There really isn’t much to do on Easter Sunday in Warsaw. I was invited to an easter dinner and to church services, but since I don’t observe religious holidays, I declined the invitations. I spent most of the day hanging around my apartment, fiddling with the computer and eating. I finished off the last of the salad I had made several days before. I am really burned out on lettuce, so I made a cucumber salad. It was quite good.
It was well past lunch when I realized that I had better go out for a walk. Before heading out, I studied the map to decide where to go. I saw several areas nearby, which were tinted green indicating parks. One was the Park Stefana Żeromskiego. I decided to go see what it was like.
The park is built around Fort Sokolnickiego, with a children’s playground, fountain, restaurant, and wooded pathways. It was very peaceful, especially considering that the land was once a burial ground during the Defence of Warsaw. The park has a generally boomerang shape. There are two knolls in the center of the two wings of the park. They look as if they were once earthworks of the fort.
I saw several trees, which were very knotted. I wonder if it were trees like this that gave people the idea of trees that eat people. This one looks quite full.
Thousands of paper daffodils were handed out on Good Friday to remember the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. I noticed people walking down the street wearing them on Good Friday, but I didn’t think to try to find out what they signified until I saw some in the park.
The whole point of going to the park was to get some exercise, so after I walked around for a while, I picked up my speed and walked until the rings on my watch closed. There was a ramp leading up to one of the knolls, where I walked up and down as fast as I could, until a couple and their dog began to go up very slowly. After that I headed off the knoll and walked around to get a photo of the fountain.
After leaving the park, I tarried along the park fence reading some placards, which were posted there. I had passed them before, without realizing that they were both in english and polish. I had only noticed the polish, since it came first in the text. (Since then I have made a point of checking signs to see if they include english. A lot of them do.) In a later post I will cover the history I learned from those placards and the ones on the park’s other long fence. By the time I read them all, the sun was going down, and the street lights were coming on. I headed home.
In park closest to my place, I noticed a monument, which I had overlooked before. Despite the low light, my phone did a good job with the images. I could have never got such good shots will my old SLR camera. Witold Pilecki was an amazing man. He was a Polish cavalry officer, intelligence agent, and resistance leader. It is well worth reading the Wikipedia article about him. He voluntarily went into Auschwitz and escaped, hoping to gather intelligence to prove that liberating the camp was possible.
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