As I thought about why I liked Bialystok, I kept coming back here, to this lovely square, as the reason...pretty much all the buildings around it have been rebuilt, the Germans & Soviets having destroyed more than 3/4 of Bialystok, and murdered half its residents, between 1939 and 45...Like the plazas in Mexico, the village squares all over Europe, the ryneks in Poland are the heart of the city. I felt again, as I did 35 years ago when Judy & I would bicycle into a village in Austria or Yugoslovia or...in the evening, and find the square full of people, that Americans cities do not have hearts.
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