russia partitioning the commonwealth. Poland ceased to exist until after the end of World War I and the treatment of its Jews varied according to who ruled them politically.
Concurrently, the Jewish Enlightenment or Haskalah took place throughout central and eastern Europe, fathered by Moses Mendelssohn. The movement encouraged greater assimilation and reduced the influence of rabbis.
At the same time, it revived the use of Hebrew in secular life.
Jewish life urbanized to a large extent during the Industrial Revolution, due in part to better transportation networks and employment opportunities for both men and women in cities all over Poland.
Jews typically labored in small workshops, securing contract work from factories that mostly employed Christians because their owners did not want to cease operations on two different sabbaths.
Their temples got bigger. In the late 19th century, the Great Synagogue of Warsaw was the largest in the world. The Nazis destroyed it after the ghetto uprising as they already had done to the Gwoździec synagogue in what is now Ukraine.
No doubt this enormous migration contributed to the ideas behind The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, one of the 20th century's most influential pieces of antisemitic literature. First published in Russia as a forged document, it supposedly revealed the Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world. Some people still believe its lies a century later, and the internet has given it a new currency among hate groups.
But the Jews who remained in Poland established a thriving culture, speaking and writing in Yiddish. Astonishingly, nearly 100,000 people attended the funeral of Yitskhok Leybush Peretz(in photo at left), an author and playwright. A champion of his people and a literary cheerleader for their self-determination, he bridged the gap between the Hasidim--who had ignored the reforms of the enlightenment--and the intelligentsia. Said Peretz: Without Hebrew, the folk have no past; without Yiddish, we have no folk. Asked the muses of art, literature and poetry in the drawing below: Who will replace him?
Jews were early adopters of a new art form, cinema, and produced their own movies in Poland after World War I, when its national borders were established for the first time in 123 years. The loyalties of some Jews, who lived closer to Russia and had supported the Bolshevik revolution, for example, remained conflicted and became easy targets for scapegoating when the Nazis invaded Poland.
Mostly minority parties competed for the Jewish vote (almost 10% of the population) in the national parliamentary elections of the Second Polish Republic. These elections produced unstable governments, eventually resulting in a 1926 coup d'etat by Marshal Józef Piłsudski who ruled Poland until the Nazi occupation. Many Jews considered him their last best hope against the tide of antisemitism that threatened them from Germany. He died in 1935.
Polish Jews also continued their migration between the two world wars, this time to Palestine as part of the Zionist movement. The British, who then controlled the territory, allowed 140,000 to enter. It became harder for them to do so during the 1930s with the escalation of conflicts between Jews and Arabs.
The Distenfeld family were among the lucky ones. They were admitted in 1933.
Christine and I had been among the first to enter the museum. Exhausted three hours later, with both the Holocaust and Post War sections to go, I paid less attention to these exhibits figuring I already had absorbed a lot of this history at the Museum of the Second World War, Oskar Schindler's Enamel Factory and Auschwitz. Still, several items caught my eye, including this ration card.
An organization chart for the group of Jews engaged in the liaison work between the Nazis and their community reflected a mostly reviled bureaucracy of individuals in denial about the occupiers' intentions. The strategy failed to protect themselves and their families.
A continuing exhibit juxtaposes the writings of Adam Czerniaków, who headed of Warsaw's Judenrat from 1939 to 1942, and Emanuel Ringelblum, who served as the archivist for the ghetto and took copious notes about what occurred there before the Gestapo murdered him in 1944. Fortunately, he successfully hid most of what he had written and gathered from other sources prior to his capture. Czerniaków killed himself with a cyanide pill after the Nazis began the mass deportation of Jews to Treblinka where they were robbed before being gassed. In his diary a year earlier he had written: I am reminded of a film: a ship is sinking and the captain, to raise the spirits of the passengers, orders the orchestra to play a jazz number. I had made up my mind to emulate the captain.
When in Rome, do as Romans; when in Poland, order pirogen, as Christine did several times, including at Zapieeck, a themed restaurant on a busy Warsaw thoroughfare. A flag planted with a toothpick announced the ingredients inside the pillowy dough. "Champignons, with hard cheese."
What appeared to be a handicapped pierogen greeted patrons on their way to the restrooms downstairs.
Waitresses even wore pierogen-patterned skirts.
Tourist trap aside, I really had to up my food game traveling with Christine. Fruit lunches after hearty buffet breakfasts weren't going to cut it, as I learned in Gdańsk, where her pierogen were served with real style. Yep, she's part Polish.
I stuck with a delicious vegetarian option. A waiter kindly instructed us always to pay in zlotys. "Your credit card's exchange rate always will be more favorable than the restaurant's," something I already knew but I increased the size of his tip anyway. Apparently servers in Poland--where the average income is just $2,000 per month (compared to $5,500 in the US)--are paid living wages and don't expect 20% tips from their countrymen. Tourists, however, are a different story.
For dinner, I compiled a list of starred restaurants in the Lonely Planet guidebook, including Restauracja Gdańska, noted for its over-the-top decor and traditional Polish cuisine. It took two lengthy phone calls from our hotel concierge to reserve a table. Even though the place was empty when we arrived, the maître d' greeted us with suspicion. Would a secret word unlock one of the outdoor tables marked reserved? He seated us beneath autographed photos of notable Poles, including Pope John Paul II and Lech Wałęsa.
My "Presidential Herring," served with bread and a thick slab of butter, was superb.
But it turned out pork shank isn't my thing and I traded my sauerkraut for Christine's red cabbage. The well-seasoned, roasted potatoes really hit the spot.
My scallops at a Thai restaurant in Sopot, served in clam shells on a bed of rock salt, were way more photogenic than filling. Christine shamed me out loud in front of the waitress when I reduced the size of her tip after she informed us that a ten percent service charge had been included in the bill. "Maybe I wouldn't have if she had remembered to bring me the beer I ordered."
The food at Glonojad, a vegetarian restaurant just beyond Florian's Gate in Kraków was so tasty, filling and inexpensive that we went back for a second meal.
Buzzing hornets interfered with the consumption of my birthday cake at an outdoor cafe in Rynek Główny, ordered in lieu of lunch. Later, I somehow forgot to photograph the very strange celebratory dinner we had at Foggy Yami where the sushi rolls were as big as logs. I packed my leftovers for lunch the next day which resulted in a concept that would make a great name for a punk band: Sushi at Auschwitz. It definitely felt very weird.
Camelot Lulu's cocktails in Kraków lured us back to an excellent meal as well the following evening.
A late lunch at Joel Sharing Concept, an Israeli restaurant we stumbled upon in Warsaw near Łazienki Park, started with wine for Christine and ice-cold beer for me in a bewitching bottle.
Our appetizers and entrees were the best of the trip, so good that I recommended them to the Norwegian tourists who sat down after us.
We finally got the chance to dine at a so-called "milk bar" (no alcohol served) our final day in Poland. A remnant of the Soviet era, it offered filling food at unbelievably cheap cost, if you didn't mind the sullen young women behind the counter who spoke no English and made us photograph our orders from the overhead display menu. I finally had pierogen, so filling I didn't need to eat again that evening.
