Warsaw, Poland: Beautiful and Welcoming City with a Tragic Past

June 12, 2018

Warsaw is one of the most surprising cities I’ve ever visited. Usually, I am a tough critic when traveling (especially if I don’t have a bathroom or a nice bed). But I became a fan of Warsaw almost instantly and jumped right into exploration and appreciation of this important city. It’s a city of contrasts: it feels hospitable and welcoming yet still retains an air of eastern European coolness. The desire to progress and rise above its history is palpable, amid seemingly innumerable monuments to the past. You feel almost overwhelmed by all the history surrounding you, yet every building is almost brand-new. There’s a lot to understand when visiting Warsaw, and it’s a rewarding undertaking. Even though I had zero expectations (or maybe because of that), Warsaw quickly became one of my favorite places.

Cloudy and cool – appropriate weather for the walking tour of mournful history

We arrived on the overnight train from Kyiv very early in the morning, so our room at Dream Hostel Warsaw wasn’t going to be ready for hours. Oh and because of its location in the city center (200 meters from the Royal Castle), our car wasn’t able to get on its actual street so we had to walk a little to it in our exhausted stupor. With these two tiny obstacles beginning our trip, you can guess how pissed off I was, so that tells you a little bit about how great this city is that I was able to overcome my pissiness to such an extent. The Dream Hostel, aside from letting their other customers check out so late (i.e. not at 7am when I wanted them out), was a great place to stay. It was clean and simple and modern, with a really comfortable bed, at least in our private en suite (we are adults we do not fork with hostel dorms anymore). The location was perfect too, right in the Old Town, so I recommend it if you’re going and looking for a budget-friendly place that isn’t a straight up hole filled with loud drunk yoots. (There are yoots though; it is a hostel.)

Right outside the hostel was an outdoor exhibit on Tadeusz Kosciuszko, the Polish-Lithuanian military leader who became a hero both in Poland and in the USA. He fought in the American Revolution as a colonel of the Continental Army. He also was an architect and he designed and oversaw the construction of military fortifications such as those at West Point. When he returned to Poland after straight killing it in America, he was made the very model of a modern Major General in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth Army, then was Supreme Commander of the Polish National Armed Forces, leading the 1794 Kosciuszko Uprising. Don’t make me type that name again. The K-dawg Uprising was against Russia, as most uprisings should be, but he was captured. Luckily, he was pardoned after a few years and thought, get me the hell out of here, I’ma go see my homies in America. And so he moved not only to the USA but to Philadelphia! Pop POP!

Proof of this dude’s opposite trajectory to mine

The Dream Hostel staff directed our attention to what is my #1 activity tip for Warsaw – the free city walking tour, from freewalkingtour.com. Free walking tours are my favorite thing to find in any city, as they are always incredibly informative and entertaining. But Warsaw’s (actually called the Free WALKATIVE Tour because they’re adorable I guess) were my favorite ever. That’s right, we took two – the general history/Old Town one (very good) and one specifically about the war and the ghetto and everything, which was extra long (2 1/2 hours I think). This latter one was spectacular, I think because our incredible guide packed so much important history into our tour and treated all of its history, good and tragic, with reverence and consideration, so it felt properly serious. And soul-crushing. Most of Warsaw’s prominent history is grim, so you have to be really ready to dive in.

We met at Zygmunt’s Column in the Old Town, one of the most famous landmarks of Warsaw that I didn’t happen to take a picture of for some reason, I think because I was cold. It’s named after King Sigismund III Vasa, the 16th century king who moved Poland’s capital from Krakow to Warsaw. I like to say his name with an aye-aye-aye in the middle.

This lady above was our guide in the Old Town for the first tour, and then for the World War history tour (the big long most important one) we had a young man take over. Both were very good (but the boy was my favorite) and both told us that they were newly engaged (not to each other), because every single guide in every single free walking tour we’ve ever taken, across the globe, has told us that they were newly engaged (I think as a ploy to get more tips, but like, no harm no foul, get that paper.)

My favorite tour guide ever! He said Warsaw so cute

But let’s start with the not-so-terrible history in the Historic Center of Warsaw. Like the above pictures, where you can see famous sayings and famous people (or characters (yes that’s Donkey from Shrek)) in various languages – including Esperanto, the language made up in the 19th century to be an international language (instead of forcing everyone to learn English). It’s not super weird to speak Esperanto here because its creator, the Polish-Jewish ophthalmologist Zamenhof (hey that’s like me I want to invent a language but not touch people’s eyes) was from Warsaw.

We also saw Marie Curie’s house. I guess I always assumed she and everyone else with second-syllable-accented names was French, but she was Polish, born in Warsaw (as Maria), and that above is the house she grew up in. Our guide taught us so much that I didn’t know about Marie’s incredible life. I knew she was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the only woman to win two, and the only person to win in two different fields of science (she real smart). I did not know that she was part of an actual Curie Family Legacy – there are 5 Nobel Prizes now in her family. Her descendants are under hella pressure. The first element she discovered was named polonium after her home country. I mean it’s so obvious but I never realized it; I think I assumed it was after her favorite Hamlet character. (Uh, I think I remember Hamlet accurately.) And everyone knows she died from radiation exposure during her research in radioactivity but I didn’t know she got extra radiation from developing mobile x-ray units for field hospitals during World War I. Her extraordinary achievements could have been thwarted by the simple fact that she could not enroll in any institute of higher learning in Poland because she was a woman. She and her sister studied in Paris, after years of planning and earning enough money to do so. While Marie saved money and worked, she continued to teach herself. She also fell in love with a man who couldn’t marry her because she was poor, and although she was heartbroken, it was sort of for the best because if she did, she may have never gone to Paris or achieved what she has. Plus people said that the man who rejected her always regretted it, so she got hers.

I also loved this story of Maly Przeglad, the newspaper written and edited by children, for children. Janusz Korczak made such a publication possible, when for 13 years in the early 20th century he ran and distributed the paper, making 50,000 copies of it every week. Meaning Little Review, Maly Przeglad was a supplement to the Nasz Przeglad, the largest Polish-language Jewish daily newspaper. Janusz said he developed this newspaper because, “There are children who have many great ideas, remarks, and observations, but don’t write, because they lack courage or just don’t feel like it. Our newspaper will encourage them to write. Encourage and embolden them.” I love this man.

Above is a picture of the clocktower at the Royal Castle, in Castle Square (apt) at the entrance to the Old Town. It was formerly the official residence of Polish monarchs, from the 16th century, as well as the seat of the King and Parliament. It was also the site of the writing of the Constitution of 3 May 1791, the second-oldest codified national constitution in the world after the USA’s (although I bet more respected). However, you may recall when I said in the beginning that everything in Warsaw is new. That includes this castle and everything else in the Old Town, which was destroyed by the Nazis during World War II. Here is a picture of the same site during the devastation, and one from beforehand, which was used later in the rebuilding process.

In 1939, following the invasion of Poland, Nazis burned and looted the Castle. But it would be almost completely destroyed a few years later, along with the rest of Warsaw, after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943 and the subsequent Warsaw Uprising in 1944. After WWII, more than 80% of the city would be demolished and almost all of Warsaw’s 300,000 Jewish residents (making it the largest Jewish city in Europe) would be dead.

Metal map of Warsaw

So I guess we’ve reached that point where we have to talk about it all. As I said, Warsaw was the biggest Jewish city in Europe pre-war, with around 300,000 Jews. Before WWII, Jews were thriving in Warsaw, with the majority living in the city center and commercial districts. Many left Warsaw during the depression, which was worse in Poland than the rest of Europe, but even so the population remained high. When the Siege of Warsaw occurred in 1939, German planes bombed Warsaw, killing tens of thousands of people and destroying 10% of the city. After this, the number of Jews in Warsaw actually increased, because there were so many refugees fleeing from the Polish-German front. Soon after the Siege ended, Hitler established the General Government in Poland and the Jewish Council in Warsaw, which would let the Nazis start carrying out their atrocities against the Polish people. First was Jewish forced labor, to clean up after the bombings. Then all the bank accounts of Polish Jews were blocked, followed by the required display of Jewish star on all Jewish shops. Then came the required armbands, and then the ban from public transit, and then the prohibition on communal prayer.

A section of the Mur Getta, or Ghetto Wall

In the fall of 1940, the Nazis, now running Poland, established the Warsaw Ghetto, which would become the largest Ghetto in Europe. They ordered construction of the Ghetto walls around the predominantly Jewish area. Non-Jews (referred to as ‘ethnic Poles’, but like Jews still can be that, asswipes) were removed from this area while Jews from the suburbs were brought into it. The walls, closing the inhabitants off from the outside world, were 3 meters high, with barbed wire on top, and anyone trying to escape was shot. More than 400,000 (some reports say 450,000) Jews were imprisoned in the ghetto, which was only a little over one square mile. People were packed into rooms, with little if any food, prohibited from freely traveling in their own city. There were typhus epidemics in the dirty, close quarters. There was starvation – the rations started at 180 calories per person per day and decreased with time. The vast majority of food in the Ghetto was smuggled in.

Marking the boundaries of the Ghetto area today

From the Ghetto, Jews were deported to concentration camps for either forced labor or extermination. More than 250,000 Jews were sent from the Ghetto to Treblinka in the summer of 1942 for extermination. Most of the remaining Jews in the Ghetto died from shootings, gassing, illness, and starvation. By the end of 1942, the Jews in the Ghetto realized that the deportations meant death, and that the transport for ‘resettlement’ was really leading Jews to mass killings. They decided to resist by smuggling in weapons. In January 1943, the Nazis entered the Ghetto to round up more Jews for transport, but they met resistance from some armed Jews. Still, 600 Jews were shot and 5,000 were removed (of the planned 8,000). But now the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was starting, the largest revolt by Jews in WWII. Adults and children were ready to fight, although with their limited supplies and arms against the German forces, they knew at this point it was more a fight for honor rather than survival.

This is called the Kotwica, the emblem of the Polish Underground State and the Home Army (which we talk about below). It was the symbol for Polish struggle to regain independence. The symbol comes from the initials P and W, from the phrase “Pomscimy Wawer” – We Shall Avenge Wawer. Wawer was a massacre in 1939, one of the first large-scale massacres of Polish civilians by German troops.

The resistance organizations, the ZZW and ZOB, gained control of the Ghetto and executed Nazi collaborators and traitors, like the Jewish Police officers. The head of the Jewish Ghetto Police committed suicide. By Passover, the police and SS forces entered the Ghetto to complete deportations, but the Jewish fighters held them back. The SS officers started burning down houses block by block to force a surrender, but the fighting continued for almost a month.

While this fighting occurred inside the walls, outside the walls the Germans were attacked at various points by Polish resistance groups. However, the numbers of fighters in and outside the Ghetto kept falling, and eventually there was no organized defense left, just survivors who hid in the sewers and dugouts referred to as bunkers.

The Nazis searched out these hiding places and would smoke or flood the inhabitants out, or just use explosives on the area. One of these dugouts was the infamous Mila 18, with approximately 300 people inside, including smugglers and ZOB commanding officers. The smugglers surrendered to the Nazis, but the ZOB command refused to move. The Nazis threw tear gas down into the bunker, and a few people managed to escape uncaught, but the rest committed mass suicide by ingesting cyanide instead of surrendering to the Nazis.

The site of Mila 18. It felt too strange to take a picture, so instead of deciding whether it was appropriate or not I took a half-picture.

The Uprising ended on May 16, 1943, when the Nazis demolished the Great Synagogue of Warsaw in a symbolic fuck you to humanity, although I am surprised it wasn’t demolished at the start of things. 13,000 Jews died in the Uprising, and most of the remaining 50,000 (remember we started with 450,000) were captured and sent to camps, mainly Treblinka.

At this point in the tour, an (white female (always) (dammit)) American woman asked the tour guide “Why didn’t the Jews just fight back when this all started??” All the decent people gave her side eye and the guide explained that the events didn’t just jump from zero to murder in a day. The oppressors, like all oppressors, started small, with sacrifices you couldn’t really risk everything fighting against when it seemed like something you could live with. Then the oppressors would add something else to the mix, and the same question is asked of you: is this the breaking point, or will it be okay? Most people think things will be okay for them, that things couldn’t get too out of hand in modern society. But soon you’re faced with a pile of small atrocities stacked on top of each other and the stack leads to complete injustice and horror, and by that point it’s too late to do much. We visited Warsaw many months ago, and even then I was shocked that the lady didn’t realize that the same thing was happening in the USA. I wonder if she can see today how ignorant she sounded, or if she realizes that we’ve reached the point she was talking about, when people should be fighting back. Every day, the leaders of American chip away at the rights of citizens and innocent people, and they degrade our institutions so much that our checks and balances are now a joke, a joke that for the most part they are in control of. But aside from trying to fight back civilly (in the courts, with fundraising, with calling offices), no one is rioting in the streets or risking their lives to fight it. We excuse it day by day as something we can live with, something that we will change when decent people are back in power. But look at what the incremental nature of these injustices has led to. There are literally babies being snatched from their families and locked up in cages. And we are not rioting in the streets for them. Is this the point when we should be? If we don’t, will it be too late to fight against what happens next? I am scared of what will happen next as I’m sure all decent people who aren’t morally bankrupt are, but I’m also scared of what’s happening now and what’s already happened. We’re supposed to study history in order to learn from it and not repeat the mistakes of the past, but that’s hard to do when people who want to repeat history are in charge.

Warsaw’s Palace of Justice today (the courts)

Ok let’s get back to Warsaw’s history before we all get back to crying, donating, crying, screaming, and not knowing what else to do. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 happened over a year before the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, the general revolt in the ‘main’ part of the city. The Warsaw Uprising of 1944 was part of a nationwide plan from the Polish underground resistance, led by the Home Army (the dominant Polish resistance movement), to liberate Warsaw from the Nazis. The fighting lasted more than two months, with no outside help, to be the largest military effort by any European resistance in WWII. The timing of the Uprising coincided with the retreat of German forces from Poland head of the Soviet advance, but when the Soviets approached the city, they halted temporarily and ignored Polish radio contact instead of charging into the city. Also, there was a Soviet base a few minutes away from the city, but they never provided air support. All of this led to allegations that Stalin halted his forces on purpose to let the resistance fail and be crushed.

Churchill pleaded with Stalin and FDR to help the Polish allies, but they refused. Without obtaining Soviet air clearance, Churchill sent more than 200 supply drops in the Warsaw Airlift. Finally America did a thing and sent one mass airdrop after getting Soviet air clearance. However, it was too little too late, and the Soviet halt gave the Germans the ability to regroup and defeat the resistance. So just another lesson from history that you cannot trust the Russians. In fact, Stalin found the Home Army’s resistance so ‘inconvenient’ to his plans that their name was censored in the post-war period and he twisted the facts through propaganda in the Soviet-controlled People’s Republic of Poland.

Monument to the fighters of the Warsaw Uprising

Approximately 16,000 Polish resistance fighters were killed in the Uprising, and between 150,000 and 200,000 Polish civilians died mainly from mass executions. In the city, about 25% of Warsaw was destroyed, but after the Poles surrendered, Germans razed the vast majority of the remainder of the city as a final lesson.

Monument to the Heroes of Warsaw, also known as the Warsaw Nike for obvious reasons

Pomnik Bohaterow Getta, the monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Right outside the Jewish Museum.

Monument at the Ghetto walls

After the war, Polish citizens led a five-year reconstruction campaign to restore the Old Town of Warsaw, a restoration so meticulous that the entire new centre is a UNESCO World Heritage site. They used old paintings and photographs to ensure that the reconstruction got much of the city’s rich architectural heritage correct, and its thanks to that campaign that Warsaw looks as historic as it does.

Today, Warsaw’s historic center is gorgeous, filled with lovely colors and important buildings, belying a history that left it completely destroyed.

The Warsaw Mermaid is an important symbol of the city, featured on its coat of arms. There are several legends about the mermaid, and the official City legend says that she decided to stay in Warsaw after coming upon the riverbank near the Old Town. Fishermen noticed that there was something making waves, tangling their nets, and releasing their fish (yas queen). The fishermen were going to trap the mermaid, but then she started singing and they fell in love, as you do. But a rich merchant (always bad) trapped the mermaid and imprisoned her. She cried, and when the fishermen heard her cried they rescued her. In return, the mermaid has been armed with a sword and a shield so she is ready to help protect the city and its lovely residents. Other versions of this story say that the Warsaw Mermaid is the sister of the Copenhagen Mermaid (the Little Mermaid). Could be true considering the Copenhagen/Little one had all those sisters. This statute stands in the Old Town Square.

So yes, when you go to Warsaw you have to take this walking tour and learn about the history. You can’t just go and enjoy the insane vegan food (next post) and not pay your respects to its past. It’s so important to learn and remember what happened here, and with any luck learn from it.