12 hours ago
Warsaw has reclaimed its position as a proud capital
Well-meaning outsiders sometimes warn visitors to Poland to stick to Kraków, overflowing with splendid historical buildings, and avoid Warsaw – 'another boring capital city', as one writer phrased it to me. Ignore them. Kraków is charming, in the way that reliquaries of the past tend to be. But Warsaw is a monument to Polish perseverance – a sprawling symbol of the indefatigability of Europe's most successful post-Cold War nation.
To appreciate Warsaw's 21st-century revival, consider what the city endured and overcame in the 20th. Months before he shot himself, Hitler ordered its total destruction. Even as Germany's fate was being sealed, the Führer's marauders executed his instruction to raze the Polish capital 'without trace' with murderous zeal. The city was dynamited block by block. Universities were blown up. Schools were torn down. Libraries were set on fire. Historical monuments were obliterated. Houses were pillaged. Survivors were crammed into trains and deported to concentration camps.
When it was over, Warsaw – the site of the most gallant uprising of the Second World War – was a pile of dust and debris. It would have been easier to relocate the capital, and the Moscow-backed government that seized Poland briefly moved its operations to Łódź. Varsovians, however, remained defiant.
In 1945, they organised an exhibition in their ruined city. 'Warsaw does not lament, it does not complain,' the event proclaimed, 'but before the tribunal of nations Warsaw Accuses'. General Eisenhower, one of the 43,000 visitors to the show, described the state of Warsaw as 'far more tragic than anything I have seen' in Europe.
Not for long.
Poles expelled from the city returned, cleared the rubble by hand, buried the dead, and began rebuilding Warsaw brick by brick. They compelled the government to support them by the sheer force of their example. Some buildings were resurrected as facsimiles of the destroyed originals. But the animating ideology of reconstruction was Soviet socialism, and, after a period of frenzied activity, Warsaw became stagnant.
A symbol of this slump was Hotel Bristol. Housed in a neo-Renaissance building that opened in 1901, it once numbered among the city's grandest buildings – and was one of the handful to survive the Nazi rampage of 1944. By the 1980s, it had become so derelict that it had to be boarded up and abandoned. Warsaw itself degenerated into a drab city whose centrepiece was a Stalinist tower bequeathed as a 'gift' from the Soviet Union.
The fall of communism stimulated a second revival. Varsovians seized the moment: they converted the Communist Party headquarters into the country's new stock exchange, and opened casinos inside the Stalinist behemoth. A cluster of glass-clad skyscrapers proliferated around them.
Despite the recent election of the social conservative Karol Nawrocki as Poland's next president, Warsaw remains a haven for minorities. 'I am of course very uncomfortable,' a gay student at Warsaw University told me a day after the result. 'But this is Warsaw, and we still feel safe in Warsaw.' 'This city', another dejected voter told me, 'gives us hope'.
Politics can conceal Poland's extraordinary achievement. Its GDP is rapidly approaching $1 trillion. The living standards of its people are the envy of Europeans. The Polish army is larger than the armed forces of Britain. Poles who emigrated abroad in search of opportunity at the start of the century are now drifting home. Some are running successful businesses – cocktail bars, breweries, restaurants – at home. Others are investing in the technologies of the future. A Canadian tourist was so impressed by the city that he was considering moving his business there. 'I have not seen a place with such work ethic,' he told me.
Warsaw, reduced to the ground within the lifetime of many of its elderly citizens, has reclaimed its position as the proud capital of a great country.
