POLAND

Poland is a land of contrasts – Warsaw is rigid, hard, unfriendly, and yet, a two-hour train ride away, Krakow is a warm, light, welcoming city. Warsaw bears the unhealed scars of WWII to this day, generations later. Krakow, which was to be Hitler’s Polish capital, remained unscathed and intact, both physically and emotionally. The contrasts are marked. Warsaw has been rebuilt, but directly atop the ruins of the War, as if to remind the viewer, whether native or visitor, to never ever, forget. A visit to Auschwitz yielded images of the horrors of the Holocaust, and yet, Schindler’s Factory, with its images of all the people he saved adhered to each windowpane, gives one hope for the possibility of true humanity in the shambles of war.