Warsaw: Everything That Was

Zbyszko Siemaszko, fot. ze zbiorów Narodowego Archiwum Cyfrowego (NAC), small, Photo by Zbyszko Siemaszko, Warsaw, 1950s, photo: National digital archives

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What hides underneath the Muranów district? ‘It is neither a monument nor a tomb – a trauma that the city would like to forget but cannot.’ – Russian journalist Natalia Konradova's notes from her wanderings around Warsaw.

I am walking around Warsaw with my guide, Łukasz. Warsaw is many things – dynamic, free, business-like, loose. But you’ll rarely hear anyone call it a beautiful or a comfortable city. The avenues are too wide, the high-rise buildings are too huge, and the empty spaces are too sudden – there, where the eye of experienced travellers expect to delight in architectural curiosities. Nominally, there’s an old town with cafes and shops with designer clothing. But this small souvenir-touristy quarter is not old at all, but quite new, like almost all of Warsaw: after the war it was reconstructed from practically nothing, from the very foundations.

The true, functional centre is Marszałkowska Street with Parade Square (Plac Defilad), ‘the biggest square in Europe’, intersections of tram lines, the metro, glass skyscrapers, the concrete monster that is the Eastern Wall, built, as they say here, ‘under communism’. And, of course, the Stalinist tower – Moscow’s generous gift from the 1950s, the urban accent, which can be seen even from the airport. Gigantic buildings surrounded by equally gigantic holes – empty spaces, parks, squares, where the wind is always blowing. It’s best to go through these places in a tram: the ragged city morphs into a film and will quickly become less frightful.

stacja muranow 3_6585174.jpg — Ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1945, not far from where the POLIN Museum now stands. In the centre – St. Augustine’s Church on Nowolipki Street, copy of the photo: Zbyszko Siemaszko/Forum

There once really was a dense, ancient tangle of buildings in the centre of Warsaw – business, mercantile, and other urban life, commensurate with the population. ‘But in 1944, Hitler ordered that the city be erased from the face of the Earth…’ – this is the phrase Varsovians use to answer the majority of questions, which arise from the guests of this rather awkward capital.

This fresh urban memory of Hitler seems somewhat affected at first. Seventy years have already passed since all of this happened. And there are other cities, such as Kyiv and Minsk, that also greatly suffered during the war. Since that time they have successfully rebuilt, and only recall the tragic events of the past on 9 May. But Warsaw is a special case: the unique city, whose inhabitants led an organised rebellion against the German occupation during World War II, remembers this history as if it happened yesterday.

Historical boom

‘We had a real boom of history. Everyone is interested in it right now, they’ve simply gone out of their minds,’ Łukasz says. We are about to set off around the Warsaw museums to see how the historical memory works and in what ways the history of the city presents itself to city-dwellers and tourists alike.

One of these, the Wola Museum, located in a small palace on Srebrna Street, is dedicated to the essential history of the workers’ movement during the communist regime in Poland. Images of production growth, honour rolls, and labour awards hung on the walls. Incorporated into Warsaw in 1916, Wola indeed became the industrial district of the city and the centre of the workers’ movement. But, in the opinion of the museum’s previous director Hanna Nowak-Radziejowska, Wola is not limited to this:

I have been working here for two years, but during this time we came to understand how exactly we need to speak about our district.

Wola Museum, view from the 'Chłodna' exhibition, photo: Jacek Łagowski / AG

We are sitting in Hanna’s office, and she is telling us about Wola, a small village to the west of Warsaw, that for a long time was known as a place where the Polish nobility would gather: it was here that aristocrats and well-to-do citizens would usually stay when they came to participate in the election of the king of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In the 19th century, Wola became an industrial and commercial colony. Wola was separated from Warsaw by the Tsar’s fortress – a system of citadels and forts built in the 1830s by the Russian Empire. As a result of the industrial development and the abolishment of serfdom, more and more new city-dwellers, yesterday’s peasants, flocked here in search of work and lodging. Because of this constant influx of new citizens, Wola overgrew its infrastructure and at the beginning of the 20th century, when the fortresses were liquidated, Wola could finally transform into an equal part of the city. ‘In the example of Wola it’s plain to see how cities arise and develop,’ Hanna summarises, ‘therefore Wola is an ideal case for examining the history of urbanisation, a sort of urban laboratory.’ However, an exhibit dedicated to Wola as an ideal case does not yet exist.

Having discussed the concept of the museum, we descend into the hall. The exhibit Reinefarth in Warsaw: Evidence of Crimes was opened in August 2014, dedicated to the 70-year anniversary of a significant event in the history of the city and the district: the Wola massacre. In socialist times, it was forbidden to speak about how tens of thousands of civilians were murdered in the Wola district by SS soldiers during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Now museum workers, making up for this period of silence, recreate the apocalyptic picture. White walls, red and black flowers, loud noises, huge photographs and multimedia projects. For the curious – screens with interviews and headphones, copies of documents. Least of all it resembles a museum the average person would be expecting to see: here there are neither display cases nor labels, nor a single item you’d expect see in a museum. Instead there are a large array of videos with the recollections of eye witnesses and there is a simple and effective design concept: one wall is dedicated to testimonies from the German side, the other from the Polish side. The Wola Museum actively engages in oral history: it records, maintains and processes the memories of the event’s participants. Witnesses pass away, but their words remain in the archives and museum collections. ‘Very few items have survived,’ Hanna says, ‘as in 1944, Hitler ordered for the city to be erased from the face of the earth.’

On the German wall hangs a large photograph taken by Heinz Reinefarth of the SS Gruppenführer, one of the main perpetrators of the Wola massacre. In the 1960s, the courts shocked Germans regarding Reinefarth: after the war he was the mayor of the city of Westerland, a member of parliament of Schleswig-Holstein, a respected man who, unexpectedly for the townspeople, was accused of crimes against humanity. However, the court witnesses were mainly former subordinates of the gruppenführer, so the picture wasn’t completely, to say it lightly, objective – they were allowed to walk free and live out their days . On the Polish wall, there are photographs and interviews from surviving Poles, such as Wanda Lurie: having lost three children and pregnant with a fourth, she was wounded but she survived, hiding from SS officers under a pile of dead bodies.

The exhibit speaks

The Warsaw Uprising Museum, photo: Adam Chełstowski/Forum

We once again walk out onto the street. The museum building is the only surviving structure from the 19th century on Srebrna street. To the left and to the right are apartment blocks from the 1970s, then empty spaces which haven’t been built upon since 1944. To double down on our lesson, we head to the Warsaw Uprising Museum. ‘Ninety percent of the city was completely destroyed. Since then Warsaw has been a completely different city,’ Łukasz remarks on our way.

Varsovians don’t have a feeling of belonging to this city.

Echoing Łukasz’s sentiment is Karol Mazur, head of the education department in the museum. ‘Therefore one of the tasks of our museum is to give modern residents the opportunity to identify with Warsaw.’ I know that the exhibit should amaze me. Everyone who has been here says that the Warsaw Uprising Museum is a powerful place, and their lives will never be the same. But for the time being, we are sitting in a conference room and Karol is telling us about the museum’s main activities: they collect eyewitness accounts. It seems that all the museums in Poland dedicated to the events of the 20th century are busy creating archives of oral history. I am interested in how things are going with the museum material – does the museum collect and study the collection, does it use their archives in their exhibit? Karol Mazur refers to the collection gently: if the material speaks, then there is reason to show it. Logical.

The idea for the ‘museumification’ of the events in Warsaw during the 1940s appeared soon after the war. But since the activities of the anti-communist government-in-exile were involved, the project was only possible under a new regime: the museum was opened decades later in 2004. Built with the use of multimedia and theatrical technology, the exhibit tells how the Poles were able to build a mature underground state with all its institutions, including agencies for security, medicine, press and even education. How this state functioned in the five-year stretch between 1939 and 1944, and how it tragically ended through the treachery of the Soviet army.

The Warsaw Uprising began in August 1944 on a signal from London. It’s thought that the government-in-exile made this decision after the Soviet army had reached the city from the east and occupied Praga (then a separate city, now a Warsaw district) on the right bank of the Vistula. Yet Stalin, contrary to the rebels’ expectations, forbade the army from crossing the river, thereby dooming the city and its inhabitants to ruin. On the walls of the museum hang photographs of Soviet soldiers standing on the right bank of Vistula. Among them, as both Karol and Łukasz have told me, were Poles: they had joined up with the Soviet army in order to help the resistance from the outside.

Director Jan Komasa in the sewer of the Warsaw Uprising Museum, photo: Adam Tuchliński/Newsweek/Forum

The roar of airplanes, the red lighting, the sewer tunnel through which uprising participants carried messages from one region of Warsaw to another. You are standing inside a big spectacle – walking around places of military glory, hearing first the cries of a blaring siren, then quiet music from somewhere behind a brick wall. The largest room holds a model of the B-24 Liberator heavy bomber, with which the British airdropped humanitarian packages and weapons to the rebels… In an improvised tent pitched in the centre of the museum hall stands a table. On the table – stacks of transparent plastic bricks. Inside each of these lie identical sheets of paper: these are protocol forms for the exhumation of the victims of the Wola massacre. Karol Mazur beckons – here is your museum material. Certainly, this material is speaking.

Judging by the exhibit, almost all the inhabitants of Poland took part in the resistance. I ask Karol, how did the Poles manage to be so well organised, given the conditions of the occupation and the brutal practices of the Nazis. ‘The Poles have a long tradition of conspiracy and underground activities,’ he answers, keeping the partitioning and reassigning of Poland to different empires over the span of centuries in mind. 'It sometimes seems to me that it’s easier for us to lead an underground life in conditions where freedom doesn’t exist, than to live normally in a free society…’

Architectural activists

After 1989 – the victory of Solidarity, the collapse of the communist government and the beginning of the new history of a free Poland – much of Warsaw’s architecture from the socialist era was destroyed. Slated for demolition were Stalinist apartment blocks and even Polish modernism from the 1960s – things which modern architects perceive as a source of inspiration, and what officials today will soon have to make objects of preservation. The hatred for all things socialist is understandable: by that moment Poland had spent decades under outside control, which today’s Poles are accustomed to call an occupation.

Discussing the regular patterns of destruction and counting the losses, Łukasz and I go to a meeting with two architects from the Centrala studio. Like other architects, they design houses (their most famous project is Israeli writer Etgar Keret’s Warsaw residence, ‘the narrowest house in the world’). Besides this, they explore Warsaw and its complex heredity – by means of architecture and modern art.

dom kareta otwarcie 2012 4_6577669.jpg — Etgar Keret’s house on the corner of Chłodna and Żelazna streets in Warsaw, pictured: Etgar Keret, photo: Bartek Warzecha/Foundation of Polish Modern Art

‘Probably they are activists,’ Łukasz says. 'You see how they came on bicycles? Only activists go by bicycle in December.’ Małgorzata Kuciewicz and Simone De Iacobis park their bikes and lead us to the entrance of a Stalinist apartment building. Łukasz recalls that not long ago there was a hat shop here which he would often pass by on his way to work. Stucco moulding on the ceiling, patterned stone tile on the floor, a square suite of rooms on the second floor. Małgorzata leads the tour: ‘Typical Stalinist architecture. This building was going to be rebuilt, but we petitioned the city authorities to use it as a cultural centre and residence for artists. It will soon be very lively here.’ Her words echo through the empty interior of the former hat shop.

We are very interested in the history of Warsaw and we are always asking the question, why does it look the way it does? What layers does it consist of and how can we today work with its past, not destroying but using it.

– continues Simone, an Italian architect who settled in Warsaw because here ‘there is something to do’. 'But we are not activists, we are architects,’ she insists. It seems this acknowledgement by the December cyclists does not sway Łukasz too much, but he doesn’t argue with them.

Warsaw's Muranów District – [Image Gallery]

Embeded gallery style

display gallery as slider

We were already beginning to understand that no matter who they were, these young people, deprived of personal memory of the traumas of 20th century Polish history, work today with Warsaw’s identity much more energetically than experienced academic experts or politicians, hardened warriors against communism. They are ready to defend Stalinist architecture because it is just as much a part of the city’s history as the royal palace.

Once we looked at satellite images of Warsaw and notice that its regular planning, rebuilt after 1944, is broken in one place: above the grid of new streets we saw a semblance of a smile – an arc of the old Mokotowska, Bracka and Zgoda streets. These relics are city roads that are older than the city itself, diagonally transecting the uniform rectangular blocks of the centre of Warsaw.

The architects shared the idea with the city authorities, and now on these streets there is an annual Warsaw Smile festival: streams of people flow along Mokotowska and Bracka as musicians play for them from the balconies above. ‘Smile is an awful name, isn’t it?’ says Małgorzata.

While Łukasz and I examine the crooked grin of the ancient streets against the background of the monotonous, geometrically aligned schema of Warsaw’s centre, Małgorzata and Simone move on to their next discovery. Małgorzata speaks about gradients:

Warsaw was always a flat city. But now there are many different hills and uneven spots here. We recently learned where they came from: this is rubble from buildings destroyed in 1944. Right inside these hills are preserved the broken bricks and stones from which the city was once built. We realised that we wanted to make an art project about this. So, we decided to cut into one of the hills.

The architects show us a section drawing of the hill. If 90% of the city was destroyed, then there had to be thousands of cubic metres of bricks and armatures left behind. They didn’t go anywhere, and Warsaw’s landscape today keeps them within itself. It is either a monument or a grave to the trauma the city would be happy to forget about, but simply can’t. In some places there are vacant lots that haven’t been built upon in 70 years, in others rise overgrown ruins of bombed-out buildings. This is well known to the old-timers, but it doesn’t prevent the inquiring young architects from shaking up the layers of Warsaw, opening them again and again.

As Grzegorz Piątek, a Polish architect and critic, and a similarly-minded individual to our ‘activists’, once wrote:

Probably, Warsaw is the most beautiful of all cities. Because its beauty is eternally promised but is never shown. Like a party without a morning hangover, or a pre-election campaign without the post-election disappointment.

Translated by Katherine Alberti

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