other / likes
Warsaw
“. so I, selfishly, will start you in Warsaw, because I love Warsaw and I’m a Varsovian.”
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other / likes
“. so I, selfishly, will start you in Warsaw, because I love Warsaw and I’m a Varsovian.”
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7 transcript-backed records
01 / evaluation
“Now there’s a new generation that seems much more Western, seems much more American. It’s visible in customer interactions, stores, fashion, and in how people even — facial expressions; eye contact’s a little more direct than it used to be, I think.”
02 / evaluation
“My family, a lot of them went through the Holocaust in Poland. And studying the German occupation of especially Poland, where the Jews were so much, and the process — what happened there after the ghetto clearances, after ’41: I think that there’s a real message about human nature there.”
03 / evaluation
“The Battle of the Field of Blackbirds, 1389: it is pivotal in Serbian memory and Serbian mythmaking, that moment — although they really mythologized it — of the great defeat of Serbia at the hands of the Ottomans, and then wresting a kind of victory by assassinating the Ottoman sultan in the last second after the battle’s been lost. I think there’s a real pull of history.”
04 / evaluation
“The people who end up protecting the people they protect the longest, hold out the longest, hold out to the end, are usually people who live on the absolute margins: widows, outcasts, people with no money, people in terrible shape, people whose lives would be transformed by having an iron stove or a pair of pants. But if you were to take that when you were hiding Jews, and you were to take their money and buy something like that, immediately all your neighbors would know what you’re doing, because every village is 100 eyes watching everybody else.”
05 / evaluation
“I think there is such a complicated story there of Ukraine between Poland and especially Russia of being entangled with both of those and creating itself in relation and against both of those.”
06 / evaluation
“They don’t have that thing that Asimov does, or even Dune, of world-building and forecasting the human future far in advance. They are like Kafka in space, and that’s absurd situations, strange turns of events — I think a pretty pessimistic view of progress.”
07 / evaluation
“It is hard to travel around the Balkans now because there are hardly any long-distance railways. It’s hard to even cross the — I had a terrible time going from Belgrade to Sarajevo because you don’t get sent to Sarajevo, you get sent to the Sarajevo that belongs to Republika Srpska, the Serbian part of Bosnia.”