Poland - Eastern Europe - page 388

a problem. Some establishments will ask for 1 zl (35¢/20p) for the privilege.
Service stations and other places sometimes have pay toilets. The fee is usually
a one-zloty coin. Some public toilets still use the older symbols to designate
men's and women's facilities; for the record, men are upside-down triangles;
women are circles (don't ask me why).
Water Tap water is generally potable and there are no specific health concerns.
If in doubt, buy bottled water, which is cheap and widely available.
3 Warsaw
Poland's capital city—not often included on many tourist itineraries—deserves a fresh
look. While it will never have the charm of Kraków or Gda ^ sk, there's a spirit of
rebirth here that's immediately contagious. Some 85% of the city was destroyed dur-
ing World War II, and nearly everything you see, including the charming and very
“old” looking Old Town (Stare Miasto), has been around only for a few decades. The
Old Town was faithfully rebuilt, brick by brick, in the aftermath of the war, accord-
ing to paintings, photographs, architectural sketches, and personal memories. The
reconstruction was so good that in 1980 UNESCO included the Old Town on its list
of World Cultural Heritage sites.
Warsaw started life as a relatively small river town in the 14th century, but within
a century it had become the capital city of the Duchy of Mazovia, ruling over small
fiefdoms in central Poland. The city's fortunes steadily improved in the 16th century
after the duchy was incorporated into the Polish crown and Poland formed a union
with Lithuania. The union greatly expanded the amount of territory under Polish
influence. In 1596, King Sigismund III decided to move the capital to Warsaw from
Kraków, mainly because it was easier for noblemen to travel to more centrally situated
Warsaw. The subsequent centuries brought the usual mix of prosperity and disaster;
the Swedes sacked the city in the 17th century, but in spite of it all Warsaw continued
to grow wealthier.
The Polish partitions at the end of the 18th century relegated Warsaw to the status
of a provincial town for the next 125 years. Initially, the Prussians ruled over the city,
but the Congress of Vienna, in 1815, placed czarist Russia in firm control. Despite the
occupation, Warsaw thrived in the 19th century as a western outpost of the Russian
empire. Finally, in 1918, after Germany's defeat and Russia's collapse in World War I,
Warsaw was reconstituted as the capital of newly independent Poland.
Things went reasonably well for a time until World War II, when the city—like the
rest of the country—was plunged into a modern-day Dante's Inferno. The Nazis occu-
pied the city in 1939 and held it for nearly the entire course of the war. The occupa-
tion was brutal; thousands of Warsaw residents were imprisoned or killed. Initially, it
was the Jews who bore the brunt. The Nazis herded the city's entire Jewish population
of about 300,000, as well as around 100,000 Jews from elsewhere around Poland, into
a small ghetto area west of the Old Town. Nearly all of them eventually lost their lives
to sickness, starvation, or—mainly—the gas chambers at Treblinka. In 1943, the Jews
heroically rose up against their oppressors in the first of two wartime Warsaw upris-
ings. The uprising was quickly put down and what remained of the ghetto was com-
pletely destroyed.