The Institute of Mining, taken over by the Nazis in 1939 to become the headquarters of the General Government of much of Poland, including Cracow.

I went to the Museum of Cracow History fr0m 1939-45, located at Ulica (St.) Pomarska 2 -- see following posts. They don't get many visitors, because it was locked during hours, and you press a call button for someone to come open it for you, and then sit & wait til you're gone. I have too many pictures from that museum to post, and also bought a CD they have made re the museum.

One of our tutors, Irmina, who showed me around Warsaw's Old Town, complained that the revised Polish high school curriculum doesn't leave time to study WWII history, so many Poles are ignorant of it. It seems, too, that Poland wants to move into the future rather than burden itself with its bloody past.

But the acts of selfless heroism taken on by Polish patriots, priests, and just ordinary people, in the face of the evil of Nazism shouldn't be forgotten. We owe them at least that, the respect of remembering their courage. Their mothers didn't raise them lovingly, to suffer, as so many did...When you walk through Cracow, and anywhere in Poland, you realize that only 65 years ago terror hovered over the streets like a dark predatory bird.

In the museum there was a photo of the ceremony renaming the Main Square (Rynek Glowny), in 1939, as Adolph Hitler Square. But two nights ago I watched the Twinkle Brothers and a Polish gorale group playing a version of Polish reggae, on a stage on almost exactly the same spot from which that ceremony took place. Hitler and his millions of followers named blacks & Poles as Untermensch, but in the struggle and final victory over them, during which other millions died & suffered, including millions of Americans, we showed Hitler & his followers that they in fact were the subhumans.