Warsaw 1944: Hitler, Himmler and the Crushing of a City. Alexandra Richie

       The City on the Vistula

      Warsaw has the fortune – or misfortune – to be situated at the very centre of the immense flat, sandy plains of Mazowia, along the Berlin–Minsk–Moscow road. Although this vast unimpeded landscape gave the fledgling settlement great advantages in trade, the lack of natural barriers meant that it was at the mercy of any army that marched through. And march they did. Austria, Prussia, Sweden and Russia invaded and occupied the city numerous times, and its destiny has been written as much by foreign armies as by Warsawians themselves.

      Today, evidence of this often violent past is visible everywhere. It is there in the huge swathes of overgrown fields in Wola, where pavements and houses once stood. It is there on the ancient steps where Napoleon stood before leaving on his march on Moscow. It is there in the Tartar and Protestant and Jewish cemeteries, which stand as a testament to a history of openness, and in the beautiful Gothic and Renaissance buildings so carefully rebuilt after the war. It is also there in the hill of rubble – 121 metres high – which was created from the ruins of the city after 1945. Ghosts are everywhere, too. They meet in the Art Deco bar of the Bristol Hotel, or in the white halls of the Wolski hospital, or hover in the spaces between the 1950s housing blocks that criss-cross the former ghetto, once home to the second-largest Jewish community in the world. There, the silence is palpable.

      Ancient Warsaw started as a trading centre. Everything, from amber and fur to timber and salt, was carried by barges on the Vistula or hauled by road to Germany, Holland, Ukraine and Russia. The settlement prospered. It had become rich enough by the thirteenth century to be named a seat by the Dukes of Masovia, and before long the skyline was punctuated by the pretty rooftops of the cathedral and the red-brick church of St Mary’s, and by the merchants’ houses, churches and high walls of the Old and New Towns. In 1596 Warsaw’s star rose again when it was named capital of the now powerful Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Polish court moved from gracious Kraków to the ‘upstart’ city in the north.

      It was a time of great prosperity for the new capital. Aristocrats, merchants, traders and soldiers moved to the city, and with them architects from all over Europe who built glorious churches, administrative buildings and palaces along the Royal Way, each one more beautiful than the last. This time of peace ended with the coming in 1654 of the Northern Wars, in which Swedish and Russian armies burned and pillaged their way across Polish territory in a seemingly endless orgy of violence. The wars lasted for decades, the worst being the invasion by the Swedes, which came to be known as the ‘Deluge’ and which saw much of Warsaw destroyed. Half a century later, Poland began to rebuild. The new king, Stanisław August Poniatowski, began to renew Warsaw’s battered cultural life. Dozens of institutions were founded in the eighteenth century, not least the Załuski Library – the first Polish public library – and the Collegium Nobilium, the predecessor of the University of Warsaw. But the peace would be short-lived. Poland’s avaricious neighbours Austria, Prussia and Russia carved up the country between them in three separate partitions; by 1795 Poland had ceased to exist.

      Warsaw’s unlikely saviour came in the form of Napoleon Bonaparte, who marched through Poland in 1812 on his way to Russia. In 1807 he had created the ‘Duchy of Warsaw’, giving the Poles some autonomy at last, but his demise spelled another period of stagnation for Warsaw, this time under Russian rule. Tsar Alexander I was not particularly hostile to the city and allowed some development – the railways brought wealth, and new streets like Jerusalem Avenue were laid out. The Jewish population, which had numbered only 15,600 in 1816, was bolstered by mass migration of victims fleeing the pogroms in Russia, and had reached 337,000 by the end of the century.

      In 1863, following the reign of the reactionary Tsar Nicholas I, an uprising against Russia ended in another humiliating defeat for the Poles. An oppressive military rule was imposed on the country, epitomized by the gigantic red-brick Citadel in Warsaw’s Żoliborz, built after the first uprising in 1830, which was both an administrative centre and a vast prison. Thousands of Poles were sent to Siberia from its cells. Some growth was permitted under the Russian-born mayor Sokrates Starynkiewicz, who under Tsar Alexander III built the city’s sewer system, introduced trams and street lights, and saw the creation of the Warsaw University Library, the Philharmonic Hall and the Polytechnic. Even so, when compared to the explosive growth of similar cities like Berlin and Vienna, Warsaw seemed stunted. By the end of the nineteenth century it had the reputation of being little more than a provincial city in the Russian Empire.

      In most Western European countries 11 November, which marks the end of the First World War, is a day of mourning. But not in Poland. The ‘war to end all wars’ might have been a horrific conflict, but it freed Poland from despised Russian rule, and marked the beginning of a period of such energy and creativity and optimism that it remains unique in Warsaw’s history. The era was not without complications. In 1920 Lenin invaded the new country in an attempt to bring Bolshevism to Germany by force: ‘The road to worldwide conflagration will run over the corpse of Poland,’ he said. To his surprise the Poles defeated the Soviet forces in the ‘Miracle on the Vistula’, the last time Russia would lose a war until its foray into Afghanistan in the 1980s, persuading Lenin to rein in his global ambitions and to pursue Communism in Russia alone for the time being. Poland also endured hyperinflation and other economic problems, political strife and ethnic conflicts, but none of this could dampen the sheer optimism felt by its young people, the so-called ‘Columbus Generation’, who were growing up in freedom at last.

      Warsaw had now become an important capital city. Though riven with serious social, political and economic problems, it was a major centre of political, diplomatic and military life, and its two main airports and roads and rail lines and five bridges across the Vistula to Praga brought diplomats, dignitaries and people from all over the world to trade, work and live. The city had always been a melting pot, and it continued to welcome foreigners, whether refugees from Bolshevik Russia or, later, those fleeing Hitler’s Germany. With its museums and concert halls, publishing houses and newspapers, museums and galleries, cabarets and film companies, it was a magnet for anyone who wanted to make a mark in the country. Its population increased from 700,000 at the turn of the century to 1.3 million by 1939.

      The massive influx of people created a need for housing, and Warsaw exploded outwards, with entirely new districts created beyond the boundaries once imposed by the tsars. The Warsaw Housing Cooperative constructed huge modernist complexes with all the latest conveniences, and gleaming hospitals and innovative schools were built. Public landmarks like the Sejm (Parliament), the ZUS insurance building and the grand new National Museum were built in the new modernist style, but the past was cherished too. The formerly drab façades of the Old Town were restored to their exuberant original Renaissance colours, and many other revered buildings such as the Warsaw Castle were given much-needed facelifts after decades of neglect by the Russian occupiers.

      Science, culture, history and the arts were celebrated, and dozens of new institutions – including the Geological Institute and the Higher School of Commerce – opened their doors in the 1920s and 30s. When Madame Marie Curie, who had been born in Warsaw, opened her new Radium Institute in 1932 the whole city turned out to cheer her. It was a time of great innovation and excitement in science and the arts. Kazimierz Funk, then at Warsaw University, discovered B vitamins there, while Józef Kosacki, who invented the mine detector, worked with Rudolf Gundlach, who in turn had created an ingenious periscope which was later used in virtually every tank in the Second World War. Kazimierz Prószyński, who developed the film camera, listened to the first broadcast from Europe’s most powerful radio station, opened near Warsaw in 1931. All scientific fields – biology, chemistry, anthropology – flourished. Jerzy Nomarski developed a way to look at live specimens under a microscope without damaging them, while mathematicians flocked to work with Stefan Mazurkiewicz, the genius who had broken the Russian ciphers during the 1920 war. Stanisław Mazur, Stanisław Ulam (who went on to co-design the hydrogen bomb with Edward Teller) and Stefan Banach worked in Lwów, but greatly influenced mathematics in Warsaw. When the Nazis invaded they fired them all from their academic positions; Banach, one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth