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Tag: Warsaw Uprising Museum

  • Warsaw – Warsaw Uprising Museum

    Warsaw – Warsaw Uprising Museum

    I visited this museum before and I think it’s the first historic attraction that I went to in Poland. Here we are, several hundred Polish historical experiences and several years later, and I thought it’d be good to pop back to the museum. It was free entrance today, being Sunday, so I knew it’d be busy, but that also saved me 25zl (around £5). I went to collect my free ticket from the cash desk and there was a short queue, but it only took around 30 seconds to get my ticket. The staff member was friendly, although I imagine he got fed up with issuing bits of paper to people all day for free.

    I’ve also posted about the City of Ruins video and the Printing Press separately.

    This was the exhibit which I found the most though-provoking, a simple city telephone directory. By the end of the Second World War, there were only around 1,000 people living in the central part of Warsaw, out of the over 1 million who lived there before the war had started.

    The replica of the Liberator aircraft I mentioned in the City of Ruins post.

    There’s a large cinema screen in the museum, and there are smaller set-ups as well. This part of the museum is quite open plan and there’s lots of space, other parts are more hemmed in and cramped. At the base of the cinema screen there’s an underground exhibit, which it’s probably easy to miss for those not paying attention.

    On the large screen there was footage of the Warsaw Uprising, amazingly some of the film made by Poles was saved and was able to be made into a video. The Soviets apparently managed to lose, no doubt deliberately, the footage in 1946, but other copies were found.

    A recreation of the city’s sewer network, which is how members of the Warsaw Uprising were able to move about parts of the city. The recreation is dark, I used a flash to get this photo.

    By the time I left the museum, the queue to get in had got relatively sizeable. The brick building towards the back is the ticket desk, with the entrance to the museum area to the right of this photo. At this point there was likely around a 20 to 30 minute to get in, so I was pleased that I had arrived earlier on during the day.

    I found that the navigation around the museum was just a little confusing, I frequently found myself not entirely sure where I was going. Fortunately, nor did anyone else, so no-one really seemed to care or mind. But, I like going around the museum in vaguely the way that the curators intended. I stayed for just under two hours, but those who wanted to see everything would no doubt need longer than that.

    Overall, I really like this museum and it tells its story in a compelling manner. It was far too busy to enjoy properly though, which is no criticism of the museum, but for anyone wanting to look at the exhibits and read everything, it’s probably best to come on another day of the week which isn’t free admission Sunday. Despite the quite challenging nature of the material, the museum also seemed to engage children though and they liked collecting the bits of paper which told them what happened on each day.

  • Warsaw – Warsaw Uprising Museum (City of Ruins)

    Warsaw – Warsaw Uprising Museum (City of Ruins)

    For anyone who visits the Warsaw Uprising Museum, it’s worth hunting out the little theatre section near to the replica Liberator aircraft. The Liberator was a US military aircraft and was used in relief flights to try and assist the Poles engaged in the Warsaw Uprising. The video of the City of Ruins lasts for five minutes and it’s in 3D, with glasses provided by the staff, giving a view of the destroyed Warsaw that someone on a Liberator aircraft might have seen at the end of the Second World War.

    The video is twelve years old now, so perhaps they can now do more with effects, but it was a sobering reminder of how Warsaw looked in 1945 after it was nearly entirely destroyed by the Germans. The museum was busy when I visited, since it was free admission day, but I had a wait of only around ten minutes to see the video. They can only fit 25 people into the theatre screen at a time, so there can be a little of a wait sometimes.

    The museum director said a few years ago:

    “If you have not seen it with your own eyes, individual photos from the war will not show it. It is only by visualising the destruction of the film that you will get an idea of ​​what Warsaw really looked like right after the end of the war, and from which ruins it had to rise.”

  • Warsaw – Warsaw Uprising Museum (Printing Press)

    Warsaw – Warsaw Uprising Museum (Printing Press)

    There’s a recreated printing press at the Warsaw Uprising Museum and they’ve got it going so that they can produce copies of genuine posters which were made by those courageous Poles fighting against the odds against the Germans during the Warsaw Uprising. There’s something amazing that even in a city which had been so overwhelmed that resourceful men and women could produce newspapers, posters and propaganda. It was also necessary to have a way of being able to call people to arms and to start a revolution against the occupiers.

    There were official Polish newspapers which were printed in Polish, but they were authorised by the Germans and were heavily censored. Their aim was to cause division and mistrust within the Polish community, so it was essential that this misinformation was countered by more authentic news. There were over 100 different titles produced during the war by the underground movement, which was a serious risk as the Germans would have likely killed anyone involved. And it wasn’t just the printing of this material, it was the distribution of it.

    I don’t normally take souvenirs back, but I liked this one, so I kept the poster that they gave to me from the printing press.