Warszawa

Warsaw — A City That Argues With Its Own Ghosts

September 11, 2026

Most capitals build monuments to agree with themselves. Warsaw's disagree. Walk a few kilometres across the city and you'll pass memorials put up by a tsarist-era underground, an interwar republic, a wartime resistance, a communist state, and a democracy that spent the 1990s correcting the communist state's version of events — and every one of them is still standing, a few streets from the others, telling a different story about who the hero was.

This isn't carelessness. It's what a city looks like when it has been ruled by too many governments to settle on one official memory. Once you start reading the monuments as a conversation rather than a collection, Warsaw becomes one of the most legible cities in Europe. Here is that conversation, roughly in the order the arguments were made.

1863: remembering a defeat

The oldest argument starts with a square that most people cross without noticing. Plac Weteranów 1863 roku is named not for a victory but for the veterans of one — the January Uprising, a Polish armed revolt against the Russian Empire. Its manifesto was issued in Warsaw by the Temporary National Government on the twenty-second of January 1863; fighting began in the Kingdom of Poland that same day, spread into historic Lithuania in early February, and lasted until the autumn of 1864. The uprising drew support across territories controlled by Russia, including broad support among Lithuanians and part of the Belarusian population.

It failed. What the square remembers is the people who lived with the consequences — and that choice, to name a public space after the survivors of a lost cause, set the pattern for everything that came after. Warsaw's memorials are rarely about winning.

The other side of that story is a prison. Pawiak opened in 1835, designed by Henryk Marconi and Fryderyk Florian Skarbek as Warsaw's first modern prison, its name taken from Pawia Street. During the 1863 uprising, the Russian authorities used it to funnel Polish prisoners towards exile in Siberia. Keep the building in mind; it comes back.

1920: the republic's saint

Fifty-seven years later, Poland was a state again, and within two years it was fighting for its life. As Bolshevik forces approached in August 1920, a young Warsaw-born priest named Ignacy Jan Skorupka — ordained in 1916, preaching at Saint John's Archcathedral — sought an army chaplaincy and joined a volunteer infantry unit made largely of school and university students. On the fourteenth of August, at Ossów, he was killed during the Battle of Warsaw.

The way he died became its own small argument. A celebrated wartime dispatch pictured him urging the troops forward with a crucifix raised; the documented account puts him beside a grievously wounded soldier, administering the last sacrament, when the shot struck. The legend won. His funeral at Powązki drew the state's leaders, he received the Virtuti Militari posthumously, and his death became the lasting emblem of the battle. The modest inscription that names him and gives his dates — 1893 to 1920 — is the interwar republic's kind of memorial: a martyr, a miracle, and a nation saved.

1943: the mound on Miła Street

Then the war, which broke the city into separate griefs that its monuments have never fully reconciled.

Kopiec Mordechaja Anielewicza is a low mound at the corner of Miła and Dubois, raised in 1946 from the debris of the houses that once stood there. Beneath it is a bunker that became a grave. During the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the shelter served as headquarters and hiding place for the Jewish Combat Organization, ŻOB, after their earlier refuge on Miła Street was discovered. On the eighth of May 1943, German forces and collaborating Ukrainian units surrounded it. About three hundred people were inside. The civilians came out and surrendered; the fighters who stayed tried to resist. The Germans forced gas into the bunker, and many of the fighters took poison rather than be captured. Around a hundred and twenty insurgents died there, among them ŻOB's commander Mordechaj Anielewicz and Mira Fuchrer.

No exhumation was ever carried out, so the buried bunker remains a collective grave. The stone obelisk beside the mound, added in 2006, carries the names of fifty-one identified Jewish fighters. Just as telling is what survived on paper: the Jewish Historical Institute holds the Ringelblum Archive, roughly six thousand documents across thirty thousand pages, assembled in secret inside the ghetto by the Oyneg Shabbos group. The institute's building — designed by Edward Eber and built between 1928 and 1936 — still has fire traces in the floor of its main hall from the sixteenth of May 1943, when German forces set it alight after destroying the Great Synagogue next door.

1944: two crossings, one river

The 1944 Warsaw Uprising produced the city's most contested memorials, because it produced two sets of soldiers on two sides of the Vistula, and the postwar state honoured one while suppressing the other.

The Home Army's side is told at Plac Krasińskich, where the Warsaw Uprising Monument — unveiled in 1989, at the very end of communist rule — throws fighters and civilians into the same violent moment. A dark basalt strip in the paving traces the route from the old Customs House wall to a sewer manhole: before the Old Town surrendered, several thousand insurgents and civilians escaped through that sewer towards Śródmieście and Żoliborz. The same square lay beside the ghetto boundary a year earlier, and in April 1943 a carousel turning next to the burning ghetto moved Czesław Miłosz to write "Campo di Fiori" — the two uprisings, physically adjacent, morally separated.

Not every sewer led to safety. In Mokotów, the Baszta Soldiers Memorial in Eye of the Sea Park marks the place where around a hundred and forty insurgents, mostly Home Army soldiers of the Baszta Regiment Group, were killed by the Order Police on the twenty-seventh of September 1944. They had tried to reach the city centre underground; German officers found them and forced them up at Dworkowa Street. Painted footprints on the ground still connect the manhole to the monument — three uneven concrete shafts under a hexagonal slab, about six metres high, designed by Eugeniusz Ajewski and unveiled on the fortieth anniversary of the killings. Aleksander Kowalewski, a Baszta soldier who survived, lit its first grave candle.

Across the river, the story is told very differently. The Pomnik Kościuszkowców in Praga is a twelve-metre cast-metal soldier, forty-eight tonnes of him, cloak flying, one hand stretched towards Warsaw across the water. He commemorates the Tadeusz Kościuszko Infantry Division, which had helped clear German forces from Praga by the fourteenth of September 1944 while the uprising was still burning on the far bank. Small units then tried to cross near Czerniaków and Kępa Potocka to help the insurgents, and were doomed by inadequate preparation and absent support. Andrzej Kasten won the commission in a competition; political turmoil delayed the monument until 1985. Locals gave the raised hand a dry nickname: an order for five beers.

The memorial slab in Rydz-Śmigły Park, on the Warsaw bank, records what that crossing cost. Before dawn on the sixteenth of September 1944, roughly sixty soldiers of the Ninth Infantry Regiment came ashore near Wilanowska Street under German fire, with more waves on the nights that followed. The insurgents at that point held only a small enclave of Upper Czerniaków. The inscription gives the toll: two thousand and fifty-six Polish and Soviet soldiers and officers dead, along with hundreds of insurgents from Czerniaków and Solec.

After 1945: the monuments that were allowed

For four decades, the crossing was the story the state told, and the Home Army was the story it didn't. The Pomnik Żołnierzy 1 Armii WP beside Andersa Street is that official memory in granite: an eight-metre soldier in helmet and uniform, machine gun held across his chest, above a pedestal carved with the First Polish Army's campaign route — Lenino in 1943, then Warsaw, Kołobrzeg, and Berlin in 1945. Xawery Dunikowski designed it after a competition failed to pick a winner; illness kept him from fully resolving the work, and it became his last project. It was unveiled on the twelfth of October 1963, twenty years to the day after Lenino, and paid for by the armed forces.

Meanwhile, what the same state was doing to the other set of veterans went unrecorded in public. Beneath the Ministry of Justice at Aleje Ujazdowskie 11, the joined basements of the former Ministry of Public Security served as a jail from 1945 to 1954, where detainees waited to be taken upstairs for interrogation. Among those held there: Władysław Bartoszewski, August Emil Fieldorf, Jan Rodowicz, Zygmunt Augustyński, Wiesław Chrzanowski.

After 1989: the city answers back

That is where the newest layer of the conversation begins. Cele Bezpieki — the Security Service Cells — opened as a branch of the Warsaw Rising Museum on the first of March 2018, six hundred square metres of exhibition in those same basements. Conservators preserved dozens of traces made by prisoners in six cells. The galleries follow opposition to the communist repressive system from 1944 to 1956, then walk through the sequence of surveillance, arrest, interrogation, trial, and sentence; another section covers the long work of recovering this history after 1989. Upstairs, the ministry still functions. Downstairs, the state has built a museum about what a previous version of the state did in the same building.

And Pawiak comes back, as promised. Under the German occupation it became the largest political prison in occupied Poland: about a hundred thousand people passed through, roughly thirty-seven thousand were killed, and around sixty thousand were sent away in ninety-five transports to camps and forced labour. The Germans destroyed it during the uprising, and after the war it was left unreconstructed — part of the gateway and a few cells surviving. Since 1990, a museum has occupied the basement. A tsarist prison, a Nazi prison, and a democratic museum, on one plot of ground, with nothing rebuilt to soften it.

How to walk it

None of these monuments has been removed, and that's the point. The Kościuszko soldier still reaches across the river; the Baszta obelisk still stands over its manhole; the First Army's granite campaign route still ends at Berlin; the Home Army's monument still faces the sewer its fighters escaped through. Warsaw has decided that the honest version of its history is all the versions at once, standing within walking distance of each other.

So don't go looking for the one true story. Listen for the disagreement. Guided can string these memorials into a walk based on the time you have, and narrate each one as you arrive — including whose version of events it was built to tell.