Ruins, Plaques, Monuments: Traces of the Warsaw Uprising

bank_polski_kule_en.jpg, default, Reduta Polish Bank, photo: Szymon Starnawski / Poland Press / EastNews

The process of post-war rebuilding of Warsaw is known and appreciated worldwide – the city’s rise from the ashes was an unprecedented event. But the capital’s traumatic past has never been forgotten, and nowadays we can still find traces of the wartime tragedy across the urban space.

The Warsaw Uprising – its trajectory, consequences, and military, political, and moral evaluation – continues to evoke extreme emotions. People’s view of this tragic revolt has changed overtime, but it has never been unambiguous in the first place. Still, this fact has in no way taken from the memory of the insurrectionists’ heroism and determination. That’s why as early as in 1945, immediately after the end of World War Two, it seemed obvious that a memorial should be erected in Warsaw to honour those fallen in the armed insurrection. The first competition for such a monument was announced by the then still existing Warsaw Reconstruction Office, but no project was selected for implementation, since the communist authorities looked unfavourably upon the idea of commemorating the Uprising. After the thaw of October 1956, the decision was made to build a Monument to the Heroes of Warsaw; in 1959, in a second competition, a project was selected, authored by sculptor Marian Konieczny and architects Zagremma and Adam Konieczny.

Installation of the Monument to the Heroes of Warsaw, Warsaw, 1964, photo: Jacek Sielski / Forum

As a result, on 20 July 1964, in the Teatralny Square, a bronze statue known as the Warsaw Nike was unveiled. (The memorial is now located on the slope of an escarpment by the East-West Route.) One of the first endeavours meant to commemorate the victims of World War Two was a competition organised by the Association of Polish Architects for the design of memorial plaques, which were supposed to replace the temporary ones, set up spontaneously by the locals and loved ones in the places of struggle and death of soldiers and civilians. The winner of the competition, Karol Tchorek, was selected in 1949, and soon afterwards his plaque design – a relief in sandstone with a centrally located Maltese cross – started to appear on the capital city’s buildings.

To the women, children, & victims

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Commemorative plaques by Tchorek in Warsaw, photo: Adam Stępień / AW

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However, neither the monumental sculpture of Nike nor Tchorek’s plaques referred directly to the heroism of the insurgents, who awaited ‘their own’ monument until the year 1989. Only in the 1980s, in the crumbling political system of People’s Republic of Poland, were the conditions right for one to be erected. First, in 1983, at the foot of the fortified wall surrounding Warsaw’s Old Town, the Little Insurrectionist memorial was raised – a sculpture of a child in a too-large military helmet, designed by Jerzy Jarnuszkiewicz. (It’s estimated that around 6 thousand children took active part in the Warsaw Uprising.)

A year later, the results of the project competition for the Warsaw Uprising Monument were announced, initiated and held by the Temporary Board of the Committee for the Building of a Warsaw Uprising 1944 Monument. On 1August 1989, on the 45. anniversary of the outbreak of combat in the Krasiński Square, opposite the baroque Palace of the Republic, a dynamic, realist composition was unveiled, depicting armed figures emerging from a canal.

The Warsaw Uprising Monument at Krasiński Square in Warsaw, designed by Wincenty Kućma and Jacek Budyn, unveiled in 1989, photo by Paweł Migasiewicz

Although the memorial triggered controversies, it’s now one of the key points on the tourist map of the city. In the second half of the 1990s, it was additionally enriched with a unique framing in the form of a postmodern colonnade and glass facades of the then-newly raised edifice of the Supreme Court (designed by Marek Budzyński and Zbigniew Badowski). It’s worth adding that, on 2October 2021, by the Krasiński Garden – almost immediately opposite to the Warsaw Uprising Monument – a composition designed by Monika Osiecka was erected, titled ‘To the Women of the Warsaw Uprising’. The monument commemorates not only women soldiers, medical orderlies, and liaison officers, but also thousands of civilian women – victims of the events of 1944.

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Warsaw Uprising Museum, photo: Adam Chełstowski / Forum

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The crowning event of all the efforts to properly commemorate the insurrectionist struggle lasting from 1 August to 3October 1944 was the opening of the Warsaw Uprising Museum. Its construction was facilitated in 2003 by the then-mayor of Warsaw, Lech Kaczyński; the institution was put into use on 31July 2004. The project of adapting historic buildings of the former Municipal Tram Electrical Plant for the purposes of the museum was created by a team of architects led by Wojciech Obtułowicz; the exposition was authored by designers supervised by Mirosław Nizio. And it’s the latter that proved particularly important – not just due to its content but also by virtue of its form. It was Poland’s first narrative museum on such a large scale: an interactive, multimedia exhibition focused on experiential, emotional engagement with history. The extraordinary success of the Warsaw Uprising Museum (over 600 thousand visitors per year) launched the trend for such a manner of narrating the past. Nowadays, more institutions of this kind exist in Poland.

Wounds of memory

However, probably no museum exhibit evokes such strong emotions as real traces of the struggle retained in the urban space. Plenty of these are to be found across the city; even if they were originally retained ‘by accident’, they’re now protected as important 'wounds of memory.' The term was employed to describe them in a publication issued by the local authorities in the 2018, containing the proceedings from the 2nd Warsaw Conservatorial Conference, which concerned precisely the traces of the damage from the times of World War Two retained in the city’s topography, their conservation and protection.

The most moving relic of this kind is the blood of an unknown insurgent, which soaked into the marble of the staircase in Bohdan Pniewski’s mansion in Na Skarpie Avenue in Warsaw. Now marked with a commemorative plaque, the stain originates from the struggle of 1944, but it hasn’t been established who it was that was killed or wounded – the house was a location where multiple units operated.

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Preserved blood of an insurgent of 1944, Pniewski’s Mansion in Warsaw, photo: Adam Kozak / AW

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In Mokotów (in Naruszewicza, Narbutta, and Tenisowa Street), on the walls of a school in Czarnieckiego Street in Żoliborz, on tenement houses in Praga and Śródmieście – all these locations still bear traces of bullets that hit the buildings during World War Two and especially during the insurrection. Another moving relic of the times is the house in Waliców Street, through the middle of which ran the border of the Warsaw Ghetto. The building was located on the Aryan side and served as one of the main Polish defence points during the Warsaw Uprising. Although it was burnt down by the Germans and damaged, it had been inhabited up until the year 2004. Now empty but included in the register of historic monuments, it’s a relic of the capital’s pre-war layout, and especially of the insurrectionist struggle.

Czarnieckiego Street 49 in Warsaw, photo: Adam Burakowski/Reporter/East News

Another similar trace is the fragment of the former Polish Bank building in Bielańska Street. Raised in the years 1907-1911 for the purposes of banking, it was one of the stylish, elegant edifices that used to characterise the centre of Warsaw. During the Warsaw Uprising, it was turned into an insurrectionist redoubt and was the place of fierce struggle for soldiers from the ‘Łukasiński’ battalion. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was here that the building of the Warsaw Uprising Museum was initially meant to be located. (A part of the building would’ve had to be partially reconstructed.) Nothing came of those projects, however. The partially destroyed object was sold and, in the 21st century, a modern office building was added to the insurrectionist redoubt.

Walls that remember

'ANTEK THE SPRAYER WAS BURIED IN THE POWĄZKI MILITARY CEMETERY' – such an inscription still figures in the courtyard of the tenement house in Bracka Street 5 in Warsaw city centre. It was authored by the mother of Antoni Godlewski, known as Antek the Sprayer – an insurrectionist soldier known for his bravery and efficiency. The 21-year-old Antek was killed on 8 August 1944 in Aleje Jerozolimskie and was buried in an insurrectionist mass grave precisely in the courtyard of the house in Bracka 5. A year later, his body was exhumed and moved to the Powązki cemetery. Whereas the inscription served as information for those searching for the insurgent’s burial place, the messages 'checked, no landmines' left on walls concerned all inhabitants of the city. This way, sappers would notify them that they had done their job. The writings they left on the walls of tenemenent houses can still be viewed today, for instance in Piękna Street 1B and Narbutta Street 3A.

The whole world knows that Warsaw’s Old Town was almost completely destroyed during World War Two and heroically rebuilt right after. But even there one can find traces of the insurrectionist struggle and the tragedy of war. One of them is a fragment of a German military vehicle’s track embedded in the wall of St. John’s Cathedral on the side of Dziekania Street.

Word has it that it derives from a Goliath track mine, which Germans would use to destroy the buildings in the Old Town. (One of those mines, or a similar one, was captured by the insurgents in Podwale Street on 13 August 1944; unfortunately, they brought it into a courtyard, where it exploded, killing its captors.) Next to the walls of the Royal Castle, on the side of the East-West Route, one can find the pillar of the shattered Sigismund’s Column. The Germans blasted it in 1945: the figure of King Sigismund III Waza fell (although, surprisingly, suffered little damage), whereas the pillar that had supported it broke into pieces. It’s the former that’s on display near the Castle; when the royal statue was rebuilt in July 1949, it was endowed with a new column.

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Commemorative plaque with a fragment of a Borgward IV tank trap, Archcathedral Basilica of St. John the Baptist in Warsaw, photo: Alina Zienowicz (Ala_z) / (CC BY-SA 3.0 PL) / Wikimedia.org

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How to remember?

Although Warsaw rose from the ashes, developed, and by now has pretty much metamorphosed beyond recognition, one can easily find scattered around the city places of remembrance, commemorative plaques (not only the ones from the series designed by Karol Tchorek), traces of bullets, and still-destroyed fragments of buildings. Reminders of the capital’s insurrectionist past include minor memorials and street names (those of battle heroes, units, and battalions), as well as surviving relics of pre-war buildings (e.g. a figure of an angel unearthed from the ruins of the completely destroyed Church of the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration of the Most Holy Sacrament in the New Town.)

There are also signs even more legible than those. These include the six-metres-tall ‘Fighting Poland’ symbol raised in 2003 on the rooftop of a building in Zielna Street. The former headquarter of the Polish Joint-Stock Telephone Company (known as PAST) was a place of fierce struggle during the Uprising; on 20 August 1944, the insurrectionists recaptured the edifice from the hands of the Germans and defended it until the day of capitulation. PAST became a symbol of the fighters’ determination and bravery; the widely recognised in Poland symbol of the underground state, towering over the surroundings, is meant to commemorate those events.

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PAST building in Warsaw, photo: Bernard Bialorucki / Getty Images

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The characteristic ‘anchor’, created by combining the letters ‘P’ and ‘W’ [for ‘Polska Walcząca’, i.e. ‘Fighting Poland’ – trans.] is also located on the top of the Warsaw Uprising Mound in Czerniaków. The hill was formed out of the rubble of Warsaw soon after World War Two; however, for years it served as a place where all kinds of debris were brought down. Various projects for the development of this neglected spot were proposed – for instance, at one point the hill was supposed to commemorate the Constitution of 3 May 1791 – but eventually, thanks to the initiative of the World Association of Home Army Soldiers, it became a Warsaw Uprising memorial. In 2004, it was finally put in order, and stairs leading to the top were installed.

The Warsaw Uprising Mound in Czerniaków, photo by Dawid Zuchowicz/AW

Since then, each year on 1 August, anniversary ceremonies are held on the mound’s top under the symbol of ‘Fighting Poland’. Currently, another renovation is taking place there: the slopes of the Warsaw Uprising Mound will be transformed into a park. To form a mound out of Warsaw’s ruins cleared away after the war was the dream of the architect Stanisław Gruszczyński immediately after the war. In the aforementioned 1958 competition for a Monument to the Heroes of Warsaw, Witold Cęckiewicz, Helena and Roman Husarski and Maria Ledkiewicz proposed a mound made of the rubble of ruined Czerniaków. Many years later, both of these visions were implemented.

Some believe that the tragedy of the Warsaw Uprising and World War Two turned the capital into a huge cemetery. Are the now existing modes of commemorating the victims of these tragedies sufficient? There’s no clear answer – no one knows the recipe for balancing the needs of a fast-developing city, with new generations continuously born in it, and the memory of those who sacrificed their lives for Warsaw’s liberation. Nonetheless, it’s important to acknowledge existing places of memory and reminisce on the history that they convey.

Translated from Polish by Anna Potoczny

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