Resilience lives in Warsaw
6/03/2010 Posted by Shella Skye
Poland's history is a chronicle of invasions by powerful forces. It's also the story of its people's resilience in fighting for their independence and maintaining their language and culture.
To understand the historical forces that have shaped Poland, two of its cities, Warsaw and Krakow, should be among the traveller's essential stops.
The country's capital, financial hub and largest city, Warsaw has literally risen from the ashes of the Second World War. The Nazis destroyed about 85 per cent of the city in 1944. Today, modern office towers in the financial district contrast sharply with the remnants of Soviet-era architecture and the city's medieval Old Town.
Warsaw's picturesque Old Town market square, lined with burgher houses, originally dated from the 13th century. Painstakingly rebuilt using pre-war paintings and photographs, it is on UNESCO's list of World Heritage Sites as an outstanding example of restoration.
On the eastern side of the square stands the Royal Castle, the residence of Polish royalty from the late 14th century. It was plundered and blown up by the Nazis but was also exactingly restored, a process completed in 1984.
Lazienski Park, Warsaw's largest park in the centre of the city, was the grounds of the summer palace of Stanislaw Poniatowski, the last king of Poland. The palace was completed in 1793, but the king only had two years to enjoy it before he was forced to abdicate. It suffered minor war damage and is now open for guided tours and exhibits of contemporary Polish art. The park includes an ornamental lake, an amphitheatre, and wandering peacocks.
Not everything worth seeing is as beautiful. The Palace of Culture and Science, a famous Warsaw landmark and Poland's tallest building, was a "gift of friendship" from the Soviet Union and completed in 1955. Disliked from the beginning by Warsaw residents, this colossal example of Soviet architecture is still known by its various monikers, including the Russian Wedding Cake and Stalin's Syringe. It's now used as an exhibition centre and office complex.
Warsaw abounds in museums and galleries, notably the Historical Museum of Warsaw in the Old Town that tells the story of the city from its beginnings, and the National Museum with its collection of religious art including the glorious 13th-century triptych depicting the martyrdom of St. Barbara.
A stunning new addition is the Warsaw Uprising Museum, which opened in 2004, the uprising's 60th anniversary. Between August and October 1944, the Polish Home Army (resistance movement) tried unsuccessfully to liberate Warsaw from German occupation in the face of the advancing Soviet army. About 16,000 Polish insurgents were killed and as many as 200,000 civilians died in the fighting and subsequent reprisal attacks. The uprising infuriated Hitler, who ordered the city destroyed.
Housed in a former streetcar power station on the southwestern edge of the former Jewish ghetto, the museum charts the uprising with photos, film footage, artifacts and recorded testimonials of those who survived.
Little remains of the Jewish ghetto except remnants of its wall. In 1940, the Nazis crammed as many as 450,000 Jews from Warsaw and outlying districts into an area to the west of the city centre surrounded by a three-metre-high brick wall. By mid-1942, when evacuations to the death camps began, about 100,000 people had died of starvation and disease.
In 1943, those who remained took up arms in a desperate act of defiance.
The ghetto uprising lasted three weeks until the Nazis gassed the leaders' bunker and later razed the ghetto. A monument to the uprising's leaders stands where the bunker was located.
Krakow, Poland's most popular tourist destination, is a pleasant three-hour train ride southwest of Warsaw. The capital until 1596, Krakow was looted by the Nazis, but its medieval and Renaissance architecture emerged from the war intact. The city is the home of the renowned Jagiellonian University, which counts astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus among its alumni.
The historic Old Town, on UNESCO's World Heritage List, has enough churches, galleries and monuments to keep tourists busy for days. The medieval town square is the largest in Poland. Dominating it is the Cloth Hall where cloth merchants once sold their wares and vendors now hawk crafts and souvenirs.
St. Mary's Basilica, with its two towers of unequal height, overlooks the square on the east. The lower tower, capped by a Renaissance dome, is the bell tower. The taller, topped by a spire, is the watchtower. Every hour, a bugler plays a melody in memory of the medieval bugler who attempted to warn the city of Tatar invaders. The melody breaks off in mid-bar, reminding listeners of the legendary watchman whose throat was pierced by a Tatar arrow.
The church's main altarpiece is a pentaptych depicting scenes from the Virgin Mary's life, the largest piece of medieval art of its kind.
Carved by Viet Stoss and consecrated in 1489, it was smuggled out of Krakow during the Second World War. Located by the Nazis, who considered it German property because Stoss had been born in Germany, the masterpiece was stored in a bunker in Nuremberg during the war but later returned to Poland.
Leonardo de Vinci's Lady with an Ermine, the portrait of 15-year-old Cecilia Galleriani, was also plundered by the Nazis and returned to Poland after the war. Housed in the Czartoryskis Museum in the Old Town, it is one of only four female portraits painted by the Italian master.
The old Jewish quarter, Kazimierz, is named after King Casimir III, who established it as an independent town on Krakow's southern outskirts in 1335. In subsequent centuries it became home to Jews fleeing persecution all over Europe. In 1941, the Jews of Kazimierz were forced to relocate to the new ghetto in the city. Under the communists, Kazimierz was a forgotten, neglected place, but restoration began in the early 1990s, and its revival took off when Steven Spielberg shot Schindler's List there in 1993.
Today, Kazimierz is a charming enclave of restaurants and bookstores. Jews come to pray in the 14th-century Remuh Synagogue and its cemetery. The Galicia Jewish Museum, commemorating the victims of the Holocaust, opened in Kazimierz's market square in 2004.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau labour and extermination camps, 60 km west of Krakow, have become a symbol throughout the world of genocide and the Holocaust. It's estimated that about 1.1 million people, 90 per cent of them Jewish, died at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, it is visited by about one million visitors every year, entering the barbed-wire-encased encampment through the gate bearing its infamous legend, "Arbeit Macht Frei" -- Work Sets You Free.
