Rising

The 14th Century Royal Castle overlooking the Vistula

In the Munich Agreement of September 1938, Neville Chamberlain and the French conceded a section of Czechoslovakia known as the Sudetenland to Germany. In return, Hitler promised peace in Europe. Six months later German troops invaded and then occupied a large portion of western Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain’s appeasement policy didn’t stick. Hitler wanted the regions of Czechoslovakia that Germany lost in the Treaty of Versailles (WWI) back. He wanted space for Germans to expand. Czechoslovakia and Poland had wide open spaces and fertile land. In September of 1939, the Nazi’s unleashed a new type of warfare: blitzkrieg (lightening war). Hitler and his generals claimed that Poland started the war, but most historians believe that Brown Shirts sent from Germany instigated the violence. Either way, Poland’s flat terrain provided a welcome mat for German tanks that stormed towards Warsaw. The Luftwaffe hit in excess of 150 cities to lower the resistance ground troops faced. Warsaw surrendered three weeks after the blitzkrieg began.

To all accounts, the Nazi push into Poland wasn’t just about Lebensraum, living space. Nazi leadership had a deep and long standing hatred of Poland. Hitler included the Poles in his list of racially inferior people that must subject themselves to Aryan rule (others included the Jews, Czechs, Slavic people, and Russians). Shortly after occupation, Heinrich Himmler (SS Commander responsible for the Final Solution of the Jews) stood in Poznań and said, “All Polish specialists will be used in our military industry. Then, all Poles will disappear from this world. It is necessary that the great German nation treats extermination of all the Poles as its major task.” It seems clear from Nazi documents that leadership wanted to wipe all memory of Poland from collective existence. They did their best. By the end of the war, over 85% of Warsaw was in rubble systematically torn down neighborhood by neighborhood, and then bombed into oblivion.

Warsaw Ghetto, smashed into the ground by German forces, according to Adolf Hitler`s order, after suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943

Walking around the Aldstadt, rebuilt from the ruins and emerging from the dust of communism, it feels authentic, grounded in history. And it is, but not in the cobblestones, towers, cathedrals, or homes that line the city square. I believe reality lays much deeper in the foundations that remained and the soil that drank tears and blood, the lives of those who fought, then stayed, and restored lives and their city.

The entrance to old town

That feeling of old but renewed has stayed with me for the months since I left. I haven’t been able to put a finger why Warsaw’s story kept fighting for room in my head until a friend said I should “braid Warsaw’s story into my story in Europe.” Her words flipped a light on in my brain. Walking with Liz through her cancer, then trying to figure out how to keep moving forward after she died was its own kind of ruin for me. Those who walked with me, particularly in that first year after her death, can attest to the fact that I was a shell of myself. Her death untethered me in a way I still don’t fully understand. Aspects of my personality and my capabilities I once felt sure of slipped away into a reality that felt like rubble. The blitzkrieg I encountered didn’t look anything like Nazi’s, but I was equally powerless to fight it effectively: cancer and loss.

The Poles may have had a sense the Nazi’s were coming, but they could not have anticipated the speed and voracity with which the Germans consumed their land. We were blindsided by Liz’s cancer as well as the speed and voracity with which it consumed her body. But this is not a story of that devastation. It’s a story of emerging from the ashes.

As I move across the plaza with the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and begin to walk around the reconstructed walls that once guarded the old heart of the city, I pass the Little Insurgent Monument. The diminutive statue is striking for a couple of reasons. The hat he wears dwarfs his head and his boots seem to reach the top of his legs. But the gun in his hands creates the real juxtaposition. He looks like a child playing dress up with his father’s vestiges of war. He wasn’t. The inscription behind the statue reads, “Warsaw children will go off to fight, we will, our capital, shed blood over every stone.” The Polish Home Army was so depleted that when city leaders planned for the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, children fought alongside every other person who could resist the Germans. The statue, dedicated in 1983, perches on an extension of new brick in the city wall remade in the image of the original wall. My continued walk around the exterior of the old city takes me past rebuilt and renewed towers, bridges, and gates, every brick and stone fresh forms of a prior life.

The city, and the old town, blend old world charm, stark 1950’s communism, and modern optimism seamlessly. Climbing the 150 stairs to the Taras Widokowy (Observation deck) on the southern tip of old town provides a stunning panoramic view of the entire city. In the distance, I can see the trees and confines of the Warsaw Zoo just over the Vistula River where Antonina Żabińska sheltered Jews during the war. Further south of the zoo rises a state of the art National Stadium of Warsaw with a retractable roof. The Polish National football (soccer) and Rugby teams play here. Back across the river, I see the spires of the Holy Cross Church, where Chopin’s sister brought his heart for burial. The museum and art school for the composer lay just beyond the church further south. Turning more towards the west, the imposing Palace of Culture and Science, a gift from Joseph Stalin (Russia) to the Polish people, towers above the skyline. Built in 1952, it remains the tallest building in Poland. Often called the “Eighth Sister,” it was designed by the same architect who designed seven of the most prominent structures in Moscow. While I can’t see it through the tree line, I know that the Warsaw Uprising Museum lies just north and slightly west of the Palace of Culture and Science. I continue to gaze at the varied architecture and centuries on display in my view before coming back to look at the “new” old town just before me.

I have a moment of surreality as I take in the skyline. A few years ago, had you told me I would be standing on this platform in Poland I would not have even batted an eye the notion was so preposterous. I could not envision my own future, let alone one so rich. A few years ago, I looked around my own internal city and saw ashes. I stand quietly in the sun taking in the view of the city around me. The people of this city rebuilt their homes and lives on the skeleton of their past, the whole past that includes so much destruction and so many conquerors. Like the statue of The Little Insurgent suggests, it was a collective effort, one that continues to this day. Tragedy reshapes landscape visibly and tangibly. We can either allow those tragedies to leave us barren, or we can rebuild anew. In one of our last long conversations, Liz told me her hopes and dreams for me. She spoke of my future. I admitted to her I could not see my own future without her in it. Her eyes sparkled when she said, “I’m okay with that.” But then those eyes became serious again, “I can.” Warsaw honors its past while reaching for its future. It rebuilt those elements that reflect the core of who it is, alongside preserving a few touchstones of the damage. Both the revised and the preserved serve as testament to survival and determination, to resilience. I take a part of Liz along with me everywhere I go and I often wish she knew I can see a little of my own future now. I too am rebuilding something new on a foundation of tragedy that I hope is as varied and unique a monument to those moments that have shaped me as the city that lays before me.