How Warsaw Came Close to Never Being Rebuilt (2015)

As a person who lives here - I can say Warsaw is a great city to live in. I’ve considered many destinations for emigrating and in the end decided to stay. Anecdotally, so did many others I know.

Green, walkable, clean, good public transport, mostly-well-connected airport, reasonable cost of living (esp. if you work remotely as a software engineer…), good and varied restaurants, and very safe.

About a decade or so ago, I was living in Poland for a few months and on a spare weekend, stayed in an AirBnB in Warsaw, on Smocza Ulica. This is a long street lined with 50s concrete block apartments, surrounded by lawns and trees. While walking around the neighbourhood I read a sign about a Yiddish poem written about one of the former Jewish residents, a girl called Khaye, who was eventually murdered in Treblinka and then incinerated. Much of that quarter of the city is in fact literally built on the rubble of the old Jewish neighbourhoods, and many of the remains of the former inhabitants still lie buried beneath the apartment blocks, burned alive in the terrible retribution of the German occupiers who decided to burn every single block of the Jewish Ghetto after the walled-in Jews attempted an uprising. Anyway, I looked into the history of this particular poem, and it led me to a modern song by the famous Israeli singer Chava Alberstein which I find very beautiful and sad. https://open.spotify.com/track/5JHgN8sWvcrG1u4rrk4yQM

I can believe people discussed the option to relocate, but I think the forces of population movement back to the ruins really forced their hands. Not that the government couldn't have forcibly relocated them, there was plenty of precedent for that in recent times: The willingness to do it would be absent.

In any event, The USSR needed Poland to succeed as a buttress protecting the Russian state. Unlike Germany it was not partitioned, it was integral and complete as a country, it had voting rights in the UN, and it had a complicit puppet government. If that government wanted to reconstruct Warsaw and the Russians held out for Łódź It would create tensions which weren't needed. Realpolitk intruded.

Is there any record in post-roman history of a city subject to destruction which wasn't rebuilt?

I am told that in order to re-create Warsaw, other towns were also denuted of stone carvings. In effect, so that Warsaw could exist again, other towns lost parts of their heritage. You can of course see some of the reobar and plaster overlay on brick and blockworks of the less well restored places, or from 70 years of erosion. It's substantively a modern city with a dress on.

The continuing legal fights over land ownership speak to how strongly people feel about their patch of land. Fighting human nature is a King-canute move.

I am polish but only been in Warsaw recently and I was surprised by how beautiful the city is.

I traveled all around Eastern Europe and I put it definitely higher in my rankings than Prague and Budapest.

I can see the point of those who may disagree, it's a matter of taste, but I find Warsaw one of the most beautiful cities in Europe for a weekend (whereas the likes of Rome, Paris, London can simply not be appreciated well in such a short time span).

I wonder what people 80 years into the future will write about the ongoing destruction of Gaza.

Dresden was never rebuilt (by the soviets) and it’s so much better for it. The city was mostly left as a pile of rubble for decades. It began being rebuilt in the 90s after the fall of the USSR to the historical standards and without all the bloc architecture

Also consider train lines and waterways and water supply to understand how they influenced this decision

I think Gliński's could add some more elements to his article:

Nazis had plans to turn Warszawa into a provincial but yet a model Nazi town in Pabst Plan [1], by completely demolishing it and rebuilding anew. But after the Uprising, they just simply destroyed it [2].

In the 1952, Stalin offered Bolesław Bierut (president before the office was disbanded; later he become the chairman of the Council of State) a choice between building an underground network in Warszawa, building a housing estate or PKiN (the Palace of Culture and Science). The answer was: "The underground is unnecessary, we can build the housing estate ourselves" - and so, out of Bierut's choice, the Palace was built.[3] Some criticize the decision and today even the very existence of the Palace that shares style with Moskow's Seven Sisters skyscrapers [4] and is considered as a monument of Soviet and Russian influence over Poland. It's still a quite hot political potato for all sides.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pabst_Plan

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_Warsaw

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_of_Culture_and_Science

[4] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Sisters_(Moscow)

It's also somehow intriguing to think how Łódź would look like if it would permanently become the country's capital; the city itself changed much in last 12 years mainly because of new communication hub that Łódź Fabryczna railway station become. But that's still not the same as being the capital.

Warsaw is a fascinating city. I am not Polish but have spent about 3 months there over the past 20 years. It’s been a cool experience watching it continue to transform. There’s a very interesting mix of surviving architecture, rebuilt, reimagined, communist, capitalist contemporary, and urban renewal. Here’s also a very young energy there due to all the schools and being a magnet for young people across the country to start their careers.

A little gem example: there’s a communist era train platform that’s been reimagined as a Bangkok night market. In a nearby rail yard building is a very good pinball museum with playable antiques.

I have visited Warsaw for the first time around ten years ago. And I was disappointed by how gray and bleak the city was.

Then I have visited Warsaw couple of years ago and I was shocked. Shocked. To me personally this city is one of the most beautiful in Europe, and I have lived pretty much everywhere.

I love Warsaw so much I actually moved here a year ago.

the city is a bit fake, it was built after 1945 from the ground up and it is nothing like it was before

I wonder if Warsaw would have been rebuilt if it had been destroyed by the USSR instead of the Nazis?

The article seems to gloss over the most appalling fact of the destruction of Warsaw: that it was not caused by combat or bombing, but that it was demolished, building by building, by nazi troops already on the ground, simply as an act of reprisal for the Polish uprising.