Warsaw: Rebuilt and Restless
Warsaw is a city that should not exist. By the end of World War II, roughly 85 percent of it had been destroyed—first by the German Luftwaffe bombing of September 1939, then by the fighting during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, then most completely by the systematic demolition that followed the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. After that uprising was crushed, Hitler ordered the city razed. SS units moved through neighborhood by neighborhood, burning and blowing up buildings in a deliberate and methodical erasure. When the Soviet army finally entered Warsaw in January 1945, they found a city of rubble and ash, nearly uninhabited. The population had been either murdered or deported. The Nazis had tried to unmake the place.
And the city chose to come back. The Old Town was reconstructed from paintings, photographs, architectural drawings, and the memory of survivors—rebuilt so carefully and so deliberately that UNESCO designated the reconstruction itself as a World Heritage site in 1980. It is recognized not as an old city but as the most successful act of architectural reconstruction ever undertaken. Walking through it, I kept reminding myself that none of what I was seeing was old in the way Rothenburg was old. It was all new—built in the 1950s, built to look like what had been here before, because the original was intentionally destroyed. That act of reconstruction was itself a form of testimony. A refusal.
Political Energy
Warsaw in 2011 was politically charged in a way the other cities on this trip had not been. Walking through the center, I came across a political rally or protest—crowds, banners, people speaking from a platform, a line of Policja vans parked along the adjacent street with officers standing in formation. I didn’t have enough context to understand the specific dispute. Poland in 2011 was seven years into EU membership and twenty years past the fall of communism, and it was still working out the terms of its own democracy—who owned the transition, who benefited from it, what the new system owed to the people who lived through the old one. The energy in the street was real. Whatever was being contested mattered to the people contesting it.
Memorials and Departures
Near one of the war memorials, I stopped at a wreath with a ribbon reading “From the American People.” I had been thinking about America’s relationship to the places on this trip since Buchenwald—the camps liberated by American troops, the Jewish refugees turned away from American ports in the 1930s, the America that prosecuted the Nuremberg trials and the America that had its own segregated army standing next to those who survived. The American role in the Holocaust’s aftermath is complicated in ways that the ribbon didn’t capture and couldn’t capture. It was a formal gesture, sincere and inadequate at once.
On the last morning before the flight home, I found a quiet courtyard behind a church. Stone walls, green ivy, birdsong. I sat on a bench and did not try to think systematically about any of it—just let the three weeks settle into whatever they were going to be. Germany, the Czech Republic, Poland. Memorials and camps and cemeteries and museums and forests and market squares and bratwurst and castle courtyards. The literature of the Holocaust made physical, made undeniable. I had read all the books. I had not been ready.
