Posts Tagged ‘Warsaw’
No Pants Subway Ride Day – photos from around the world
Passengers on the Warsaw Underground take part in the flashmob
People take part in the 2012 No Pants Subway Ride…Started by Improv Everywhere, the goal is for riders to get on public transport dressed in normal winter clothes, but without trousers, and keep a straight face.
Looks like fun. Though it would take a warm subway to get me to take part.
Is this a candidate you could vote for?
A Polish singer and tabloid celebrity has put up posters of herself stretched out on the sand in a provocative bikini as part of her campaign to win a Warsaw district council seat in municipal elections on November 21.
Several of the posters…are to be seen around Warsaw’s Bemowo district bearing Sara May’s slogan: “Beautiful, independent, competent.”
“The deeds count, not the words, so I will not promise anything. I live in Bemowo in Warsaw,” May, whose real name is Katarzyna Szczolek, wrote on her English language website, adding that she would try to make the city a better place to live in.
Ah, yes. Poland maintains their tradition of interesting poster art.
The election? Oh.
Swastika quilt disturbs an Old West utopia
One day two summers ago, an elderly couple walked into a local museum, shyly offering up the surprisingly well-preserved quilt for sale. The 90-year-old man, who had lived his whole life on the flat plains an hour north of Denver, was divvying up family heirlooms when he found the mysterious quilt.
The man didn’t remember seeing the quilt before and wasn’t sure who made it. His mother and sister had been avid quilters, as had so many women of his childhood. Maybe they made it together and it was tucked away when his mother died in 1934. His sister was also dead, so there was no one left to ask.
JoAnna Luth Stull, registrar at the museum, was working that day and gently explained that the museum didn’t buy items but suggested where the couple could get the quilt appraised. She was immediately transfixed by the workmanship as she smoothed the cloth across a table, not noticing the bold geometric pattern.
“Oh, wow,” said the museum superintendent as he happened by. “That’s a swastika quilt.”
Stull, 55, did a double take. Arranged across the quilt in shades of red, pink and beige were 27 swastikas. Her reaction was immediate and visceral. She saw an emblem of hate. “That’s what my generation sees,” she said.
So began an unlikely dilemma for the small museum in a city named for Horace Greeley, the New York newspaperman who famously cajoled all to “Go West.”
Could they display the quilt? Should they?
“Our mission is to preserve and interpret the history of Greeley. This is a cultural artifact,” said Erin Quinn, museum director. Greeley was founded in 1870 as a utopian community, with strict covenants requiring temperance and modest living. Quinn can imagine women only a generation or two removed from the city’s founders gathering to socialize and make something functional.
I had this discussion with a friend of mine, thirty years ago. She had a hatpin with a swastika on it – that had belonged to her grandmother – made before WW1. She wore it, once in a while, mostly to get discussions going to see where her neighbors really had their heads during the war with the Nazis.
Because most didn’t know she was a Jew who survived the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising – the city where we had this conversation.
She was always willing to explain the differences – and ask questions.
Holiday photos from Bethlehem you won’t see on network TV
Israel will allow 200 Palestinian Christians into Bethlehem for the holiday
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission
Roger Waters vows to hold a concert matching the Pink Floyd concert in Berlin
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission
The Pope’s visit to Bethlehem Palestinians below an Israeli watchtower
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission
I had a dear friend who survived the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. She was brave enough to return from Russia whence she had escaped to – to fight in the Polish underground against the Nazis.
I recall asking her in 1978 why she kept the Polish name she used in the underground. She told me that – everything about her that was a Jew before the war died when her husband and children were slaughtered by the Germans.
She also told me – years later – she couldn’t be a Jew, again, watching Israel treating Palestinians the way Nazis treated Poles.
