Eighty-seven years ago today, Germany invaded Poland, an act of aggression that signaled the start of World War II. When I lived in Warsaw in the early ’80s, I’d walk every morning down Opaczewska Street to Grójecka Street to catch a bus or tram. I didn’t know then of the intersection’s significance, but, visiting the old neighborhood a few years ago, I found a monument commemorating the soldiers and brave citizens who gathered there the first week of September 1939 and tried to stop the invading German army. It had been erected after the end of Soviet domination in 1989.
A little before 11 Saturday morning, Hania called her friend Kasia in Warsaw and a few minutes later we listened on speaker phone as air raid sirens went off all over the city, marking the 82nd anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising. We were in Warsaw two years ago, for the 80th anniversary, which I found to be an impressive commemoration, and each year it seems to get bigger than the last, as the new generation remembers the (mostly) young men and women who rose up against their Nazi occupiers. It was a failed revolt, in part because the Soviet army, sitting on the other side of the Vistula river, failed to come to the aid of the Poles. They knew that a destroyed city, with a depleted population, would be easier to occupy.
Later on social media I saw footage of crowds, not just on Plac Zamkowy, where I had stood two years ago, but downtown, where smoke from flares momentarily clouded their numbers. Many cities have events that define them: Boston has its marathon; New Orleans its Mardi Gras. Warsaw has its Uprising commemoration, and every time I see it, even from afar, my love and admiration for the city and its people is rekindled.
Forty-five years ago today, from my memoir Falling into Place:
“May Day arrived, and I went alone to Plac Zwycięstwa. Two young men nearly seven feet tall carried red flags at the front of the parade. Their presence seemed to add to the freak-show quality of the communist holiday in the land of Solidarity. Behind them marched various dignitaries, including Stanisław Kania, First Secretary of the Communist Party, and General Wojciech Jaruzelski. … An American woman, exiting the lobby of the Hotel Victoria, asked ungrammatically, “Where are they all going to?”
“Hell,” replied a Polish passerby.
On the New York Times list of “Places to Go in 2026,” Revolutionary America is #1 and Warsaw is #2. I generally pay little attention to such lists, but the recognition of Poland’s capital – so often overshadowed by Krakow – is well-deserved and personally satisfying. I have been writing about Warsaw since the late ’70s, when it was a little-visited capital behind the Iron Curtain, and I have delighted in seeing its evolution into a world-class city. In 2011 I wrote about its resurgence for National Geographic Traveler (yes, the New York Times is a little late to the party) and the story appears in my book The Joys of Travel. It is completely different from the story the magazine published, which is a story unto itself, one that – now that Warsaw’s in the spotlight – I might try to publish.
We had lunch last week with friends who recently returned from vacation in Poland. Both were born in China and have lived in the U.S. for many years; in their retirement, they have become avid travelers.
In Poland, they were surprised by the scarcity of Chinese tourists. In their previous travels – to Switzerland, Italy, even Hungary and Czechia – they had found busloads of people speaking Mandarin.
Then they thought about the places they had gone in Poland. In Warsaw, they had visited the Warsaw Uprising museum – on the 81st anniversary of its start, when thousands of Varsovians took to the streets to commemorate the ill-fated revolt against the Nazi occupiers. In Gdansk, they had spent time at the Solidarity museum, dedicated to the free trade union that was born in August 1980 as a challenge to the communist government and that led, eventually, to the dismantling of the Iron Curtain. Qian pointed out that June 4, 1989 – the date of the first free elections in Poland since prewar independence– is also the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre. There were no Chinese tour groups in Poland, she decided, because their government didn’t want them getting any ideas.
It was interesting seeing the Polish deputy foreign minister Radek Sikorski on CNN this morning, having just seen him last week in Miami addressing a small group of Poles living in South Florida. That meeting, though it included discussions of Ukraine and the current state of Poland, was casual and upbeat; at the conclusion, after posing for a group photo, Sikorski urged everyone to teach their children Polish. Speaking with Wolf Blitzer this morning, he noted that, after 500 years of history with Russia, Poles have learned to take signs of aggression from the east seriously.