A Polish Week: When History Isn't History

You can't spend time in Poland without running into WWII. 

Being historically minded, and working (at the time) amongst the institutional legacy of the Nuremberg Trials, I knew I knew everything about WWII when we set off for Poland. I was wrong.

If you go to Krakow, you have to go to Auschwitz. Jeff and I were looking forward to this field trip like an overdue visit to the dentist. It's not easy to get to, and the non-discretionary tour exceeds three hours. That's three hours of depressing statistics, more depressing anecdotes, and filing silently through depressing ruins in the hot August sun. Fun.

Three hours have never passed so quickly. (Jeff will attest.) For one thing, I never realized how much of our cultural understanding of the Holocaust is based specifically on Auschwitz: from Arbeit Macht Frei to the use of tattoos to identify prisoners (which our tour guide insisted only happened here).  

But what I really hadn't understood, and the reason I am grateful I went to Auschwitz, was the magnitude of Birkenau, the death camp next door. Birkenau is an atomic wasteland. I swear there are still no birds there, nothing but long grass and weeds covering what little remains of row after row after row of bunk houses. This is where the train tracks to nowhere enter through the red brick prison gates and stretch a mile down the "sorting platform" to the crematoriums. (One of the smartest things the Nazis ever did was to blow up the gas chambers of Birkenau. I couldn't truly picture what had happened there when all I had to look at was a caved-in pile of rubble.)

But more or less, this was all stuff I already knew. What I didn't know was the story of Warsaw. 


In the final days of the war, the Polish resistance -- in an effort to liberate Poland for themselves before the Soviets did it for them -- rose up in Warsaw against the Nazis (separately but equally as ill-fated as Warsaw's earlier Ghetto uprising). The Nazis laid siege, the Soviets dawdled, the other Allied Powers chose not to intervene, and once the uprising broke, the Nazis moved through the city killing everyone they encountered (we're talking 200,000 civilians), blew up any building still standing (including what we would consider today to be World Heritage), and deported anyone left alive when the dust settled.

In short, the Nazis wiped a metropolis off the face of the earth.

The newish Warsaw Rising museum tells this story effectively, if with a bit of an historical slant. According to the museum, the Soviets and even the U.S. were as much to blame as the Germans in the destruction of the city. True, the Soviets waited out the two-month uprising instead of coming to the Varsovians' assistance, and the deprivations of Communist rule took its own toll on Poland's culture, pride, and power. But I have difficulty laying blame for Warsaw's annihilation too many places other than the Nazis. 

It was under Communism, after all, that Poland rebuilt its beloved Royal Castle and the surrounding old town, an incredibly expensive and ambitious undertaking. I'm not one for artificially reconstructing historical edifices, as the end result too often smacks of Epcot Center. But I will make an exception for Warsaw.

Wandering through the Royal Castle, I quickly forgot that all this opulence - the gilt, the marble, the crystal and inlaid wood - is only forty years old. 


Likewise with the entire city of Warsaw: it might not be much to look at, but the very fact that it is here is impressive enough.

Krakowskie Przedmiescie, the main drag of Central Warsaw, was packed on a warm Saturday night last August. Varsovians strolled in pairs, lounged on benches with ice cream cones, crowded around street performers in front of the Royal Castle. We felt a similar rumbling of dynamism throughout our trip: the hipsters reclaiming decrepit sectors of Warsaw and Krakow, the country's halting effort to modernize its rail system, intrepid Poles home from their work abroad. These are people heading someplace. If Poland can't yet escape the legacy of WWII, at least it is taking control of its own destiny.