Warsaw: A city nearly wiped out, 80 years on

Warsaw today is a thriving European capital. But beneath its skyline lies the trauma of a city nearly wiped from existence.

"Warsaw was like a pile of ruins – nearly nothing here, especially in the center," historian Krzysztof Mordyński told CGTN. "But people returned to the city. People returned themselves. Nobody told them to." 

The choice was to rebuild as new, or to try and salvage what was destroyed. Mordyński understands the balance: 

"We wanted to keep... the identity, tradition of Warsaw, so for the people, for the pre-war inhabitants to feel still like they are living in Warsaw," he explained.

Germany's Nazis planned to eradicate the Jewish people involving a systematic effort to dehumanize and murder on an industrial scale. They also planned to raze Warsaw to the ground.

Art historian and guide Patrycja Jastrzębska took CGTN on a tour through some of the capital's most famous and infamous districts, including where the Jewish Ghetto had been established in 1940.

"Everything we see here is completely new," said Jastrzębska. "Nothing survived where we are, nothing has survived from pre-war Jewish Warsaw. Everything was destroyed, there wasn't even a sea of ruins. It was a sea of rubble."

All that remains of the Warsaw Ghetto today are stone markers showing the boundaries. 

In April 1943, the Jewish inhabitants staged the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which was savagely put down by the Germans. In the aftermath more than 35,000 survivors of the fighting were sent to extermination camps.

Jastrzębska said: "They were brought here from the ghetto, and were held and then transported in cattle wagons to concentration camps. We also see how we see this gate here. This monument depicts the parting of the Red Sea from the passage in the Bible."

The following year, a different uprising, this time involving the Polish Home Army, rose to fight the German occupation across the whole city. One of those who fought was Janusz Maksymowicz, then just a teenager. Speakkng to CGTN at the Museum of the Warsaw Uprising, he explained what life was like under occupation.

"If a German was walking toward you on the sidewalk, a Pole had to step off into the street, so the 'master of the world' could walk freely," he recalls.

"I still remember this one moment: I was walking along Świętojerska Street - and on the other side, a Polish man didn't yield to the German. They brushed shoulders.

"Then, without thinking much, the German unbuckled his holster, took out his pistol, shot him and left without even looking back."

The second Warsaw Uprising lasted 63 days, ending in October 1944. After the Home Army's surrender, the Nazis expelled the entire civilian population of the city. 

With SS chief Heinrich Himmler insisting "The city must completely disappear from the surface of the earth," arson and explosives squads set about systematically destroying any remaining structures – from homes to loibraries to churches. By January 1945, Warsaw had lost more than 10,000 buildings, an estimated 85 percent of its prewar total.

"Was it worth it? Absolutely, yes," Maksymowicz told CGTN. "Why? Because there was no political or moral force that would stop the youth so that we would not take up arms and try to take revenge on the occupiers."

At the end of January 1945, Russian forces liberated much of Poland. In August 2009, researchers at the Polish Institute of National Remembrance estimated Poland's dead, including Polish Jews, at between 5.47 and 5.67 million, at the hands of the Nazis.