28-05-2025
Below Warsaw's modern surface, a dark past haunts its tourists
"You can ignore history and just look at Warsaw as a modern city. But if you are curious, then you can find something on every corner." The words are from Witold Wrzosinski, director of the Jewish Cemetery on Okopowa Street in the Polish capital.
The Warsaw native, who oversees the 33-hectare last resting place for the city's Jews, is spot-on when talking about the 1806-founded cemetery, but also about the city as a whole. Anyone who visits the Polish capital who does not come away with learning something of its rich and often tragic history must be walking the streets with blinkers on.
Then, Warsaw looks like a chic and modern metropolis: The architecture is appealing, the underground stations are stylish and sometimes so clean that they almost seem sterile. There are many parks to retreat from the hustle and bustle of city life, including the centrally located Łazienki Park, which is the largest. Along the Vistula River, which divides Warsaw's old town from districts such as Praga - now the centre of the city's artistic scene - people like to walk the promenade on warm evenings.
The history begins at the Palace of Culture, a monumental building that is impossible to overlook and was erected at Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's behest in the 1950s. At almost 240 metres, it is still one of the tallest buildings in Poland. Once seen as a symbol of communist oppression, Warsaw's residents have now made their peace with the "Stalin syringe" - a reference to the edifice's sharp-shaped spire. It is now home to museums and cinemas, among other things. A travel tip: Take the lift up the spire for a panoramic view of the city and Vistula River.
Recalling uprisings
The Centrum Nauki Kopernik, the science centre and museum named after Medieval astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), is also located on the banks of the Vistula. Copernicus, who was born in the north-central city of Torun, is considered one of the country's most important scientists. In the neighbourhood, you will discover the former power station Elektrownia Powiśle, a factory building that now houses modern restaurants, cafés and shops.
But there is more to Elektrownia Powiśle than just industrial history. The plant was a focal point of the Warsaw Uprising of the Polish Home Army against the German occupation in the autumn of 1944, where workers tried to supply the city with energy during the fighting.
The Nazis put down the uprising and then answered it with brutality. On the orders of Nazi SS and Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler, the occupiers bombarded the entire city centre. Photographs of this period can now be seen in the Warsaw Uprising Museum and in Polin, a museum devoted to the more than 1,000-year history of Jewish life in Poland. The museum is also dedicated to remembering the Holocaust.
It was between mid-April and mid-May 1943 that what remained of Warsaw's Jewish population launched an uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto against the Nazis. It was the biggest Jewish act of resistance during the Holocaust, and it also ended in tragedy. Cast-iron plates embedded at 22 points in the street surface mark the external boundaries of the erstwhile ghetto.
The rebuilt historic old city centre
To the west of the Vistula, where the historic centre, royal palace and ghetto were located, not one stone was left standing at the end of the war. However, as early as 1945, the people of Warsaw set up an office for the reconstruction of the capital. They wanted to rebuild everything as faithfully as possible. Warsaw's Old Town, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1980, is recognised worldwide as the most famous example of a reconstructed city.
The memorial to the heroes of the Warsaw ghetto uprising at the Polin Museum is also of great interest to history-conscious travellers: It was here that on December 7, 1970 then-West German chancellor Willy Brandt knelt down in a historic gesture of Germany's expression of remorse for the wartime crimes committed against Poland.
One of the most important memorials in Warsaw is also the "Umschlagplatz" - transshipment centre - near the Warsaw Ghetto. There, the Nazis rounded up and then deported some 250,000 Jews to the Treblinka extermination camp 100 kilometres to the north-east.
The Jewish cemetery, which was once part of the ghetto border, was spared from the bombs. And so, with its sometimes monumental burial artefacts, to cemetery director Wrzosinski it is a testimony to how generations of Jews lived in Warsaw.
Today, 60 people are working on the huge cemetery grounds, including 30 archaeologists who are unearthing buried jewellery and porcelain, but also rifles and cartridges from the time of the Jewish resistance. "We all know how they died," Wrzosinski said of the country's Jews. "But let us here show how they lived."
