Back to the movie: At the Tower Theater Sunday afternoon a packed house watched a film about the Warsaw Uprising. It was a horrifyingly graphic, uncompromising depiction of the doomed revolt of Varsovians - women as well as men, many in their teens - against the occupying German forces in the waning days of World War II. At the end of the two-month battle, 200,000 Poles were dead (in a city with a pre-war population of 900,000). At one point a young woman standing amidst ruins hears an explosion and runs to avoid a shower of blood and limbs. Watching that scene I thought of my editor at National Geographic Traveler magazine who, after commissioning a story about Warsaw from me, requested I "bring out more of the romance of the city."
