Hi everyone - Michael Anes your friendly but exhausted trip co-director here. We are starting to get blog followers and yet there are few posts. What gives, you may ask.
I have simple answers by showing you our schedule in three pictures.
First, the latter portion of our Łódź schedule looked like this:
On June 12th we had excellent, stimulating lectures on key contemporary concepts by very long-term colleagues and friends of Heather's originally, who then became my friends too (Aleksandra and Ela).
On June 13th we enthusiastically received a in-depth multi-media presentation by the newest member of our gang, Michał Rauszer, on the perception and use of peasantry in the construction of Polish national identity. This relatively new area of study is important and very current, and as is the case with all our Łódź colleagues was pitched at precisely "the right level" as I like to say when complimenting a teaching talk.
June 14th was an emotional day. So much more can be said in pictures than in words, but we have learned a lot about the destruction of the Jewish community of Poland over many months and this day exemplifies the tragic, ineffable feeling of loss.
We took a packed Saturday morning intercity train (our first and only such travel mode) which sped us off to Warsaw in 1 hour, 20 minutes. The fastest Łódź to Warsaw train is now 1 hr 12 minutes, and I like to tell my student groups that it is only in the past 5 years or so that the duration of these trips has matched the speed of the same route in the pre-war era. This factoid is a truly incredible marker of the extent of WWII damage and the difficulty in full reconstruction in Communist times, through the regaining of independence and accession to the EU.
Our first couple of days in Warsaw have been very busy!
Stan Obirek was a colleague of Heather's in 2010-11 and is, along with Ela Durys, one of the real OGs, talking to our 2013, 2018 and 2024 groups. Stan is warm and knowledgeable in the extreme and I was filled with joy just listening to him.
POLIN is a multiple award-winning museum for a reason, and we spent over three hours there. We'll have more to say (I'm sure) in future posts with lots of pictures.
And then today we enjoyed a new lecturer for us, Maria Babinska, a researcher from Michał Bilewicz's lab in the Center for Research on Prejudice at the University of Warsaw presenting ideas of contemporary relevance such as secondary antisemitism and, importantly for the aims of our trip, covering the idea of collective narcissism. Maria presented very recent cross-cultural research on perceptions of the Holocaust in Poland, Germany, and Israel, among other nations.
What does tomorrow hold, you ask? Only a supremely busy and exciting day! Polish language in the morning, a tour of the Presidential Residence (Belvedere) and a meeting with a 99-year old fighter in the Warsaw '44 Uprising, and then we go to the Uprising Museum! Then out to dinner together. Whew.
Pictures as soon as possible. Thanks for reading!