There is a City...

.
There is a city...
which stops for one minute every year.

I've been living here for over twenty years and though the calendar is filled with many commemorations, religious, secular political, for some odd reason none affects me so much as this one. This year it caught me on the way to a meeting in the Old Town. Where I live the event (the sixty eighth anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising) is signalled by the loud plaintive wail of factory sirens all over the town which begin precisely at 17:00 and finish precisely 17:01. In the Old Town I was surprised to hear mainly peals of church bells, which was not quite the same (especially as they are all post-War casts and rather 'tinny' in sound). A bit later, already in the meeting, through an open window wafted in the sound from the market place outside of apparently spontaneous patriotic singing (incongruously mainly First World War anthems and marching songs, followed by hits of the Warsaw street orchestras of the interwar years and a few catchy tunes from the early years of communism - about  rebuilding the capital destroyed by the Nazis). They were still at it when I left over an hour later - a several-dozen strong group of mostly young people (probably many from the rather nationalist and wrong-headed Party-I-do-not-Support [PiS]) surrounded by passers by who'd stopped and knew most of the words ( I confess I do not). Just as I walked past the gathering it was being addressed by a little shrivelled old lady who'd taken part in the fighting at the age of 16. My late father-in-law was also a combatant. Apart from the patched (and some raw) bullet scars on many buildings - undatable of course - there are few traces above-ground of the Uprising in today's town fabric (apart from the graves in the cemetery that is). Part of the reason for this is that it was the 'wrong' partisan army that was involved (the anti-Soviet 'Home Army' and not the pro-Soviet 'People's Army') and the Communist authorities had no intention of paying any more attention to it than they had to, this is why the monuments that were put up in the 1980s were the result of long fights with red tape and restrictions.

But today it was not monuments that mattered.

[the palm tree is an urban sculpture, a pretend palm tree in the centre of a pretend roundabout - the police often stand on it and give you a fine if you try to use it as a roundabout, because there is a sign earlier telling you not to use it to turn left, crazy. The building with writing on it talks of the whole nation [re]building the capital after the War, the big square in the film is nearby and has the Grave of the Unknown Soldier - where Mitt Romney was shouted at yesterday - and the other scenes were shot by the central station and underground]