Today, we met our tuides and our group of 23 folks from the UK and the US.  Everyone seems really nice.  Our tour manager is a lovely young woman named Adda.  She was born in Poland and her family still lives here.  She lives  in England and is an independent tour manager.  Our guide is a young man with impressive credentials as a Holocaust expert.  We also have a local, Polish guide with us who remembers the Holocaust as a young boy.  He and his family lived in the area designated as the Ghetto and had to move five times as the borders of the Ghetto expanded, as his family was not Jewish.  Today, we saw the Jewish Cemetery with  perhaps thousands of graves crowded in the small area.  There are two large ‘blank’ areas where there are mass graves where the thousands are buried who died each month of starvation or disease.  There is a statue dedicated to the man who ran the orphanage and altho his name wasn’t on ‘the List’ went with the children in his care when they were shipped to the gas chamber.  The children felt safe with him.  More about him later in the tour.  We saw where Mila 18 was (book by the same name by Leon Uris) and the mound that is the mass grave of the Resistance fighters of the Ghetto Uprising of 1943.  Not,far away is the memorial we saw yesterday.  Ironically, the monument is made of the stone the Nazis had that were going to be used for their Victory Memeorial when they won the war.  We spent several hours at the museum that follows a 1000 years of the Jewish History in Poland.  A beautiful new building whose entrance depicts the parting of the Red Sea…the ceilings depict the desert where the Jews wandered and the back dePicts Noah’s Ark.  The exhibits are excellent and rival the Holocaust Museum in Washington…altho only a small part of the museum is dedicated to the Holocaust.  After, that we visited the orthodox Synagogue.  It was the second largest in Warsaw.  Hitler ordered the destruction of the Great Synangogue to punish the Jews for the Ghetto Uprising, altho there were no Jews left in Warsaw.  They were all gone.  After the Uprising of 1944, the entire city was razed.  All day, we have been seeing groups of Israeli school children.  They come to Poland every summer on school trips.  We returned to the hotel after a long, but very interesting and informative day.  Went to dinner at the same great restaurant Andy and I had been to twice.  We had a set menu of Greek Salad, cold cuts and smoked herring done several ways.  Delicious!  Even had a taste of lard…the we had a choice of salmon or chicken with grilled vegetables.  For dessert, there was an apple crisp with vanilla ice cream.  An excellent dinner thoroughly enjoyed by the group.  Tomorrow, we leave after breakfast for Treblinka.