Sat May 25 - 18:00 (Warsaw)

This morning, Gedeon made Ricky and me another great Polish breakfast. He cooked Polish hot dogs, scrambled eggs and prepared salmon. We ate bread, tomatoes and plum cake. After eating, Gedeon drove us to the Warsaw Rising Museum before leaving us for the last time. We thanked him again for all his hospitality and generosity. He was happy that he could host us on our first segment of our journey.

The Warsaw Rising Museum was very informative and told a detailed history about Warsaw from the start of WWII on September 1, 1939 to after the war, when Poland turned into a communist state.

Before the war, Warsaw's population was 1.3 million people. Then it went down to 900,000. By the end of the war, only 1000 people stayed in the city of ruins. It was amazing that they created the most successful counterfeiting scheme during the Nazi occupation as a way to 'get money' for weapons and supplies. The Warsaw Underground gathered a militia of Poles together for an uprising in 1944. They requested help from the allies (who joined Poland in declaring war on Germany in 1939) but they never came to their aid. Stalin was supposed to give them support, but never acted. Stalin said that the Poles were dumb for trying to overthrow the Nazi's by themselves. Then after the war ended, Stalin imposed communism to the country which continued the hardship they had to face for decades longer until the Berlin Wall fell.