It is perhaps for this reason that, from the battlefield of rubble and ruins, Warsaw became once more the old Warsaw, eternal Warsaw.
One must love one’s city in order to rebuild it at the cost of one’s own breathing. According to the Polish writer Leopold Tyrmand: “One of the philosophers calculated that Varsovians inhaled four bricks each year at that time. Early on it was suggested that the remains of the city should be left to memorialise the war, and the entire capital be relocated.Ĭlouds of dust asphyxiated Warsaw’s inhabitants. The Varsovians who had not escaped Warsaw lived among the devastation, and would often find corpses buried in the rubble. The grass lined alleys bring to mind the ruins of Pompeii. Across much of the city, only basements, low walls and the occasional ground floor section of a building remain. Their photographs capture what has become a topos of post-war urban ruination: the exposed innards of buildings.Īrchive footage from British Pathé shows the buildings in 1950 appearing to fall arbitrarily. They visited England, Czechoslovakia and Poland, where they surveyed Warsaw, Kraków, Katowice, Wrocław and Szczecin. In the summer of 1947, the architect Hermann H Field led a small group of American designers to study the post-war reconstruction of Europe. It was suggested that the remains of the city should be left to memorialise the war, and the entire capital be relocated It is testimony to the veracity of his work that almost 200 years later, those paintings were used to help transform the historic city centre from wreckage and rubble into what is now a Unesco World Heritage Site. Photograph: Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Imagesīellotto, who was made court painter to the King of Poland in 1768, created beautiful and accurate paintings of Warsaw’s buildings and squares.
Hitler’s forces destroyed 85% of Warsaw’s historic centre.
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